I’m in the middle of writing another article about how I’m going to turn my depression around.
It’s Saturday. Today has been…weird. I went to bed at 2 am (which is earlier than usual these days) but woke up at 1 pm. I slept for eleven fucking hours straight, not even waking up for a bathroom break.
I don’t have my kids this weekend. Other than the obligatory crying, I have a lot to do because I have to make up for over a week of being catatonic because everything has become too much. Sleeping in today lost 25% of my weekend abilities.
I’m supposed to go for my biweekly walk with a friend tomorrow morning. It takes up a chunk of my time but it’s also an important part of my mental health. I also have a date tomorrow night. I’ve already rescheduled the guy, I can’t do that again. But getting ready for a date takes time.
My splurge for the month was buying a new planner. Twenty bucks seems unnecessary, I had other undated ones I could use. But they weren’t fitting the bill and I found it hard to organize non-Google-calendar-type things electronically. It was a tough purchase for my unemployed brain.
After vacuuming the upstairs (fuck me, how do cleaning people clean an entire house in two hours but it takes me forty-five minutes just to vacuum three rooms?), I plopped down and began filling in the dates in my undated planner.
It filled me with sadness. I’m writing July, August, and other months like they’re decades away. As if it’ll be a long time before I see my handwriting those months.
I write “31” on the final page. December 31st feels the same as when someone says the year 2035. It’s not real. It’s science fiction. I look at the page with a feeling of dread, knowing that I’ll feel just as shitty in nine months as I do now. I’m holding a book full of days that will mostly be full of despair and pain.
Since I’m downstairs, I turn on the TV because I’m still logged into my ex-husband’s Apple+ account (listen Apple, don’t crack down on that shit. I’m not going to subscribe, ever.) I’ve been meaning for months to watch Coda, a movie about a teenager whose family is deaf.
I’ve seen the clips on TikTok. I think I’ve seen the entire movie on TikTok in short snippets. I know in the end scene (spoiler alert), Ruby sings “Both Sides Now” during an audition while signing because her parents snuck into the theater. I know it’s emotional.
While watching the movie, “Both Sides Now” looped in my brain. It doesn’t make me sad.
It makes my heart ache.
I’m still mourning the life I didn’t have. I don’t just mean the alternate universe where I didn’t divorce and turn my life into shambles. The universe where I’m not panicking about money and I see my kids every day. I’m aware that universe also includes a shitty husband.
I feel like I’m forever mourning the childhood I also never had. My writing is often about my mother and my resentment towards her. She was an active parent and did the work of raising me. When I think of awful moments in my life, it’s her face that pops up.
But it dawned on me during a scene between Ruby and her father just how little I ignore my dad’s lack of parenting. I can mourn the loss of not having a loving mother because she was the poster child for the opposite. But I don’t have a contrast for my dad because he wasn’t there.
My dad worked on a ship and was gone for months at a time until we moved and he got an office job. From there, my dad became a religious fanatic and spent his non-work time at the mosque.
I’ve heard my mother endlessly rant about my bad behaviors, my bad personality, and my bad personhood. I never heard anything from my father. I think my brain figured that the lack of saying anything good is canceled out because he rarely said anything bad. The net emotional difference is zero.
The only positive thing my father has ever said wasn’t directly at me. It was when his friend’s daughter ran into me years later and said how her father constantly compared her to me. That meant my father praised something about me (I’m guessing how I graduated and moved to California, like a success story). We were in a now-defunct music store and it shook me to my core.
Now that I’m a parent, I see how that’s fucked up. I’m the parent who over-praises her kids. I don’t say, “That’s a great project!”, instead I tell them “You worked so hard on that!” because all the parenting books say to do that. When my overly emotional daughter is upset over the most absurd issue, I say “I know you’re having big feelings right now, and that’s okay.” I slip up sometimes but I try my best to not brush her off or say her feelings are wrong.
I roll down the window and holler dozens of times, “I love you!” when I drop them off at school. It drives them nuts when I repeat it at home. “Ugh, why do you always tell us that? We know you love us,” they complain. My excessive I-Love-Yous are at nagging levels.
I don’t care. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow at least they won’t ever wonder how I felt. When they were younger, I told them that one day they’ll be teenagers who scream that they hate me but I’ll still love them. Now, I remind them that even if I’m disappointed or mad at them, it never means that I’ve stopped loving them.
Yesterday, my daughter was willing to go on a walk with me. She’s ten and already in full Tween Mode.
