Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

Dreams show us how to find meaning in our lives, how to fulfill our own destiny, how to realize the greater potential of life within us.” Marie-Louise Von Franz in The Way of the Dream

Early this morning I dreamed a dream where I was trying to explain to someone what it is like when you are drowning in a depressive episode. Even when you know what it is, that it will pass, and you will be okay if you don’t do anything to fuss with it. It still hurts, it still impedes activities of daily living. and you rarely have the words to express…

This is the example I gave to the dream inquisitor:

I once lived in a town called Victorville. It was high in the California desert where scrub and Joshua trees are the dominate flora broken up occasionally by a bright yellow daisy. In the summer it’s 120 degrees but it would drop down to a brisk 90 at night. In the winter it would be 75 during the day and you’d wake up to ice and snow in the morning. I loved winter there. But the example comes from early spring when it rained. It never rained normal, if there is such a thing. Most of the time it would shower for like two minutes, barely dislodge the dust on the windshield and then the sun comes back. Except this one time when I was out on the street with my companion when the sky darkened ominously and the heavens opened up and dropped water so fast the earth wasn’t ready to absorb it. Within a few minutes, water was rushing down the street like a river. Not deep enough to jump the curb (thankfully) but deep enough to know not to cross the street. Then like a faucet being turned off the rain stopped, the clouds moved and the sun came out again. Within minutes, the water stopped flowing and the overworked storm drains worked according to plan, and it was like nothing happened. Except me and my companion were soaked to the bone.

You’d think I’d say ‘the desert represents the depression’, but no. Yes, depression is a dearth of serotonin on the brain, but that’s not what it feels like. Throughout my life I have had the general sprinkling of depression where it is dark and there are some drops keeping me from speeding along in life until it passes, I mean, who doesn’t. But that downpour where it felt like God Himself was draining his tub onto the earth, is the feeling when, for no good reason, the sky in your emotional landscape clouds over ominously and then it rains so hard and so fast you don’t have time to correct it. You are trapped in a downpour without protection and all you can do is watch as the emotions rush by you trying to pull you into the current. You can’t move, you can’t protect yourself. All you can do is take you social meds and wait. You fight against the urge to step into the torrent and be washed away, but mostly you just wait. You practice your CBT techniques but you wait. People see it as being ‘lazy’, but you wait. Then the drops stop like a faucet being turned off, the light comes back out, and the rushing water turns into rivulets and then disappears. Everything dries up and you go back to the work you left when it all started as if nothing happened in the world, because to the world, nothing happened.

The image is comforting and I now have words to explain what it feels like. It’s a memory of mine which comes up when I see a hard rain. The desert isn’t prepared for a lot of rain because, well, it’s a desert. They trust the water will be quickly absorbed into the sandy loam before anything horrific could happen. Except for those two or three showers a year where the rain falls faster than the absorption rate and the water is flowing swifter than the storm drains can catch. I wish the depression would hold to such a minimalist schedule, but it doesn’t. But unlike Victorville (when I was there anyway), I now have the infrastructure to be like an umbrella. I am able to protect myself from the emotional onslaught of painful, relentless drops. CBT, journaling, blogging and even talking to a family member or a friend can help during the storm. The storm passes, you take a shower and change your clothes and you go back out into the sun and work until the rain comes again. Thus is my life.

Thriving In Action

This is my mission statement for 2026:

One of my action items to prove to myself I’m thriving was to have quarterly get-your-ass-out-of-the-house things to do. My first one was Between the Lines. A play in Castro Valley, CA which was directed by a coworker at One Medical. It was a sweet story of a girl trying to fit in and the characters in a book who were refusing to let that happen. It was a sweet story that touched on some deeper subjects like the importance of fathers in their child’s life and a single-mother’s struggle when he doesn’t. The importance of friends and acceptance in life. But in general, it was fun, well thought out and staged. I walked away from the play lighter of heart and desperate to be able to see better.

Saturday, the 23rd. I singed up to go see Mandalorian and Grogu with a theater full of rabid Star Wars fans. People dressed up and strangers talked to strangers. I won a trivia book for all the Star Wars movies. I am a fan of anything space based, I realized. I loved the TV show The Mandalorian because I would come home from work exhausted and sit on my bed and watch and episode or three and Sammy, who was pissed off at me because I was gone the whole day, would sit on the bed and watch with me. Not cuddle, just watch. I think she had a crush on Grogu: he was small and green too. It endeared the show to me. And the violence. I do love me some fictional, unrealistic violence.

