Black is White (intro)

March, 2004

Everything is black. It looks black, feels black, even smells black, if that’s possible. With her eyes open or shut, weather she was focusing on her physical senses or her emotional state, the blackness enveloped her. Of course, the fact that she was zipped up tightly inside a sleeping bag at 4:30 in the morning might have something to do with that. But as her restless mind flipped thru the photo gallery of her past year’s memories she realized that it would be the same if she was in the midst of the desert at high noon. Blackness was her state. It had been like that for a while and showed no signs of abating.

The sleeping bag had become somewhat of a comfort to her. She dragged it around like an infant does a security blanket. Its convenient lightweightedness (is that a word?) still provided the right amount of warmth: not too hot, never cold. She could use it as a cover when she managed to force herself out of bed long enough to sit on the balcony and pretend to read. She could use it as a muffler to stifle the sounds of her sobbing so her friends wouldn’t know she was experiencing yet another crying fit. It could be her cave when the sunlight breaking through the slats of the blinds became too bright to ignore. It even once served as a camouflage to hide her presence when a concerned friend arrived with the goal of dragging her out to the “real world” to “deal”. While not true, it certainly seemed to her that the sleeping bag was the only thing she could rely on in her life right now.

How had she gotten to this place? She had always prided herself on her personal strength and sense of independence. She had neither now. How much of this was her own doing and how much had been out of her control completely? Was her semi-belief in destiny going to force her into accepting that this condition was unavoidable? Or would her rational/logical element require her to accept that she had gotten herself here? Either option looked bleak. Neither provided her with an understanding of how to extricate herself from the depths of this depression.

She tried guilting herself out of it. She told herself that there were so many people in the world far worse off than she. There were people who were unable to eat because they didn’t have food. She just couldn’t because she was an emotional basket case who’s stomach had always reacted poorly to stress. There were people had no place to live because their community had been hit by an earthquake or a volcano or a tsunami. She was just homeless because her flat mate and once-future husband had traded her in for a less complicated model. There were people who were jobless because they didn’t have the education to properly market themselves. She was just without work because she had put all her hopes in someone who had encouraged her to become dependant upon him and then turned out to be unstable. Yes, there were far worse cases than hers out there. She had so many things going for her she should just pack away the sleeping bag and walk out the front door and involve herself again. But she knew she wouldn’t. The thoughts of all those hungry tsunami victims only made her more depressed.

The guilt thing wasn’t working.

So she would try counting her blessings. She had an incredible “family” of friends who’s love for her she could daily see in their eyes as they sought her out to encourage her and she could hear in their voices when they called with invitations to unimportant potential distractions. She had her supportive family back home that, if she could bring herself to tell them what had happened, would be begging her to return to the fold because they were certain that home cooked food and quality time with the new niece would cure anything. She had a decent looking resume that would be able to get her quality employment if she was willing to compromise her principles and work for a profit-driven industry as opposed to the non-profits or education based programs she had always sought out. Her $50,000 student loan was down to about $40,000 after 10 years of payments. She had no car loan payments because she had no car. She lived in a community that was filled with opportunities to explore her passion for the past and the dead people who had shaped it. Yes, she was in a position that most people would envy. She had so many things going for her she should just pack away the sleeping bag and walk out the front door and involve herself. But she knew she wouldn’t. The list of her current potentials only reminded her of the gaps that now existed on the list where she had erased everything that she had been building with him.

The counting blessings thing wasn’t working.

Weather she tried to busy herself or if she took pills so she could sleep all day, the snapshots of feelings and memories would pop into her head uninvited and cause her belly to knot up and her head to buzz and the tears to well up. Sometimes she could choke back the need to cry but that usually resulted in a violent headache. So she would allow herself cry until her sinuses were so congested that she began to choke in her efforts to breath, which very often led to her stomach wretching weather she had food in it to bring up or not. How pitiful was she??? Even detaching herself from herself and looking at it from an objective perspective only made her hyper-aware of how low she had fallen and how disgusted she was with herself. Yes, she was a modern woman who was fully capable of taking care of herself. She should just pack away the sleeping bag and walk out the front door and involve herself. But she knew she wouldn’t. The awareness of her abilities only highlighted the harshness of what she had allowed herself to become.

The avoidance thing wasn’t working either.

So what could she do to move forward? How could she get beyond the inertia that had taken hold of her, the deer-in-the-headlights feeling, the blackness that seeped into every corner she tried to crawl into? Nothing she tried was making the situation better and she needed to get better. This wasn’t right and she knew it. Her supply of peanut butter was close to running out and her concerned friends were considering passing her off to professionals in the mental health field. While she was aware of the possibility that this could be a helpful venue change, that assistance from those trained to help mind-melts such as this could be a viable path, she just couldn’t bring herself to admit that she couldn’t help herself. A lack of control had brought her to this place. It could only be a restoration of control that brings her away from it.

