What's old is new again

 Throughout the many years I've been writing here, my ongoing struggle with mood has never abated. A large number of articles have been published explaining that we're all overwhelmed and suffering anxiety. I always felt that way, but yeah, it's worse.

At some point every day, I'm stopped by all-consuming feelings of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness. This isn't depression--depression is something I'm hard wired to recognize before it even manifests identifiable symptoms. This is something different. It's an enveloping weight of despair, unhappiness, and deep sadness that I can't really articulate in a way anyone else would understand.

I've never had great luck with therapy. On some level, I feel like therapy is a scam. You do all of the work while paying someone else to sit there asking questions you've likely already asked and answered in your head. Maybe I've just had bad therapists. The last one was bad but in that case, I didn't need her to do much more than sit and listen because I had absolutely no one else to talk to about what I was going through at the time. I knew I was intelligent and insightful enough to work it all out in my head as long as I could hear the thoughts that were colliding in my brain by giving them some space and attention.

At my age, I figure I have like 20 years left to live. I'd prefer to live them not feeling like crap emotionally and physically, but that doesn't look like that's how it's going to go. That certainly doesn't induce any optimism for emerging from the mental and emotional quagmire I find myself currently situated in.

There are many points along the way in this blog where I've talked about one's right--my right--to stop being alive. Although I've always found a way to keep going when I surely felt like doing anything but that, not a single day has come and gone where I didn't remind myself that I have another option and I don't have to stay if I don't want to. I always thought that these ideas would fade and drift away during the healthier times, but that hasn't been the case at all. If anything, each day, week, month, year of my life just pushes that conversation forward and makes it louder, demanding more attention as I become less adept at focusing on just getting through to the end.

So, what is the purpose of therapy in my case? What I've written here are thoughts I would like to analyze and dissect, but there are some things you can't even bring into therapy unless you want to be dropped as a patient or effectively incarcerated.

My loneliness isn't a result of not having people in my life. It's the result of the people in my life either not recognizing or not being interested in the profound sadness that is killing me.

Reinvention but not really

This year, I turned 60. I knew it was coming, but for some reason it hit me hard. I'm old. I'm a senior citizen. That's not how I feel; this is what my culture tells me.

A lot of things have happened in my life in the last few years. Some were surprising. If you had told me that I would become friends with an author whose work I admire and who is the ex-wife of my state's former governor, I would have said your were hallucinating. That happened, though, and it's among other surprising things including doing my second and then third public radio interviews, being part of the TED organization's $10,000 Mystery Experiment, having surgery for something incredibly odd, and then being diagnosed with a complex auto-immune disease.

Life is a journey, but it's also a carnival house of mirrors that disorients and confounds without notice. I'm not sure what to make of it all. Keep evolving--it's a trip.

May. Fascinating.

 

The origins of May. From the dictionary: https://www.dictionary.com/e/may/

The dread

 I'm 12 hours away from going to see my mother. Everything is wrong in her house and she's not willing to even try to do anything for herself. She would much rather sit surrounded by walls of resentment and fume at the world for the indignities of old age she's experiencing. 

She doesn't know I'm coming. That's going to be sprung on her at the last minute. I'm not staying at her house. Instead, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks where I can have my own space, some quiet at the end of the day, and complete control of the television. Also, I am way too fucking old to sleep on a futon.

I'm dreading this trip. There's a knot in my stomach. We need to have some hard conversations that my brothers, being too chickenshit to talk to her themselves, have pushed me forward to navigate. That's grossly unfair, but typical of adult siblings with an elderly parent. The sons walk on water, the daughters wipe up shit.

My own health is in decline. I don't have the compassion bandwidth to manage the life of a person who would rather wallow in a victim narrative than show any gratitude for living into old age and having ample help to facilitate day-to-day comfort.