I’m already planning my third outing, I want to go to the opera for my birthday. My birthday being in the middle of the quarter. I can’t afford the choice tickets my friend used to buy but I’m going to go to a matinee on a Saturday and hope there will be tickets available for the cheap seats at cheaper than face value prices. There is Manon and Tosca coming up for that time frame. I’ve seen Tosca but not Manon. I’m looking for a CD player at thrift stores so I can prep by listening to the CDs. I don’t use a streaming service and I mostly listen to books in the car, so my life has been something of a musical desert. I love the way Opera makes me take deep breaths with the arias and then float away on the high notes. It’s very calming.

I realized I’m picking outings where we are all there for a uniform experience. I’m not really ‘socializing’ but going somewhere without someone is a really big step for me. My sisters don’t like musical theater and science fiction/fantasy doesn’t really interest them. The difference between the the first two is the opera will have alcohol, which adds a scary element in the mix for me. I really never figured out why. You just can’t trust people when they drink. There is no argument you can make that will make me believe otherwise. But we are all still there for a civilized cultural experience. My last one might need to be to a Faire (Ren, Dickens or Psychic) where everyone is doing what they want and I need to participate in something other than shopping. If I don’t get a job any time soon, I won’t be able to participate in anything at all. (Sigh).

I’m proud of myself. Even if these are baby steps compared to what my life used to be when I was younger and not terrified of the outside world. I’m happier and safer in bed, but that’s not how life is lived. It’s not how to thrive.

The Consequence of Truth

So, I got new insurance after the old insurance took out a pound of flesh from my credit card (thank you congress for not supporting the ACA) and once I finally got things settled I found a doctor and made and appointment for the first available. They ask questions like: Do you have thoughts of harming yourself? Do you think of suicide? Do you feel hopeless? Now because of my honesty, I’ve had one social worker call me to make sure I have access to the suicide prevention line. I’m waiting for another one to call me about……I dunno. They did assign a psychiatrist but I won’t talk to him until June (My appointment was at the end of April). They need a box for yes, but I know better.

I told the truth, or my truth for that time. I was tired of fighting the good fight and being a burden to everyone in my family, and I want it to end. I won’t lie, there are some mornings when I wake up and realize I am failing at EVERYTHING and I don’t want to ever leave my bed again. The panic alone at the thought of starting another day is enough to hide under the covers for protection from the world.

But I don’t. I know it’s temporary and I know I just need to take my meds and wait the thirty minutes or so for the meds to calm my anxiety and brighten my mind. I know this. I know there is a way out of this darkness. Finding the energy to do something other than huddle in my room with Sammy and apply for jobs I won’t get and doom scrolling isn’t helping.

I’m not back in the void. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!!!

Most days I’m in a mental state of ‘meh’. I go through the motions of what I need, ignoring what I want and trying to do something productive in my tiny world. I am reaching out socially. I started Stitch and Resist with another person in the TRAC Group (Tracy Resistance and Coalition) and I’m going to share it with SURJ. It is way to find people who are struggling with the anxiety inducing climate of the day and try to do something positive. I’m going to a movie on the 23rd with a bunch of rabid Star Wars fans. I’m having the second Stitch and Enrich at church on Saturday where I’m going to teach crochet to any of the women who want to learn. I want us to make blankets/hats/sweaters/whatever to give to either the homeless, the premature babies at the hospital or for the farmworkers who have to shelter in place because of ICE. I’m still doing all of this in the same state of ‘meh’. Is that normal? Is that fine? I dunno. Honestly, right now I’m alive, I’m trying and I’m working on it. And feeding an unhealthy addiction to cookie butter.

A Different Perspective

Foxglove

I love foxglove, and not just because its poisonous, it’s beautiful.  I don’t like how the flowers trumpet down and I wanted to see from the other end.  I found it exhilarating.  Sometimes being upside-down is more blessing than trial.

Exetential Angst…

…thy name is anxiety. 

I don’t know if I’m in a full-blown crisis yet, but naming your demons is the first step in taming them.

A Little Green A Day

Saturday (April 25) was the celebration for Earth Day (April 22). It was attached to the city’s farmers market. I will admit, it took me a minute to get my courage up to start talking to people. My anxiety has been higher the past few weeks. By higher, I mean thinking about supplementing it with vitamin X with my daily social meds. I didn’t. I just focus my mind on other things and try to suppress it the best I can. Not that suppressing it is really going to help in the scheme of things, but I didn’t have time to dig down to the splinter causing this rash of irritation. After, I went to the farmers market to see what they had to offer. My social and emotional goal is to go again or make it a weekly thing to get me out of the house.

