Trying hard to learn to be positive.

My hope is that if I try hard enough, I can reverse the downward spiral of my depression and turns it into something that lifts me up instead of pulling me down.

After all, healthy people stay more or less happy (at least compared to me) most of the time and don’t seem to be the victims of the terrible and terrifying gravity that holds me down and keeps me from getting anywhere.

That means that either/or they lack the gravity (depression) in the first place, or that said gravity is present in all people but in healthy people there is a countervaling (sp?) force that acts in the opposite direction and keeps things more or less “up”.

Again, at least as compared to me. I am certainly not suggesting that everybody but us depressives walks around in a constant state of bliss as if they wore a golden nimbus made of meadow sunshine and angel farts.

They just don’t have a black hole where their soul should be that sucks up all the love and joy and happiness inside and locks them away forever, leaving only a gaping wound behind where there should be flesh and blood and real human emotion.

Myself, I am such a queer duck (actually a pigeon with a fetish shhh) that if I ever catch myself feeling real, honest to goodness full on human emotions, it makes me incredibly happy because it means I am not entirely dead yet, and it feels so good to finally feel something for a change.

Even if it’s “negative”. Like I have mentioned before, many times, when you have been numb for along time that even the pins and needles pain of blood returning to a limb that’s fallen asleep is a blessed relief.

Because while pain hurts, it at least reminds me that I am alive and kicking,.

The numbness is just plain wrong. Wrong like a broken arm is wrong. You know something has gone drastically wrong in your body on such a deep animal level that all youir animal instincts are crying out for you to fix it somehow.

But you can’t fix it. Not like you would a normal wound. The wrongness persists and your body and mind are stuck in a constant struggle with it.

And I would gladly call the whole war off and tell both sides to go home without supper and think about what they have done.

But that’s impossible when one side is trying to annihilate the other.

Hmm. I started out talking about trying to learn to be positive and ended up releasing some of my negatives instead.

Well, better out than in. Sometimes, in order to let the sunshine in, you have to let the darkness out to make room.

People don’t get this, and that includes me most of the time. The gut-level reaction to a person being verbally negative is to interpret that as unhappiness and try to fix the problem when the only problem is the depressive is being misinterpreted.

Sometimes the best thing anyone can do for us is just sit and listen quietly, without interruption, while we disgorge whatever vileness is haunting us and thus exorcize an inner demon or two.

That’s a lot of what therapists do. They listen.

It’s odd (and tragic) that, as a global society, we are still so ignorant of people’s need to relate what has happened to them that we rarely are even cognizant enough to see that our own needs are met, let alone accomodate the needs of our loved ones.

Instead, we are so jaded from a constant diet of entertainment that we can only see our own thoughts and emotions through that filter, and tell ourselves that our thoughts and feelings don’t count as content because they are not entertaining enough.

The idea of this kind of communication having intrinsic value is alien to us.

I mean, how can something be worth anything besides what we can “get” for it?

Commercial consumer capitalism at its best, folks.

And so we keep things to ourselves because we don’t want to “bore” people with the mundane details of our lives, and we act as though for anyone to suggest that to be less than totally entertained for five minutes is akin to asking them for their heart, both kidneys, and their firstborn fetish.

I mean child.

Eh, either/or.

And so we end up locked up inside our self-centered individualist cul-de-sacs, not even knowing that there is a bigger, brighter, better world outside our cages if we only open up our hearts and souls to see it.

I am such a mystic poet. Especially for a rational materialist.

I think the millennials are fixing that, however. They travel in groups and are super into mutual consultation and do things like become bronies and do experiments in radical trust and all kinds of other things that warm my bitter. sullen Gen X heart.

I cling to the notion that our kids will learn from our mistakes and reach out to one another to create community and mutuality and other great stuff like that.

It’s all very Seventies, come to think of it.

History really does repeat itself.

But things do get better.

I feel like I need to have that playing in my head on an infinite loop. Things can and do get better. It just happens in a way that we can’t see because we are inside the vehicle as it changes and lack the vision to see it from an outside point of view.

I am one hundred percent sure that I am the first person to ever say this breaktakingly original thought : what the world needs is a spiritual awakening.

But not the kind they sell at the various variations of revival tent meetings that take place all over the world. This is not about finding Jesus or whoever. This is not about repenting for our supposed sins. This is not a violent awakening.

It’s more like waking up from a pleasant and restoring afternoon nap on a beautiful summer day and looks out the window at the sunshine and the grass and the big blue sky and realizing that the world is a pretty wonderful place after all.

Amen and pass the lemonade.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.