OUT OF THE SILENT DARK

I put something out into the world the other day, it got a good reception and I had a few hours of excitement and gratification. But excitement always dissipates and this time, as it did, I felt myself going down, slowly turning away from the light and into the dark, the oh so familiar dark in which I am silent, passive, despairing. How strange, not to be energized by recognition, but to turn away from it, away from the very thing I crave. Why not simply do more, put the next thing out into the world. Why not build momentum? In a perverse way, I perceive getting what I want, being seen, as proof that nothing will ever fix me, nothing will ever be enough. The insatiability of alcoholism, the bottomless pit of the unloved child. How boring - to go back to my mother. Suddenly, I remember a dream I had when I was nineteen or twenty - only a single shocking image stayed with me when I woke - my mother with tape across her nipples. I remember being astonished that I had managed to create the perfect image for what I felt, had always felt, that I had brought into consciousness terrible secret knowledge and shame. I am not seen. Or nourished. Or loved.  

     Another child may have come to the same conclusion, said, okay, that's the way it is and I'm going to get what I need somewhere else. Was it my depression that kept me cut off from the energy to act, or was my sense of being unseen and unloved the genesis of my depression? And when had I transferred that belief on to the things of the world? When had my certainty of never getting the nourishment I needed become "there's no point in trying?" When had I learned not to try again? When had that response become so fundamental, automatic, that it blocked a more natural human response – if this feels good, go for more.  Instead, my morbid fear led me to feel rejection even when it didn't exist, and to collapse completely whenever I encountered it, as everyone does in the course of a life. When had my certainty of failure grown large enough to truncate any and all production?

     Questions without answers, and they aren't new. I've been trying to get free of this hobbling dynamic for many years, searching for the way out my self-imposed silence and isolation. That struggle has led to the only thing I know with certainty - the way out, the only chance to get beyond all the things that block me, is to act. Just that - take action. Don't pretend there isn't a heavy undertow that wants to pull me back into the silent dark. Acknowledge it, feel its lure in my body. Then take a deep breath, look for the way up and over fear, connect to hope, and take my baby steps.