So much of how we experience life is in our head. Clearly. I spend a lot of time laying what is inside my head out here in this space. Of course there isn't enough room for all of it, and I wouldn't want to let some of it out for public view anyway. But trying to get my arms around it is a difficult and time-consuming process. The last few months, since the art show was everything I did every minute, I've had some interesting experiences that have gotten me to really focus on what is fact in my head and what is my invention.
I am always trying to figure out what the best thing to do for my daughter's education is. So when I bumped, by chance, into an essay written by Dorothy Sayers on education, I was profoundly moved. While telling myself I wanted to use some of the ideas in the essay with my daughter, my brain decided to rethink the education I, myself, had as a child. Many of the facts I understood about my education morphed into inventions and I slid down a very slippery slope of meaninglessness and landed in a heap of depression at the bottom. This was dismaying on so many levels. Here I work so hard to experience the joy of life, only to find myself disintegrating before a rather simple idea. And yet it wasn't simple. I was entirely connected to who I perceived myself to be. Despite the subtitle of my blog, I do have a notion of who I am. And that person is, in parts, an invention. Better I know this now, right, than proceed foolishly on never recognizing myself for who I am.
Believe it or not, because of the work I have done over the last year and a half, I was able to pull myself out of the funk and move forward. I ran into, again by chance, the writings of Eric Maisel. I'm currently reading The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression. His therapeutic perspective is similar to my own therapists so I think there is nice convergence. I have pulled, so far, two things out of this book that have helped me. One is, people like me (talk about a loaded phrase!) can be easily tipped into depression when our sense of meaning has been dislodged. We search out meaning everywhere and when things happen to upend our understanding we are devastated. The second thing I learned is that because of the first we do, and will, experience periods of depression throughout our lives. The trick is to learn how to talk ourselves back out of it.
Actually, what these ideas do for me is confirm what I have already experienced. There are a number of catastrophic periods in my life that can very easily be explained as "crises of meaning". And I was devastated at the time and I have not always reclaimed meaning in some of those events. This book has given me a useful frame to talk about my emotions and how my head works. I have observed that not everyone thinks the way I do about their inner workings and I have, at times, felt very alone and very retarded about it. But this book enlivens me to believe that I found my "group" and I'm not so alone. There are other people out there who can crash after reading a fifteen page essay because it called into question their entire elementary school education.
As for the depression, I feel like I've been given a free life-time hall pass. Here's how: the last time I dumped, I was seriously dislodged. All the sour, hateful, degrading things I had worked to stop saying to myself were back with a vengeance. And the harshest one of all was the one that said I should not get depressed again, not so severely, because I was doing so much better. It took almost a week to pull out and I did it by reframing my depression and being kinder to myself. It truly worked. It is almost immediate when I find the right words. And having observed myself doing that, I could understand that the trick to not being depressed isn't avoiding the depression but allowing that it will happen and having tools to come out of it.
Here's the really interesting bit. The depression, at least this time, and probably others if I had paid attention, is a red flag. It is saying to me that there is something important I have to work on and HERE it is. Right here, on this spot over this issue. It can't do anything other than point. I have to figure out what the issue is and what I have to do to make it right. But it comes with a purpose, it isn't random. I believe this because what the essay allowed me to feel was my own sadness at not having the sort of education that could have made me the intellect Dorothy Sayers was. And at the same time I have before me a daughter wanting to claim her inherited intellect and I had the means, now, to provide some of it. And while I'm helping her, maybe it's time I did a little more work myself! Fortunately I have never felt too old to learn and have spent many a happy hour reading this's and thats because they piqued my curiosity. Perhaps, now, I might focus a little bit more and fill some gaps.
Do you know how very fun it is to diagram sentences? My daughter and are having a grand time doing it. My college interest in linguistics has always intrigued my daughter and now we get to stick our toes in to the shallow end and splash around. It's a lark. I never did it in school. Educational theories were changing when I was in junior high and no one bothered to teach basic grammar. So I'll fill in the gap, what my intuition has been doing for me can now be bolstered with the facts. And my daughter gets a much more sound beginning. All this to prepare for a little adventure in Latin. A little deeper in the pool. We're floating for now, with a little dog-paddle. But we will actually learn to swim. I think we'll be fine, don't you?
I have to add that I am guilty of giving up. It's a life-long habit. I didn't quite realize to what extent until this last experience. So I am working on reversing that tendency. I have rekindled my work in baking cakes and knitting small-gauge projects. I'm back to reading my books on scholarly investigations into the early Christian church. I've been re-invigorated with purpose and energy. I walk more, I organize more, I clean more. The facts of my life are really much more rewarding than the inventions I now see I devised to understand it before. Bernard Brandon Scott happened to write in Re-Imagine the World this sentence, ". . .reminds us that naming the situation, truly describing it, often produces more hope than the false expectation that by some magic wand it can all be set aright." He's right. I understand that now.
