I am falling once again
Nov. 1st, 2012 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI've spent the past few weeks drifting further and further into the fogbank that is depression, and this isn't, on the whole, a great surprise.
But: today, oh, today. It has been one of those days, I suppose, that has a lot to do with my funny sense of timescales: instead of experiencing distance from others as loneliness, as isolation, I have been feeling it as a comfort and a joy: to wheel through the streets of my city and to feel it settle around me; to press my hands and my face against the limestone and to know whence it came; to stare at the river and the sky and the spires.
I went to counselling, yesterday, and it was more reflective than conclusive: I talked about loss, and about abandonment, and about the emptiness that depression feels, and (obliquely, circumspectly) about being an outsider: about being queer and passing for straight; about being trans* and passing for female; about my very simple relationship with my body and other people's very complicated understandings of it; about appearing to be all that is wrong with the English Establishment as a consciously-learned act; about the people and the ceremonies who have been my mooring points and the ways I no longer fit them - and I left feeling grounded. Grounded and whole again, like the mountains make me feel whole, like music makes me feel whole.
And on my way home I stopped above Hobson's Conduit and I watched the leaves blown along the water, and Cambridge settled back onto my shoulders and - it is a gift and a homecoming.
Today I read Null & Void, and that was a homecoming of another kind.
And today I did errands and I moved myself through the crisp autumn air and the crisp autumn sunshine - it is not even that not yesterday I learned to know/the love of bare November days - but that, today, gloriously today, I feel alive and wholly here, and that is so rare and so beautiful.
There was a seminar, also, on tectonics and mantle dynamics and climate change and poetry - and that was a homecoming; there was visiting a friend, and that, too; there was stopping in a shopping centre and listening (for a time I did not measure) to someone playing a street piano, and it was beautiful.
I am in love.
But: today, oh, today. It has been one of those days, I suppose, that has a lot to do with my funny sense of timescales: instead of experiencing distance from others as loneliness, as isolation, I have been feeling it as a comfort and a joy: to wheel through the streets of my city and to feel it settle around me; to press my hands and my face against the limestone and to know whence it came; to stare at the river and the sky and the spires.
I went to counselling, yesterday, and it was more reflective than conclusive: I talked about loss, and about abandonment, and about the emptiness that depression feels, and (obliquely, circumspectly) about being an outsider: about being queer and passing for straight; about being trans* and passing for female; about my very simple relationship with my body and other people's very complicated understandings of it; about appearing to be all that is wrong with the English Establishment as a consciously-learned act; about the people and the ceremonies who have been my mooring points and the ways I no longer fit them - and I left feeling grounded. Grounded and whole again, like the mountains make me feel whole, like music makes me feel whole.
And on my way home I stopped above Hobson's Conduit and I watched the leaves blown along the water, and Cambridge settled back onto my shoulders and - it is a gift and a homecoming.
Today I read Null & Void, and that was a homecoming of another kind.
And today I did errands and I moved myself through the crisp autumn air and the crisp autumn sunshine - it is not even that not yesterday I learned to know/the love of bare November days - but that, today, gloriously today, I feel alive and wholly here, and that is so rare and so beautiful.
There was a seminar, also, on tectonics and mantle dynamics and climate change and poetry - and that was a homecoming; there was visiting a friend, and that, too; there was stopping in a shopping centre and listening (for a time I did not measure) to someone playing a street piano, and it was beautiful.
I am in love.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-02 12:39 am (UTC)I am so shy about lyricism and waxing poetic, most of the time, and I so look up to people who can do it, but this appears to be a week of Feeling Called, and under the circumstances I'll be damned if I won't answer.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-02 12:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-02 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-02 12:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-02 05:39 am (UTC)