Still here

Boring Health Crap:

1) the Mystery Illness seems to be abating, on its own. I'd still rather know what it was, but at least I'm getting better.

2) I hurt my back a couple of weeks ago. I'll be fine, but it's painful and affecting mobility and my ability to work.

3) My Gee Pee wants me to see the Trick Cyclist about medication I've been on for years (and which is working just fine for me, thank you very much). This worries me. The tablets help, you see, to the point that I feel uncomfortable when faced with the fact that medical professionals who have no idea what it is like to be inside my head might take them away. But last time I had to do this (two years ago) the Trick Cyclist in question was very sensible and so there is probably nothing to worry about. So I keep telling myself.

However, this stuff takes a back seat to something else:

I'm being confirmed on Sunday.

Assuming I don't get cold feet between now and then, that is.

Waiting

We decided, more or less by default, to take a "gently gently" approach with the letting agents. Oh, the Scrabble magnets on the refrigerator say some pretty rude things about them at the moment, but we haven't written any exceedingly polite letters about our right to quiet enjoyment of the property, and we haven't rescheduled or cancelled the second inspection, due this weekend. We're trying to be philosophical about the "opportunity" to give the house a good spring clean. I'm mostly coping, but feeling stressed at times, especially the nights Sweetie isn't home.

Meanwhile, life goes on, Lent approaches fast, I have realised that I am working long enough hours to become inefficient and need to place some sensible boundaries on things. I'm looking for a new spiritual director, having spoken in some depth to people I consider spiritually astute about my experiences; I think I've found some good guidance on this, closer to home than I expected. I also realise I need to return to a regular journal-writing practice; not necessarily the public one of blogging each day, but some sort of time putting my thoughts into words. I've done this on and off for over a decade and I am always happier, healthier and more "productive" (though not always in ways that are immediately apparent) when I do it. Of course, correlation is not causation and it may be that when I am well I return to the journal because I finally have the energy to do so. So this week I've been writing in spare moments, and I think this is good. I will see where it leads.

I'm considering studying theology more formally, by distance learning. There's a course that might be suitable. I can't really justify it yet; my musical career (hah!) needs a lot of attention before I'll be self-sufficient and I can't really afford the money until then, but I'd love to do it.

I want to be planting my garden, it's planting time here, but I have to wait until I know whether we can keep living here. Still, I've done some things in containers. It's something.

Advent Year A

I had avoided starting an Advent discipline; I thought maybe doing some writing every day, or some sort of music-related thing, might be useful reflection. Then I realised that it would just be one more thing for me to be perfectionist about, and that maybe "getting through Advent" is discipline enough for those of us with responsibility for leading others in worship.

These last few weeks I've been leaning heavily on friends, getting lots of hugs online and in person, being listened to patiently by people who really are rather too busy but manage to make the time anyway. The message that has been coming through is that the care and support that pulled me out of the pit last time are still there.

The last few days I've also been e-mailing one friend in particular, not with my usual meandering e-mails full of the adventures of the day with added musings, but even longer letters full of rather a lot of analysis, comparing my last serious depressive episode with how I'm feeling now. She's sparing with her advice but has had some useful insights.

I could spend several hours and many paragraphs explaining how I've come to this conclusion, but I think I do need the structure of some sort of Advent discipline right now, and I think it needs to be something gratitude-based. Not to beat myself over the head with my many blessings, and not to ignore or discount the mess the world seems to be in and the huge amount of work ahead to make God's kingdom known, but to hone my perception of God in everyday life.

I don't want to make this too complicated or too rigid so I am going to go with a daily gratitude list and try not to sweat too much if I miss a day.

