In the spirit of all things Anglo, I invite you to a little tea-time chat.  I am just sitting down to my afternoon cup of tea and have a few simple things to report.  I've been favoriting all kinds of spiced teas lately, Green Ginger or heavily-spiced Chai have been vying for the top.  Today, it's Chai with milk and sugar (they don't have honey at my workplace!).  How do you take your tea?  One lump or two?  Now, if I were a proper Brit, I'd have some sort of biscuit to offer you...but a cyber-biscuit sounds all kinds of wrong.

Frankly, I do indeed prefer life in general to be less full.  Weekends are such a tricky time of trying to connect with your family, getting enough lazy-time, working around the house, and catching up on sleep.  It's a perfect conundrum and I admit that it stumps me most of the time.  

It is a life-long struggle for me, but not so much the depression itself.  It is more the ability to be kind to myself in light of its rather shadowy bits.  I preach loud about self-care, but dears - I fight every damn day to keep the good words and thoughts at the ready and to push back on the deluge of lies threatening my mind.  I bruise like hell most of the time, and sometimes I flat-out lose. But the battle only lasts so long, and that was yesterday. 

I'm happy to report that today is looking squeaky clean with its bright citrus perspective.

The truth is, depression comes to the forefront of my soul for a reason - at least for me.  I am  missing my sister and niece something fierce and immersed in all kinds of confusing thoughts, changes, and disappointments. I'm not eating well, not exercising, not writing, not snapping enough photos. All of those reasons aside, let's not forget the chemical imbalance always teetering in my brain chemistry.  So what if I just had to sit on my bed in a total conoundrum about what to wear (not for any special occasion, mind you) for almost an hour.   So what if the only self-care I can really muster is several hot baths in one day or lying still and brooding over the dying pear tree in the back-yard?

i suppose that if you are the kind of person that finds wallowing to be among the 7-deadly sins, than perhaps you would advise that i surround myself with positivism, adjust my negative attitude, pull myself up by the bootstraps and just make myself feel better, damn it.

but at what cost? if these "moooods" are so continually battled, what part of myself is being severed? all of this simply so i can go about my day and feel better, feel productive, feel useful? i agree that to feel better, productive, and useful are important emotions, but are they much more important than to feel worse, unproductive, and unused? why do we persuade ourselves out of moods? it's NEVER made sense to me. "i am going to now talk myself out of feeling angry at my husband because it is not acceptable nor helpful to our relationship, plus it will freak the kids out." speaking from a somewhat narcissist perspective (in that only 1 person is really overly affected by my moodiness, and i don't have to deal with hiding myself for a more appropriate time so my kids feel more secure), i realize that not every single emotion needs full reign when it presents, but i also think there is something truly cauterizing about simply deciding that how we feel is unacceptable and doing any and everything to just get out of that mood.


it's been one of those weeks where peeling hard boiled eggs turns into the most frustrating task OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. where you slice one piece of coconut cake and two seconds later it promptly falls onto the carpet (with tiny pieces of coconut everywhere). you then pick it up to throw away and miss the garbage can. it mocks you in a big splat on the kitchen floor. you reach for a paper towel, and in your frustration manage to pull the entire roll of paper towels from its rack.

also, did i mention? you have ABSOLUTELY.NOTHING.TO.WEAR. and you are the fatest person alive?

these things are temporal.
how i realize this.