Skip to content
All the parts of my life
All the parts of my life

"I am trying to hold in one steady glance / all the parts of my life." — Adrienne Rich, from the poem "Toward the Solstice"

  • Home
  • About
  • I Published a Book!
  • Lighted Lake Press
  • Questions? Feedback? Misspellings?
  • Opt-out preferences
All the parts of my life

"I am trying to hold in one steady glance / all the parts of my life." — Adrienne Rich, from the poem "Toward the Solstice"

What the darkness is like

July 18, 2010

After an evening of dark thoughts and strong sobbing, some questions move through the front of my mind.

I definitely have too many books. If I got rid of bunches of books, would I feel liberated in some way? Could it help me to then lose bunches of weight, maybe? — that sense of liberation, however limited it might be?

Am I trapped within the fences of my everyday life, as I so often feel I am? Or am I trapping myself, allowing the endless tangled skeins in my brain to overwhelm whatever clarity and determination might still exist in there?

Can I write my way out of the confusion, if not out of the depression? Even if the sentences I can pull out aren’t any good, the act of writing is good in itself, and therapeutic, always. The writing can suck, yet still be “valuable,” in that it helps me just to try to express what the darkness is like.

Why do I still have these moods when, for the most part, my anti-depressants seem to keep the worst feelings at bay? I don’t want to think about changing medicines. Is there something else I can do to ease some of the pain, to stop myself from breaking, or being broken?

I realize living with a depressed person is not a walk in the park … or maybe it’s that walk through the park after your car died and there’s a storm pouring down on you, and a rain-wrapped tornado not too far away. How can a relationship withstand that kind of stress, on-again and off-again, month after month, years upon years?

I’m tired now, and finally might try to go to sleep. I hope to wake feeling better (or even less bad would do), well enough to get some decent reading done tomorrow. To hell with everything else, if I can just steady my mind for a while and read.

© All the parts of my life 2008-2015.
books and reading depression appetitesweight

Post navigation

Previous post
Next post

Related Posts

PBS program about depression

May 25, 2008

Only a couple minutes to write, but wanted to note a very good program about depression that was on PBS a couple nights ago, called Depression: Out of the Shadows. It was followed by a Q&A with Jane Pauley and three experts on different aspects of depression. They are reairing…

Read More

The Classics Circuit: The Children by Edith Wharton

January 28, 2010

I’ve been a fan of Edith Wharton’s novels for over 15 years, so I jumped at the chance to participate in this tour, and am glad it compelled me to read one of several Wharton books that I already owned but hadn’t previously read. Many, many thanks to Rebecca Reid…

Read More

A blah blah blog post

March 26, 2010

So I have a little bit of “home alone” time, and so many things that I could do, and a few that I probably should do, like walk on the treadmill (and that would also mean watching Lost from two nights ago, and it’s supposed to be an amazing episode,…

Read More

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Popular Posts

Categories

RSS
Facebook
Facebook
fb-share-icon
X (Twitter)
Visit Us
Post on X
©2026 All the parts of my life | WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
  • Manage options
  • Manage services
  • Manage {vendor_count} vendors
  • Read more about these purposes
View preferences
  • {title}
  • {title}
  • {title}