1) I am grateful for the green tomato chutney I just ate with cheese and crackers. I made this earlier this year out of tomatoes from the garden -- we had a bumper crop and couldn't manage to eat them all fresh.
2) I am grateful for the group I performed with this evening, who have in their way become a big part of my life over the last couple of years.
3) I am grateful for the care and attention immediately directed my way when I started to talk about low mood or depression or whatever this current dark cloud is.
4) I am grateful for all the care and attention that people normally show me, when I'm not in crisis management mode and nothing is "wrong" but things are just ticking over. Even if I can't see it, or don't normally notice it... right now I assert that I believe it is there.
5) I am grateful for the heated underblanket in my bed. I have trouble not seeing this as extravagant and wasteful, to be honest, but in the cooler weather we've had recently and with the lack of insulation in the home we rent, being able to climb into a warmed-up bed and let the muscles in my back relax properly is a huge help.

And it is late, and I am tired, and that underblanket is sounding mighty good about now so I will stop there.

On her kindness

I've had a bad cold this week, nothing serious, but enough to slow me down.

I've been feeling shaky mentally for a while now. Nothing drastic, but enough to slow me down. I'm in a foul mood more often than I like, being avoidant even about activities I love, increasingly unable to imagine enjoying things, my sense of perspective is a bit all over the place and I am wondering if it is time to start with the dried frog pills again -- not to drug myself out of my sense of dissatisfaction, not to medicalize a perfectly reasonable response to an uncontrollable and dangerous world, but to correct or ease or change whatever chemical or structural characteristic makes my fears so overwhelming that I resort to avoidance, displacement, or numbness.

The thing is, I don't really believe it was the antidepressants or the three and a half years of therapy that got me out of this last time. I think it was the continual reassurance of other people caring for me, doing their best to help me despite the difficulties (and I know I did make it difficult, for it was so hard for me to trust), making it clear that even if I don't understand why, I am valued and cherished and loved.

That support has not been withdrawn. On the contrary, it is very real and very ongoing. If you are reading this and you are someone who knows me, please do not think I don't notice that you care. I do notice, and I am grateful, but sometimes it's still hard for it to have any effect. It's as if another layer has been peeled away, and the fears that disabled me in years past have been replaced by some newer ones and some older ones, and suddenly my need to understand why I am loved -- so that I can keep doing whatever it is, you see, and so control my fate -- outweighs my ability to accept love I do not think I deserve. And the messages that I don't deserve love echo from a church that systematically excludes me and my loved ones and a society that makes it clear that the poor are to be discarded, right back into childhood fears of violence and abandonment. My ability to see myself as a beloved child of God disappears in a puff of Pelagianism. My ability to trust God to love me even though I am decidedly imperfect evaporates. I don't understand, and I can't trust, and so I am afraid. But I also have this desperate desire to improve things, to act on behalf of God in the world, to heal the sick and bind up the brokenhearted and all that priestly stuff from Isaiah. Christ has no body now on earth but ours, said Teresa of Avila, and I want to be the hands, the feet, the eyes -- even while I cannot imagine I will ever be anything but dust, not loved, not hated, not even noticed. And the danger of that is that without the sense of belovedness, without the knowledge that I am valued and cherished and loved, all my works are forced and manipulative rather than joyful. I will not be able to refill the well from which I draw water, and eventually I will be too tired and dried out to continue being unkind to myself while I try to serve others and will lapse into apathy or selfishness or despair. I know this is how it goes. I've been here before. It's not kenosis, a joyful self-emptying, a costly but beneficial surrender... it's sort of the opposite of that. But I don't know what else to do, I don't seem to have any control over my sense of being loved, and so I keep going through the motions, hoping beyond hope that if I keep going the doldrums will clear, waiting and watching for some subtle shift in perspective and meanwhile struggling against my instinct to withdraw, hide, hibernate, conserve what I think I have left -- as if any of it is mine.

I am already weary, already thirsty. I keep saying, on Twitter and a few other places, that I know this will pass, winter is always a bit difficult, I know I will be okay. But what I need to remember is not just that I will be okay but that I am already more than okay, that I am already valued and cherished and loved, and this is not contingent on anything I say or do or think or believe. I need to remember how to be kind to myself while being kind to others, I need to remember how to accept the kindnesses others offer.

