Finding the Wild Soul Within

  • Joy & Spite

    Joy & Spite

    Joke’s on me. My beloved’s depression sparked my own, which I don’t have very often. I had an episode last year this time that took about a month to resolve. Mostly my depression is of the generalized irritability variety, not the heavy, flat variety, but here it was, heavy, flat, vaguely sad but not about anything.

    I’ve lived long enough to regard moods as akin to weather. We can sometimes see it coming, but sometimes the forecasts are wrong. Sometimes weather happens out of season. Sometimes a winter is especially rainy.

    Even though we can’t control the weather, we can take care of ourselves around the weather: wear the right clothes, have heat or air conditioning, wear sunscreen and sunglasses, carry an umbrella, stay the hell inside when necessary.

    So even though I knew I wasn’t in charge of this mood, that I couldn’t control it, I could take care of myself around it. I pulled out the SAD lamp and stared at it every morning for a little while. I made sure I had all of my meds and supplements, even the ones that aren’t necessarily necessary, just helpful. I made sure to eat regularly, and sleep, and drink salty water to keep my blood volume up. I put psychic Comet (aka Floracita) on my head, in case some of what I was feeling wasn’t mine at all, but the collective dismay at the political situation. I did some energetic boundary work.

    I’m a big believer in working on multiple levels simultaneously. Doing energy work without tending to my lived body isn’t going to help, but tending to my lived body without acknowledging that it’s affected by what’s happening outside me also doesn’t get me very far.

    I also thought about something I’ve noticed before and that Martha Beck has talked about a lot. Sometimes fatigue, depression, and the like are soul-level responses to not doing the things that bring us deep joy. It’s a bone-deep NO that shows up as a form of emergency brake to keep us from going too far off the rails.

    So I sat with my wild and I thought about what my wild wants to do. What it has been asking for is writing. And writing that doesn’t get caught up in shoulds or self-censorship because what if this is too much, what if people think things about me.

    I opened a new file and I started writing. And it’s definitely drafty and I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t know how it will develop, but it’s there and it’s begun, and I felt demonstrably happier after I’d done it.

    A community I’m part of has a mantra for this particular moment in history: Spite & Joy. We do something every day to spite this administration, whether it’s donating money to a food bank or calling our Congresscritters. And we do something every day for joy, because joy is revolution in this moment. They want us scared and confused and depressed and hopeless, and we will not go there.

    Spite & joy, y’all. Spite & joy.

  • Caretaking

    Caretaking

    This week a beloved had a depressive episode. It was fast, rough, blessedly short, but it wasn’t necessarily how it was going to go. Hell, it hasn’t been long enough to actually convince me it’s over; it could flame up like embers stirred in the fireplace.

    I felt immediately deflated. For all kinds of reasons, some good and some not so good, I’ve spent the last ~20 years caretaking through various mental and physical health crises. Overfunctioning is certainly part of it, but it’s also true that this beloved would be dead several times over without that caretaking.

    This isn’t the first time that I’ve tried to find my wild, even if I called it different things. Each time, at some point, a crisis would show up and take up all of my time and energy and resources. Once it was over, I had to recover from all of that depletion, and I’d maybe get a little traction and then BOOM. Another crisis.

    So it felt familiar, is what I’m saying.

    It was an opportunity to choose what I’ve chosen before. But a different beloved said something recently about there being a difference between caring for someone and taking care of someone, and that landed for me. It’s the middle ground I’ve been longing for, the space that accounts for interdependence and taking care of people’s needs without letting someone else and their needs be the center of one’s world.

    I chose differently. I didn’t abandon my beloved, but neither did I drop everything else to hover and manage. It might come to that at some point. It’s hard to know. But it was the right choice in the moment, and I can hold on to that the next time it comes up.

  • Wild Dancing

    Wild Dancing

    I’ve been a dancer all my life, but not because I’m good at it. My mom put me in ballet when I was five because I was clumsy, and she thought it might be a good way to help me find some grace.

    It was a doomed venture from the start. I grew up to be short, busty, with powerful thighs and a thick butt I could never tuck under my spine to anyone’s satisfaction. Still, I danced ballet until I hit the awkward point in adolescence when you had to be really committed to ballet to keep taking classes.

    I loved it the whole time. Not every teacher, not every class, not every sequence, but I loved the combination of music and moving my body, making them sync up.

    After I quit ballet, I only danced sporadically. In grad school my friends and I would sometimes go to the club and dance, which was pretty much the only activity you could get me to leave my house at 9pm for. Work had an 80s dance party once, and I danced myself sweaty and exhausted while the CEO told me I was one of the top 5 dancers at the company. Maybe top 10. At a retreat, the leader wanted to teach us all the zombie version of the Thriller dance, and I threw myself into it enthusiastically, only finding out later that everyone else had a much harder time taking in the steps.

    It turns out I’m not actually bad at dance, just ballet, which requires a kind of body and flexibility I don’t have. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I’d taken other kinds of dance as a kid—modern or jazz or even tap.

    As I’ve been thinking about WILD, dance keeps coming up. I keep longing for it. The problem, you see, is that I have ME/CFS, which is an energy-limiting condition. I have to be careful and strategic about my expenditure of energy, lest I overdo it and crash and become basically non-functional for a bit. So I’ve been hesitant to do anything.

    But I’ve had this condition for a long time now, probably 25 years. That 80s dance party at work? I danced for hours. I was tired afterwards. I slept really well. I had to ask my friend to wash my jeans because they’d gotten so sweaty. But I didn’t crash.

    I’m not going to start with hours of dancing. I can’t guarantee the 80s dance party is a replicable experience. But I wonder sometimes how much of my chronic illness has to do with not being aligned with my soul’s deep gladness and what will happen as I keep working on WILD.