Too Good To Be True

I was trying to tune out the house a bit, while matching puzzle pieces with other puzzle pieces. It’s such a calm and in-control way for me to work out odds and ends and jagged pieces too. I think I was also trying to stay relevant. This house is always full of noise and clamor, and the Grateful Dead channel on satellite radio. I wasn’t trying to prove a point to anyone but myself, to remind myself that I’m still relevant and here. It’s so easy to fall timidly into the abyss as the anxious, sometimes cold, “weakest link” of the family, but my family never lets me fall too far. Mainly, my kids don’t. And the way out of the abyss is so simple and so real and it’s so obvious. That’s the worst part. I can find odds and ends and jagged pieces. I can find baby toys trapped under the couch, inevitable typos in popular novels, and the tiniest speck of food in the corner of a photograph. Putting puzzle pieces together; perpetually puzzled. It’s the way you have to train your brain and your hands and your heart. Once a murky mess, it now reveals a portrait.

One of the weirdest and longest lasting symptoms of the existential and postpartum despair has been a lack of listening to my music. It’s like the one thing I’ve been afraid to let back fully into my life and my heart. And I don’t know why. I wonder if it’s because music has been here since the history of humans, and will always be here as long as we will be here. Perhaps beyond. There’s a rhythm in everything and everyone. Maybe when I started re-realizing that I like to think that every little thing matters, I was afraid to let the most matter-ful thing back in full force. Of course I sing, badly, and I listen to music in the car, because you sort of have to, and I listen to music that other people play. Sometimes I even love it. And yet I’d been having silent baths, without my usual “Bruce Hornsby set to a soothing volume 2”, or the way I liked to play Lizzo when I’m making sandwiches. Sometimes you have to let it light you from the inside out.

When I was in high school, and after I had some sort of spiritual awakening about who I was and wanted to be, I would go through occasional bouts of depression. I called them depression, because even when short-lived, everyone who has experienced it knows exactly what it is. It’s very much different from sadness or the blues. I was lucky to only get these bouts of depression for short bursts of time. I always thought they were like growing pains; trying to wrap my head around the changing world with my changing mind and spirit and body. Sometimes it would get to be too much, but it was a good thing. I’d get dizzy with the feeling of being high on life. And sometimes, it was a bad thing. It was like my world was temporarily leeched of color. The darkness was surprising, offset only by the pure light I was used to living with. During these short bursts of depression, I’d get anxious and sad when hearing an old song or looking at an old photo. When not in one of these short bursts, I’d get delicious nostalgia. It was like a light switch. To this day, I get a weird feeling if I hear a song I was listening to during these times.

Little by little, and probably in not a lot of time, it came back. It comes back. I think back then, we were talking days. Now, we’re talking longer. I still maybe call them “growing pains” but I think of them as productive somehow. Even if they seem like the world is sucked and leeched of any color and meaning, of course, the gulps of fresh air and the smiles and bursts of song and dance, and music, are all miracles. Stardust or not. When your mind is always in overwhelming explosion mode, and your heart is always like a spinning ball of crazy, or is it magic, or is it crazy, the lack of knowledge, explanations, and control can be unbearable. And it can also be a gift. We’re all spinning balls of magic and crazy and there’s just enough of the good stuff to calm your brain. Or at least catch it, like gulping a breath of fresh air when you’ve been drowning. A feeling of peace when you’ve been spinning. It’s the way it rushes back, both ancient and fresh.