My Friend Eeyore

It's been a long dry spell between blog posts. The reason I give is that I've been totally immersed in the world of ukulele building; that's partly true. The other part that I haven't wanted to admit is that I've been struggling. Don't panic, I'm fine as in doing pretty well now – not like Ruth Zardo Louise Penny's old the old poet who means, “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical” when she says it. I'm back on an even keel and life is chugging along. Another reason for the lack of posts is I've been avoiding this subject and it refuses to get out of the way and let me write anything else.

I can really identify with Eeyore. When Pooh asks him if he's finally happy he responds, “No but I really like this new tail.” I am happy a lot of the time but occasionally I crash. When that happens it's as if I'm looking at the world through glasses that let in only one colour of light and it ain't rose! I don't make it a secret that I've struggled with depression pretty much all my life but I don't advertise it either. I can't speak for the experience of others; I can only try to explain how the world looks to me when I go down the black hole. It's not rational, it's not logical and it's annoying as hell but there it is. When I crash, which I do much less frequently that I did before I obtained medication 20 years ago, everything gets distorted. Every piece of information that comes into my brain gets translated as, “You're useless!” Intellectually I KNOW how ridiculous that is and I feel even more useless because it is so ridiculous. When well-meaning people remind me of what I've accomplished my brain translates that as, “You're useless, you can't even get people to understand;” or “All you do is worry other people.” When people urge me to just look at the reds and yellow's, that's all very well but I can't see those colours because I have blue glasses in front of my eyes. Yes, I believe/know red and yellow exist and try as I might, until the glasses are off, I can't see them. Yes, I WANT to see them and if I could will myself to see them I would.

The wonderful thing about having a medication that works is that I know I will again be able to see red and yellow so I fold into myself, withdraw from the world and wait. Eventually the glasses go away and I get on with it. The awful thing about having medication that works is that my doctor questions whether or not I need it. She is a caring person, a good doctor, and she wants to do what is best for my health. We've had this conversation a number of times over the last 20 years and each time I've tried to wean myself off the meds in the way she suggests. I try this when I'm in a really good headspace and I feel as though nothing can possibly go wrong. After a while little things start to go wrong then everything goes wrong, then I realize the blue glasses are back; I resume to my regular dose of meds and eventually the glasses depart. The last time we did this dance I wrote her a letter putting on record the specifics of how my life changes when I try to go off the medication. I debated about sending it because I didn't want to be a whiner. I did send it because I wanted an accurate record of the lived-through experience for the next conversation on the subject. Now instead of asking if I think I still need the meds she asks, “Steady as she goes?” It may seem like a small thing but it makes a great deal of difference to me.

It's taken 20 years for me to have the confidence to say 'this is how it is for me' and that confidence can be shaken very easily. Recently I've read news reports that say SSRI's, the kind of medication I take, don't work that well and that counselling has a better success rate. There's danger here for me to turn this into another 'useless' message. Meds work for me! I don't care if it's the placebo effect: I don't care if counselling and examining my family history would work. I don't care if, down the road, my life is shorter because of some to-date-unknown complications of the medication. I don't even care if I never know the root cause of why my brain acts the way it does. I care that my life has been so much better in the last 20 years than it ever was before the two capsules a day. I care that Richard sticks with me through all the crazy ups and downs and tells me that he knows when I'm struggling and loves me anyway. It can't be easy living with someone like me and the fact that we travel this road together is one of the great joys of my life.

At the moment I don't know where the glasses are and I find it hard to believe they even exist.

Chances are they'll show up again and I won't be able to figure out why. They'll go away;  I'll emerge  and get back to enjoying the hundreds of small things in my life that are cause for celebration. Now it's time to pick up the ukulele and do some more sanding. The possibilities for this little instrument grow more exciting by the day and I hope, now that this post is out of the way, I can get back to writing about the journey into lutherie.

If you're still reading, thanks!

One more thing: I particularly like this quotation I first ran across in the dedication to Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen.

"When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him. In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one." - Karl A. Menninger