Only say the word, and I shall be healed...

Placemarking

Had a hard time earlier this week. Everything's going well -- teaching continues to challenge and stretch me, and my students are a delight. I have some performance deadlines which are enough to motivate me to practise but not enough to terrify me, and things are going well at Nearest Church (which I need to find a better name for, but never mind): I'm getting involved, getting challenged, and also still feeling very welcome. Friendships old and new continue to grow and develop. My life is pretty good.

But I've been having a bit of brainhacking, or counselling as many people would call it. I'm dealing with the same issues that sidelined me in 2005, stuff about parents and trust and growing up. Yes, I had three years of therapy before, three years of going once a week to an appointment I mostly dreaded, spending the first half hour getting to the point where I could talk about things in any meaningful way at all and then the next fifteen minutes sobbing and the next five trying to regain enough composure to get up and walk out of the room. Those three years, and a lot of other help besides, got me to the point where I could venture out from under the duvet and actually do things. They got me to a point of functioning in the world again when I had retreated.

They didn't really deal with the reasons for the retreat. And if I want to remain functional -- if I want to keep doing things in the world without being ambushed at some point by uncontrollable anxiety -- I've got to do some work toward looking at some of those issues, painful as they are, at integrating those experiences into who I am now.

It's easier this time in some senses, because I am mostly functional. I get out of bed every morning. I practise most days. I don't cancel work, calling in sick because I don't have it in me to leave the house. But it's also harder, because doing these things means I have commitments I want to keep and there isn't always space for me to hide under the duvet if I'm frightened.

On Monday I had my appointment and oh, it hurt but oh, there was progress I think. And then I neatly folded my issues away into one corner of my brain and went off to do my teaching. It wasn't an easy evening of teaching, and on my way home while I was sitting on the Tube praying silently to myself those bastard issues unfolded themselves and I went from mostly calm and collected to being in tears. There is nothing quite as classy as crying on public transport, so of course that made me feel worse, and for a few moments I wondered if I was really losing it all again.

Thankfully, Sweetie was home from work a bit early and when I got in Intrepid Anthropologist had nearly made dinner, and between the two of them I had lots of hugs. And people on the lovely lovely internet sent their own hugs, and some choice words which genuinely helped. I was terribly clingy and insecure but Sweetie was very patient (he really is SO kind). And shortly before I dropped off to sleep I had a very strong feeling of being carried, being prayed for. I don't know if it was these words from a friend that did it,
"Behold, he that keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep...
The Lord will preserve your going out and your coming in
From this time forth, for evermore"
or if there was some other trigger. But I am profoundly grateful, and I have kept coming back to echoes of that feeling over the past few days. It is intensely reassuring.

I'm also wondering how I can ever get things sorted out. I'm aware, you see, that I have a lot of reflection to do. This stuff I'm dealing with in brainhacking overlaps with some of my blogging here in fairly serious ways. There are issues around trust and abandonment and Eucharist and allowing myself to be fed, even if the church appears to be trying to limit access to God's table, and I find myself re-thinking my position on this in some ways which are rather scary to me. There are issues around abuse and intervention and how to respond now to people who once hurt me but no longer have that power, how to honour my parents, how to act in such a way that I have respect for myself without expecting that my actions can mend relationships that are deeply wounded.

Even though I am (moderately) anonymous, I don't know how much of this I can discuss here without maligning people who do not deserve it (and nobody deserves to be maligned). I don't want that to become an excuse for not doing the reflection, but neither do I want to speak ill of anyone. I need to be able to write about my own experiences but I also need to make it clear that these are just my experiences, that I do not have the whole picture and that I know I do not have the whole picture.

That doesn't go into the metrical psalmody from last night, or the stuff that's developing at Nearest Church, or the irony of the first person I went to church with in this country looking for a more inclusive church to attend, or my thoughts about same-gender partnerships and monogamy and my deep frustration that some parts of the church sanction these relationships if and only if they are life-long monogamy of a much higher standard than is expected of heterosexual partnerships. It doesn't touch on the big brown butterfly that flew around all our heads at the Eucharist this past Sunday morning, or the young man now deployed to Afghanistan.

