Playing a waiting game...

Today is a new day. I was touched and only a little bit embarrassed by loving thoughts from friends. It helps me to make my moods more public, the hidden quality to depression just makes it worse.
Every time someone sent me a hug or wished me well I wound up crying again. There seems to be an endless supply of tears in the one body I am carrying around so heavily these days. Sometimes I just silently cry and watch the tears running down my cheeks and sometimes I am bent double sobbing like a small child and sometimes I am just numb and disconnected. I know that I am not my feelings, that I have the meditative ability to witness my feelings and allow them to pass through me, but I also know that sometimes I am totally identified with the crying, the wailing and the despair.

Watching my depression grow reminds me of the first time I decided to experiment with live yeast. I could only have been about 9 or 10 and I got hold of some baking yeast and thought I would see what happened when you mixed yeast with hot water and put it in a jar. I screwed the lid on the jar tightly and hid the jar under my bed. Every few minutes I checked on the growth. It seemed to grow at a phenomenal rate.  By the end of the day the yeast/water mixture had reached the top of the jar and then I got a bit frightened. What would happen if I took the lid off the jar? Would the growing yeast mixture overflow, would it make a huge mess, would it carry on growing? So I did what I have since seen is a recurring pattern my life - I pushed the jar further under my bed, pretended it wasn't there and went to sleep. When I woke up in the morning my bedroom had a strange yeast smell. The jar was no longer where I had left it. The lid of the jar had blown off, the yeast mixture exploded and the mess was everywhere. Suffice it to say I was horrified, my mother was furious and I spent a few hours crawling around under my bed cleaning off growing yeast blobs.

Ever since then I have dealt with my winter depression in the same way - I have bottled it up, checked on it periodically and then pushed it away until it exploded. This doesn't seem to work very well. The adult version of the jar of yeast means that I create mess by doing this - with work,with friends, with relationships and primarily, with myself. So yesterday I opened the jar and revealed the expanding contents. By writing my feelings I stopped them a bit from growing bigger. This morning I checked on them and I felt a bit easier, not so suicidal, not so panicked and alone and this is definitely a good thing.

Today I woke early, I showered, washed my hair and even put a small amount of make-up on. I got dressed and went out into the world for a bit, not too far because I am still in physical pain from my neck, my tooth extraction and just my whole self, but further than yesterday. I had a solitary coffee in Starbucks, cooed at someone else's cute baby and came home.  This is a step in the right direction. The yeast is arrested in its explosive contained rising. Maybe tomorrow I can see people and move a bit more.

I see that I have no real choice. There are too many people in the word that I believe care for me, for me to give up.  It's tempting. It's very, very tempting, but ultimately, it's not a choice. One day at a time, one hug at a time, I will make my way through this. I know that if I keep feeding the negativity I am living in right now - feeding it and putting a lid on it, it will grow and grow and I am afraid that I will explode with it, but in that explosion I will just disappear. Small yeasty Cynthia blobs clinging to the underside of the furniture.

I am not ready to disappear yet. I have too many things to create, too many cakes to bake and shopping trips to make. Like I said yesterday... one day at a time.