The anxiety is worrying me, or should I say it’s causing anxiety, which is making it worse. I think I almost had a full-on panic attack when I worked in the food pantry at Open Heart Kitchen.  I took big 50lbs bags of potatoes and carrots and creating 2lb to 3lb bags for easy hand out. Within the first hour, my eyes began to feel like there were curtains slowly closing around my eyes. Not just seeing the darkness coming but feeling it as well. I started to get lightheaded and I thought I would lose consciousness. I went to the table to see if there was room for me to sit down and help them cut net bags. There was a chair but not space to cut….so I walked away. I would assume, if I showed the distress on the outside (pale out, or seeming incoherent, someone would have said something) I went back to my table and began to put onions in netted bags. It cleared up and went away. I didn’t faint.  I didn’t make much of a fool of myself by asking for help.  Yea me.

I bring this up now because while I was walking the farmers market I started feeling the same way. I’d have these episodes before when I was working with an acute and prolonged case of irritable bowel syndrome. Then I thought it was dehydration. I wasn’t dehydrated at OHK, I might have been at the farmers market.

My anxiety has been taking this opportunity to play “You’re dying, why try.” song and “What’s going to happen to Sammy” on the flip side. I’m waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing and my breath trying to catch up. I try to push the record off the player, but my brain keeps spinning, the evil pixies keep singing and I throw myself into distracting pursuits to take my mind off things.

There is hopeful news.  I finally got my medical straightened out and I see a doctor on Wednesday.  My prefrontal cortex is saying it’s probably nothing, just anxiety or dehydration.  My limbic system is shouting: BRAIN TUMOR.  I will say, a disease of the brain, the one thing I’ve prized over everything else in my life is terrifying.

I Protest Two

Today was No Kings III. For a small town (like under 100,000…I think) we had a mighty force of courageous and outraged citizens demonstrating. I worked mostly at the membership table. I know I can talk to people if there is something between me and them….a table, a bar on the chair, even glasses. That’s not saying I like doing it, but I know I can do it if it’s needed. I held a sign for about 30 minutes towards the end. I made it myself…”Stop Deranged Trump Syndrome”. I think there is a better word for syndrome for the message I was trying to get across, but it’ll do. I was forthright in getting people to sign in, get them to take a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” sticker until we were out. I told them about drop cards and why, even if they’re old and white, they needed one.

This picture sums up my whole day. I don’t know her name, she sat in her chair, in the sun waving her flag at passing cars and refused to give up, or give in. My hero! I couldn’t hold a sign unless I was in the shade of a tree. I’ll get stronger, but she showed us all how it’s done.

Part of why I am doing this is to fight back the anxiety of unemployment, looming recession and because it is horrible out there, and if we don’t stop it, it’ll only get worse. This week I’ve been to a TRACC Indivisible membership meeting and a SURJ.org local circle meeting. The circle meeting asked questions of what we would be comfortable in doing, gaging where we need to focus on to be a better team and support system for those in the community. One was to be a decoy car with a Mexican flag when ICE is in the area to give people time to go home where the government can’t get to them. My first thought was NO! That’ll get me shot. Which is a valid concern with the untrained stormtroopers making life miserable in the towns they infest. But then the evil pixie pops up her spiky little head to ask, “Would that be a bad thing?”

Yes, you evil sprite, it would be a bad thing to be shot and killed before I am ready to leave the earth. Again, it’s the passive suicidality trying to reassert itself into a more prominent role in my life. And the depression, anxiety, passive suicidality and the pixie can rearrange the deck chairs all the want, but I still own the boat! I still decide when the ship sinks or float. And damnit, it is going to sail until it reaches the Elysian shores we’ve all been promised in our individual spiritual studies. It just bothers me that I’m not cured. I still have to tackle the darker elements to the mat every day. I know, I’ve had this for decades, probably my whole freaking life if you look back at Distraction I wrote my first suicide-esque note when I was barely double-digits. I’m hoping it’s not too late to make a life of what life I have left, but every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.

I’m constantly trying not to let the thoughts of failure, giving up, of wasting my life and all that entails bog me down. I’m trying to write, but the ever present need for an income keeps me distracted from the comforting pools of creation. I set the goal at the end of last week to go back to the basics….take meds, exercise, eat 3 meals a day, pray and read the scriptures. Anything else is gravy, as they say. And then I caught myself piling on more and more things every day and I shut down. After going to the SURJ and TRACC meetings on Thursday made me withdraw from the world on Friday. It was hard to engage with people today, but I had the safe space of a barrier (even if it is imagined) me and them.

I know this is sounds like a doggy-downer post, it’s not. I got up, even when I didn’t want to, and went to the protest. I accomplished that. I shared my opinion, my jokes and my stake story with strangers. I am moving forward, but just like the dragonfly in the chrysalis, it is a struggle to emerge a new and stronger creature. And I just want to be the promised dragonfly instead of in a constant lava state.