But how could she bring any measure of control into her life while she felt like everything was so out of her grasp? She couldn’t even manage to keep herself from thinking about things. Pushing out the bad, ignoring the negative, used to be one of her greatest abilities. Now she was completely at the mercy of whatever it was that triggered the memories. And there were hundreds of triggers, daily. Stupid text messages from him where he signs her name next to his… the realization that she’d left her eyeglasses on the nightstand next to his side of the bed….the friend who called to invite them both out because he hadn’t heard about the breakup…the commercial on TV for the upcoming rugby match they had planned on watching together with their friends…the cigarette stub in the ashtray…the song on the radio…the character in the book she was trying to read who, no matter how hard she tried to change it, would “speak” in his voice…the pizza her friend wanted to order to encourage her to eat and the realization that she could now put mushrooms on as a topping…the nightly ritual of taking the pill…the hunger in her body…the this and the that of every day that had always been filled with the thoughts of him like when she found a recipe that she knew he would like and began to print out before she remembered…. Every single “flash” brought on the now all too familiar physical reaction that was a combination of nervousness and nausea. And there was no way to avoid them. When she tried it only made things worse (if possible!).

Maybe that was it. Maybe her efforts to avoid were exacerbating the situation. Strange that she would consider this. Avoidance had been a wonderfully successful tool for her throughout her life. She had trained herself to do it without even realizing what she was doing, that’s how good she had become at it. But how many times had she told him that his ignoring of problems only made them more difficult to deal with later? Jesus! Now it made sense! She had always known that so many of their problems had been hyper-influenced by issues outside of them. She could see how stresses from his past were being buried in theory but would resurface in the form of his verbally violent responses to seemingly small issues. How often had she sat baffled on the couch as he cursed her lack of support for him on an issue that he had just introduced to her which had been brought about by his own actions (or inactions)? How many times had she thought that he was projecting his own insecurities onto her? His later-to-be-discovered deceptions caused him to mistrust her because he assumed she was driven by the same motivators. All the issues he refused to deal with, the things she had discovered about his past over the course of a year of living together, his unwillingness to recognize their influence on his present, they all played into the end result. They all led to his choice to follow the path of avoidance by running away from every reminder of the responsibilities he had originally chosen and then decided were too difficult to maintain. They all led to his walking away from the life they were building to start “from scratch” with a new woman, a new circle of friends, a new set of standards, nothing to remind him of his past messes. Nobody to hold the mirror up to his face and require him to deal. Avoidance. That was the root.

Could she actually be doing what she had found fault with him for doing? Was she walking down the same path of destruction that he was? Perhaps she had been the one projecting. Maybe there were things she didn’t want to admit to herself so she shoved them away in the recesses of her mind, only to have them bubble up and influence her responses and choices later on. Oh, would this be a horrible thing! If this was true she would no longer be able to blame him for everything. And she had been counting on her righteous indignation to kick in at some point and carry her through the pain to the stage of anger where she would be able to sail, blemish-free, into the next phase of her life.

Well, she had a choice to make now. She could continue to do what she had been doing (and not doing) in the hopes that some day she would wake up and it would be all gone. Count on magic or drugs or prayers to get her through everything. OR, she could start eating again, build up some strength, and actually be pro-active. Count on herself to get her through everything.

For the first time in weeks she began to feel an inkling of her former self, the directed and motivated woman she used to be. A plan was formulating. Her posture straightened just a little bit. Without recognizing the feeling at first, her stomach grumbled a request for some sustenance. She could do this. She would do this. No avoidance anymore. She wouldn’t fight against the memories. She would relive them, analyze them, accept them, deal with them. She would look at her experiences and find in them what was holding her back. She would use her past to prepare herself for her future.

Some of her fears screamed out to her about this decision. “It will hurt!” “You will discover things you might not want to know!” “Unburying the pains of your past might weaken you more!” “You’re going to descend even further into the blackness!” All of these things she recognized as true. The cure could end up worse than the disease. It could all backfire and the process may destroy what little sense of self she still possessed. But…..it could work. She may be able to regain her former strength of spirit and even go beyond it. She could discover patterns that historically had worked against her and turn them around and use them for good instead of evil. She may be able to understand how she got here. And that would allow her to go someplace else. And she desperately wanted to be someplace else.

Yes it would be difficult and maybe she wouldn’t survive. But was she surviving now? Was this how she wanted to be? No. It most definitely was not.

She pushed back the top of the sleeping bag and allowed her eyes to adjust to the light breaking thru the shutters. She would get up today. Maybe she wouldn’t walk outside just yet…. but the pizza shop was just around the corner and she did have a craving for mushroom pizza…….