Baby Cat’s energy and not tripping fuses with anxiety
As I sit to write, a little black Tasmanian devil of the feline kind makes it nearly impossible to type. His spurt of energy is contagious and very sharp when he sinks his teeth into my skin. At twelve weeks, Baby cat is a joy to be around. Caro found him in a six-lane freeway in Miami when he was barely a month old, and had just enough time to snatch him off the tarmac. In six weeks of baths, dewormers and great love, he has tripled in size.
Caro has taken over my house while I’ll be traveling. My original plan was to leave at the end of June, but my lack of experience overestimated my progress in getting ready. The new deadline was July 29, only three days away. But architectural work yet to be finished, changes in the ketamine treatment schedule in Portland, OR (now starting August 25), and the sheer volume of tasks related to Inward Ride have pushed the departure back to August 8 at the latest.
The last few months leading up to the imminent departure have been very intense. The resolution and excitement to leave on a long journey don’t preclude the nitty gritty of daily life, nor does it put the internal turmoil in pause.
Depression is a very multifaceted phenomenon that can be approached and described from so many different angles. Decades of experience with it have shown me a great deal about its intricacies, but also about its advantages.
Up until 1996, when I moved to the United States, I was a chain smoker. I quit when my ex-wife invited me to make a choice: her, or the addiction. She made her point so kindly and non-reactively that I had no reason to fight back. There was no fight, really, only an important decision to be made. Since the trade off was highly positive, it wasn’t really about the choice to be made, only about how to make it. My approach was to understand what I was gaining from the cigarette addiction, as that was what I would have to relinquish.
And here is the parallel with depression. No one would ever choose depression consciously. Yet, it is very important to understand its foundational purpose. At this point in life, I do believe that personally, depression has had the purpose to hide trauma from my conscious mind, much like a fuse that trips with excess current. I might get into more details about this in a future post.
My resolution to live for healing has shaken up the foundations of my personality, including depression itself. As I become more and more conscious about my inner experience, I resort less and less to the depressive state. It is as though the gage of the wires that hold the inner current is increasing. As a result, I have experienced more anxiety. The “current” that was previously repressed is gushing out.
I can be with this. I have turned my life into a practice of presence to this. Sometimes I need to take time away from daily tasks, from people, in order to introspect and observe the two inner rivers: the one of turmoil, and the one of peace. The more I sit, the more I have a conscious choice about which is in the foreground running the show. “Practice makes perfect” as the saying goes… But “perfect”, for a perfectionist, is a trigger concept, so instead, I’ll say that “practice makes peace”.
Baby cat is now spent, and sleeps soundly beside me as I get up to resume working on my to do list.
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