–

Health & Healing

The loss of my job in January was bad enough, but it was insult to injury after I got the message from my states ACA program that my insurance premiums were going up by 160%+. It worked out to be what I managed to scrape together and save from refinancing my only tangible asset, changing my insurance and phone coverage. I wasn’t worried. I began to believe the fear mongering by the press about how the ACA subsidies were expiring at the end of the year were going to double or triple our premiums. It made 160% not as horrible as it could be. Fast forward to the beginning of this month and I checked to make sure my autopayment cleared my card and the cost was $1,500+. That was a 300%+ jump in the premium., or close to 500% jump total. I’m still shocked…terrified…bewildered…dumbfounded…pissed off.

The bureaucratic two-step I’ve been doing to get my money back and set up the state funded medical program has been intense, confusing and frustrating. I’ll admit, I do have a mental block when it comes to stuff like this, it’s a lot like figuring out taxes for me. I hate it and need it and it’s written in legal double speak and I allow it to confuse me. I try to push through, but by the time I get to the end of the paragraph I can’t remember what it was talking about. I’m assuming it’s willful ignorance, but I don’t know how disengage my will. I’ve filed a complaint to get my money back and I’ve set up my state funded medical which will be available to me 1 April 2026.

Not a moment too soon, either. I thought I was suffering from sinus issues because of my nose clogging and my face hurting due to the pretty, pretty trees in bloom but it turns out it was more. I didn’t check to see if it was COVID because it didn’t go into my chest. But this messy, goopy, sticky, blood stained mush came out of my nose when I could get air through it to breathe. I power-washed my sinuses regularly with my battery-operated neti-pot which I think saved me. If I were working, I would have taken OTC meds and powered through but it was nice to stay in bed, literally for days and sleep and allow my body to heal. Today is my first day out of my room and I’ve been off all meds since Monday. As much as I love Nyquil and Dayquil they don’t do my body any good. So, yesterday my body forcefully ejected the unused or unnecessary portions of the meds from my body and, honestly, I feel five pounds lighter.

What made the recovery a little easier was knowing I could take my state funded medical card to an urgent care or emergency room and get help if I needed it. It’s just a fact of life, when you don’t have insurance even a benign common cold creates the most uncommonest of scenarios in your mind about death or drowning in debt. People who are against the Affordable Care Act, I believe, have never had to decide to wait out chest pains and hope it’s not a heart attack or go to the emergency room and not be able to cover rent. I have. And I have to say, jumping through the fiery hoops of bureaucracy is better than betting your life to make rent.

Doom Scrolling

We all do it. Someone sends you a cute video of (insert favorite subject here) and then you swipe up to see what’s next and then it’s three in the morning . By then you’re all tangled up in knots because the terrifying truths from your favorite influencers have enraged you and then your gears get stripped by a cockatoo tap dancing along with a Fred Astaire movie. (@jackson_huhniverses) And you keep going, hoping for another spoonful of sugar to make the horrors perpetrated in the world go down a little easier.

This solid waste of time is a symptom of the anxiety, and an excuse to submerge myself in the depression, I know this. Last week I spent 40 hours swiping instead of doing something productive, positive or useful for my mental and/or physical health. I wish they would put guardrails on these sites so you can’t go careening out of control. Can’t the algorithm that learns what you want and like learn to cut you off like a conscientious bartender? At least when I’m crocheting because I can’t deal with the sudden rush of anxiety over (insert crisis here) I’m making something…..doom scrolling doesn’t accomplish anything.

What I’m realizing is my depression, or the Void, is looming over my life again. I’m talking medication-upping, therapy-seeking depression. I’m hoping my desire to get out of bed before 7:00am, well, up and doing something like write or job search in bed, is a sign the light is coming back. I started walking with the ducks again and I’m putting forth a courageous effort to stop the scrolling before my alarm clock goes off. I’m ten toes down withstanding the void, but I am terrified. Rereading my post Distraction was a giant flashing red light and I blithely went about my life like “It is what it is,”

The answer is the beginning of my last paragraph: “…I’m realizing…” I can do something about it, and I’m trying. God help me, I am trying, Then I scroll up in my brain to make plans and a perfectly balanced cinematic short of the evil pixie pops into my mind to remind me this is my life. I will always be depressed, I will always be paralyzed by anxiety and I will die that way. (I won’t lie, death has been on my mind lately). I need to recapture the hope I had in Beyond Surviving, I’m not starting at zero, I still think I’m further along than when I started this blog what feels like a hundred years ago, I guess that’s something the evil pixie can’t take away. Celebrate the small wins, is what they say.

And Then I Read This

The universe gave me a response to the last post:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe we are gifted for something and that this thing must be obtained.

Marie Curie