I don't have time to blog it all.

Further updates as events warrant, I guess.

Miscellany

It is my day off and I'd like to be outside in the park, but my joints are playing up and I'm not really walking well enough to go traipsing around on my own. So I'm catching up on bits of non-work computer stuff, instead.

I was going to post something serious, going to work on something from the placeholder post I wrote a few weeks ago now, or maybe a post on economics and spirituality and abundance and my take on these, but I've used up all my concentration for today so you get miscellany instead.

Had a lovely chat with Sweetie this morning about the future. Lovely lovely. Nothing we didn't already know, nothing we hadn't touched on before, but it was good to reaffirm that our plans for our lives are compatible.

On Wednesday we have a meeting with Potential Future Housemate to talk about house-sharing stuff. I am hoping it goes well. If not, I need to have a good re-think about some of the shorter-term future. I certainly can't afford to live alone and have the space I need to do the work I want to do.

This week I e-mailed the chaplain at Academic Institution to ask about... well, I'm not sure all of what I'm asking about, which was why writing the e-mail was difficult. Some of it is a matter of specific advice on a particular project of mine, but that overlaps with some major gaps in my understanding and faith. It's all a bit tangly. I'm not sure whether to point him at this blog or not. For now I will wait.

Yesterday I sang in a choral concert at fairly short notice. I have Lauridsen's setting of "O Magnum Mysterium" stuck in my head now. There are worse earworms.

Earlier this week I was feeling quite twitchy. This happens from time to time and usually passes in 2-3 days, and this time was no different in that respect. The worst of it is something I call the "what-ifs", not positive, expansive what-ifs like the ones Graham posts but more ominous and fearful. What if all my students quit? What if I fail my exams? What if I hurt those I care about, what if I alienate those I love, what if I miss everything important in life, what if I fail, what if I cause harm? It's a sort of litany of all the ways I could be unlovable, all the ways I could err, all the ways I could mess things up. It's part of the way my brain works: I have a lot of ideas, they all branch off of one another like a tree and I have trouble following only one branch. Sometimes this is an advantage, in that I have some pretty good ideas. Sometimes it's a hindrance, trying to decide which limb I can rest on, which bit of the tree to climb next. This was a particularly damaged limb, a blackened and diseased piece of wood, not safe to sit on for any length of time, but try telling my brain that!

On Monday I took this to my paper journal, where I don't worry about anonymity or what people might think. I wanted a quick answer to the what-if gremlins, a short and memorable rebuttal. And I got one, in the phrase "God will still love you." I hadn't expected that.

I would love to say that this drove the what-ifs away, that I felt better instantly, that I slept without nightmares that night. It didn't have anything like that sort of effect. I kept feeling anxious and twitchy. Whatever weird brain chemistry thing was happening had to run its course. But I think it helped, in that the twitchiness was a little easier to bear. That in itself is a mercy.

Otherwise

I'm still quite a bit more tired than I thought. And today is not a great day pain-wise. I don't seem to be dealing with either of these very well.

Today I appear to have:

-done one load of laundry, which I am having to do again because the washer did not work right and the soap did not go in.
-written a self-indulgent blog post that is too long for anyone to want to read
-failed to do any academic work at all
-failed to do any tidying, which I was meant to be doing this morning, other than the laundry
-been a wittering, mind-wandery, silly fool in comments on other people's blogs

Bah. I don't like how this post is going.

Good things I have done today:
-thought about my Sekr1t Pr0ject (shhh!) and realised some of what I was trying to do is just prevarication and I need to go ahead and make a decision already
-prayer
-got dressed
-ate food

And I will keep making it better:
-will shortly go for a walk in the glorious sunshine; it is a nice day for prayer in the park, I think
-will teach later, which I'm looking forward to.

So there.