The song played in my head when she pointed out the colors in the sky.
“When you look at clouds, do you see shapes?” I asked. I prayed she’d say yes and tell me the cloud on the right looked like a shark.
“Sometimes. But these don’t look like anything because they’re spread out. But look at the colors on them, it looks like a painting,” she replied.
Fuck. Me. My daughter didn’t see the song’s side about shapes or the side about rain. She saw the middle. She saw the colorful painting that the clouds and sunset made in the sky.
Maybe I’m approaching my mental health from the wrong side. I’m focusing so much on the cloud’s rain because I desperately want to see the ice cream castles.
Is there a middle option I never considered?
I don’t know what that means in the real world. My life is full of rain clouds. The feather canyons made of clouds are the world where people have happy partnerships, healthy children, and successful careers.
How do sky paintings translate to real-world lives? I don’t know how to find the beauty in my life right now. I know all the #blessings I should count. It’s hard because I’m not comparing my state of life to other people’s lives. I’m comparing it against what I once had.
I had a giant savings account because I’m paranoid and put our bonuses in them. I had the most ginormous house I’ll never afford again. I had my kids every day. While my husband sucked, he at least broke down the Amazon boxes and took out the trash (the bane of my divorced existence). I had money to splurge on clothes and activities for my kids.
If I become homeless tomorrow, I’ll think my life today is the colorful sky art. I’ll think that at least I do have savings, even if I don’t want to dip into them because I desperately want to buy a house near my kids’ future high school and closer to their dad’s place. I’ll think about how I’ve got a house, which is better than renting because if I miss a payment, it’ll take a while to get kicked out. I’ll think about how I still have enough of my looks to attract a mate.
But I’m still utterly lonely. When I kicked off the divorce process, I assumed I’d have my kids 90% because my ex-husband worked far away and came home late. Fucking worldwide pandemic that happens once a century comes along and that plan went out the window when he could finally work remotely. Evently-split joint custody sucks. Yes, I know the kids should see us both equally, I don’t want to deny them their dad.
…
I’m writing this while sitting on my rug, back against the couch with two layers of couch protectors on top because I’m not white and that’s what non-white people do. I’ve got my new planner and markers to my right and a diet soda on my left. At my feet is a giant bag of clothes I got for free from my local Facebook Buy Nothing group in the hope of finding something my daughter likes because I can’t afford the thrift store anymore.
Further away on the floor is a board game I purchased ages ago and set up so I could learn how to play it with my kids. I have board games and puzzles stacked against the fireplace because I can’t afford storage and there isn’t anywhere to put one anyway.
My diet soda rests on a coffee table pushed aside. There are two boxes of offroading remote control vehicles I got for my kids at Christmas but didn’t give them. I planned to wait until summer to surprise them and use it as an excuse to go to the park (aka free location). Now that I’m unemployed, I brought them out so we can start using them once California stops being a dick with the constant rain.
Everything I described is who I am and my environment. This is me.
Am I pushing too hard for the life I wish I had? It seems like all I do is gripe because I don’t have it and every day something new prevents me from having it.
Maybe the real-life version of the cloud sky painting is simply acceptance. This life isn’t good. This life also isn’t bad. Growing up, I felt like others were running while I barely trudged in wet sand (I didn’t grow up around beaches to know that wet sand is more compact and sturdy than dry sand).
Is the answer to stop trudging altogether?
…
I paused typing to open Google Images and searched “clouds sunset”. I found one I liked and made it my laptop background.
It replaces the virtual vision board I made which focused on love and big homes.
Do I know the answer? Not really. I can’t sit still or else my depression will take over. It’s insidious and I don’t notice until it’s too late. It feels like Venom taking over Spider-Man. I struggle to remove the sticky, dark suit that takes over my entire body.
While I focus on finding work, I think I need to embrace the trudge. I’m not going to catch up to my friends and peers at this stage in our lives. Not anytime soon. I have to remove the pressure because it’s aging me and we’ve established that I can’t afford Botox.
But I also can’t stop. Stopping means I stay in bed and destroy my mental health for hours on end.
Maybe, for now, my cloud sky painting is simply to move slower. I’m still moving. But I’m embracing the trudge at a comfortable pace. I need to take the pressure off and stop the endless mental checklists of things I should be doing.
More importantly, I need to be okay with changing the cloud sky painting. I cling to things like they’re the rule of law when I’m the only judge signing off.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Darius Bashar on Unsplash