Just a wee-touch of the ‘angry depression’ had me hiding under the covers for the past week.
I watched Oprah yesterday, because you know…nothing like watching a halocaust survior walk through the gates of Auschwitz death camp to cheer you up. I watched the whole thing and I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry because I can’t wrap my mind around it. I can’t, as a passionate, loving, woman and mother imagine that type of betrayal, pain and loss. It’s too big for my mind. SIX million people died there and that was just ONE camp. I saw the hair, the shoes and the suitcases, but it was too big for my mind.
After it was over, I did something I haven’t done in a couple of days. I got up, took a shower, put on my make up and I left the house on my own free will. I have that right. I have that right to be able to just get up and go as I damn well please. My mind, my anxiety and my sudden spurts of depression scare me, but It’s not the fear of walking into a gas chamber against my own will or watching everyone you’ve ever known be divided into groups and not knowing that may or may not be the last time you see them.
OH hell no, depression robbed me of hours of my week and scared me under my covers for days…but unless my depression is carring a gun, i will no longer be a prisoner.
Remind me the next time I get a touch of the depression to watch Shindler’s List or Kramer vs. Kramer. Something that gets me fired up.
This weeks SPF is sort of based on Auschwitz.
1. Your suitcase/s or travel bag.
2. Your ground.
3. Something you are powerless to.
It’s only as hard as you make it.
24 responses to “I lost my head and forgot spf…sort of.”
Glad to see you are up and feeling better!
Welcome back. I visit there often. As long as you manage to come back, it will all be okay. :)
“The inside of your head is a dangerous neighborhood.
Stay the fuck out of it, will you?” Said to me by a friend about 6 years ago (and also a quote from a movie, I think. LOL)
This week, on a very special Stuff Portrait Friday.
Did you happen to see Oprah last week when she had the dog who could walk on its hind legs, and it learned to do this because it had no front legs? I don’t know how the dog-who-walks-upright and the Auschwitz survivor end up on the same show. This is the mystery of Oprah. I am glad you are feeling a little better.
i think the holocaust just IS something too big to really get and think through with all the consequences. i’m german but of course too young to have been really effected and luckily none of my family-members that i know of where. but of course i grew up with that part of our history and i’m still ashamed something so horrible could happen in this country that i love. i went to the camp in bergen-belsen last year with an american and an australian friend and it was just … surreal i guess. a feeling as if someone was sitting on your chest the whole time. i remember bawling when through the whole hour of a documentation they showed and just not being able to grasp how cruel human beings can actually be and how it all started out and happened. it’s big. it’s huge. it happened a long time ago but i think it’s good to never forget. makes you appreciate what you have now. i’m glad you’re feeling better…
I watched that yesterday too. It is just completely unimaginable.
Glad you are feeling better.
Wow. I have been to Dachau and it is a very sobering place, indeed. My memories are almost always in color – my memories of Dachau are in shades of black and white and iron gray. There is a lingering saddness and a brooding bitterness that is almost palpable – but in an abstract way. The enormity is almost to much to grasp in a more personal way even in person.
It seems that SPF and WWC will both be memorials this weekend. I hope your depression lifts soon – that is not a fun way to be.
Isn’t it amazing when our problems are reframed for us.
This is a HARD spf.
glad you are back. Shaun’s comments alone are enough to get you outside! :)
Whatever does it for ya. I’m just glad you are getting out and feeling better.
See that whole thing that mom always said that we hate: “It could be worse.” She is right. Just like she was right about Taylor winning AI. Damn! How does she do it?
Girl, I hate it when the funk gets me. It usually takes hearing the plight of something so awful that I will stop feeling sorry for myself, dust myself off and get back to the business of living. Right now, the motivation that keeps me from huddling in a corner in a ball is the friend of my sister-in-law who lost a child to cerebral palsy last year and has a daughter dying of cancer now. Did I mention that the cancer patient is only 4?
Nothing like the struggles of others to make us recognize how truly blessed we are.
This is going to be a hard SPF. I can usually think immediately of what I want to do. Right now, I have no idea.
Oh damn I wanted to tape that episode. So I gather it was good ina “I can’t wrap my mind around it kind of way?” It is too often I get too wrapped up in how “hard” my life is and what I “don’t have” and how “broke” I am. Sheesh I have no idea. I think I will watch Schindler’s List soon … wanna come over?
Couldn’t watch. Schindlers List gave me nightmares for years, still does I think.
My friend Michelle toured that place, when she returned, she said that she no longer believed in God. Powerful.
Glad your up, and showered. I was beginning to smell you from here.
LOVE YOU HAB!
I too, like some of the other commentors, have visited a concentration camp…Dachau. All I felt was just an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss. Thinking about that place still brings a heaviness to my heart. Anyway…I can relate to the bouts of depression…I spent a good part of our 3 yrs. in VA medicated. Hang in there…as long as you have the will to not let it get to you it won’t.
Nilbo’s gonna be all over that last line…
Oh – and I’m glad you’re with us once again. You know that I care about you and appreciate you and all of that shit. I’m just better at focusing on the sexual innuendos. Sorry.
glad you are back…sometimes we need to be able to see the bigger picture.
Thanks for writing all this. I have some random bouts with depression. They aren’t frequent, thank God, but when they happen it makes me feel like I’ll never feel normal again. It helps me to know that other people feel like this sometimes and to hear that you got up and did something about it, all by yourself.
hugs to you…
not doing SPF…gonna have a baby instead… :)
peace…
I didn’t cry watching yesterday’s show either, but I did cry today when those two Rwandan girls saw their parents again for the first time since they were little. Darn pregnancy hormones, yeah, that’s what it was…
…. Sophies Choice.
Another choice.
I hear you. We all need perspective sometimes.
I used to have a habit of needing to find catastrophes that had happened to other people so I could avoid feeling my own feelings. I wanted to feel grateful and motivated and inspired ALL the time, with no looking inward. I used to get paralyzed if I even tried to look inward.
So, sister, your pain is real. (But I think it is ok to set it aside for a bit if you need to.) And Auschwitz was a terrible hideous devastating time in human history. I believe it’s a this AND that world.
Isn’t it amazing, the range of emotions we have? The power and the obliteration that hate can make, but on the other hand, the power and regeneration that love creates??
“This week, on a very special Stuff Portrait Friday…”
Bwah! Yep, I get why you love him, Kristine. Shaun’s a keeper. A big old dork, but still a keeper.
I’m at work during Oprah, which is for the best, cuz girlfriend freaks my shit OUT. Watch Ellen! She DANCES.
(Oh! And that Picture? Utterly FAB! You rock the camera, baby. Rock it SOLID.)
Just thinking about you, honey. Happy End of May to you.