Hardened

It has been a week and a day since I got my tattoos.

I'm so glad I did. I'm not sure I can stress that enough. I also can't believe the effect they have had on me. It's hard to overstate that, as well.

Please pardon this distasteful bit coming up. It needs to be said.

Since mid-July I had been suffering some of the blackest depression I've ever known. (If you can't tell your diary, and this is my diary...who can you tell?) I tried very hard not to burden friends with it, because who needs that? Didn't always succeed.

It felt like an ocean in storm. I'd sputter-crawl through one wave, suddenly find myself lifted high into the air and light as a feather, only to crash again the next day. Or hour. Sometimes I'd lift myself free. More often I'd be lifted by the words or actions of someone close to me. Each time I'd look down on the ocean around me and think I can beat this. I know how. I have all the tools. I'm going to beat this. And I'd mean it. I would even write it out, like lancing a boil, and think I'd drained it.
But depression is a sneaky bastard. It sees you slam a door shut and it skulks around to a basement window. At some point you'd find yourself going down to your mental basement for some turnips or turpentine or something and there to greet you would be Depression, five feet deep and rising fast. Why howdy, stranger! You didn't think you could keep an OCEAN out of your house, did you? 

Losing my job precipitated it, but not in the way you'd think. Many people define themselves by what they do to pay bills and I have never been one of those people. I didn't miss the job as a job. I missed the people tremendously...much more than I would have thought possible.  I'm not the most social person around...a classic introvert, I am...but I seem to need human contact a lot more than I thought I did. I'd keep making plans, they'd keep being killed, often at the last minute. Sometimes the reasons made perfect sense. Sometimes they didn't. It didn't matter. That happens to you a dozen times or so, scattered among any number of people, and it gets hard not to take personally. Especially when your personal bugaboo is rejection. So easy to conjure that feeling forth.

On tattoo day, again feeling about an inch tall (and damned sick of the feeling), I reminded myself what my body art was to represent. On my left shoulder, an infinity heart depicting love without limits. On the right, a blue spruce to represent fears I have conquered. (Being afraid of blue spruces is the most ridiculous phobia I've ever heard of in a lifetime of studying phobias, and it was mine for too many years to admit.) So at any time I could look to my left and see love. which I give and receive in abundance...or look right and see fear transformed into beauty. I figured between those two images, I was adequately armed against pretty much anything life could throw at me. But just to be safe, I'd get a stud in my ear, too: that wouldn't mean anything, and its meaninglessness would be ripe with meaning. With apologies to the late George Carlin:  Why? Because. Just because. I'll going to make an eighth hole in my head and put an ornament in there and people will  have to deal with me. The idea that I could be somebody to be dealt with, that was new. I would have said "accepted"before, "I was somebody to be accepted"--and then felt crushed when I wasn't, or thought I wasn't. Big change.

It's been a week and a day since. Everything has pretty much healed. For a while my blue spruce sported needles of flaky dead skin; now both tats have a tiny bit of scabbing in one corner and the earring is absolutely unnoticeable unless I stop to think about it.

The mental transformation has been interesting to behold.

It wasn't an instant fix. Like I said, depression is a sneaky bastard and for a while it whispered poisonous seductions. You think a tree can stand against an ocean? And that heart's wishful thinking,, too, loving many and much just means you can be shit on by many and much all at once! C'mon, let's go swimming. I want to show you what's down here. 

It all came to a head this past Saturday afternoon.
More plans were hanging in the balance. I was to be going with a friend and her family to the Waterloo Buskers' Festival that evening--something that has been running annually for 26 years, longer than I've actually lived in this city, and I'd inexplicably never attended. Anyway, I was so sure those plans were going to be scuttled that I had convinced myself, with ironclad certainty, that they had been. Upstairs I went, my head pounding, and I laid in bed--never mind that it was quarter to three in the afternoon, I wasn't sure I'd want to get out of bed ever again.  Eva was away for the day, which was good. I'd been in great shape when she kissed me goodbye and  I didn't want her to see me like this. She didn't deserve to, not after the endless love she has shown me over so long...love that of course I wasn't worthy of.

I started to cry. Black thoughts capered, whitecaps frothed, and the wind between my ears commenced to howl. There was nothing for it to carry away. My head was totally empty. I saw nothing but endless ocean around me, felt nothing but the slap and buffet of colossal waves, tasted nothing but salt.

Some scrap of self-preservation hauled me out of bed, almost without cognitive awareness of it, and plopped my ass in front of my keyboard. I gripped it like the life preserver it was and started playing.

It was over an hour before what I was playing actually registered in my ears. Most of the emotion had leached out. What was left was a lovely tune: melancholy, yes, but not viciously so. It sounded frail and fragile, which was probably apt because I felt that way.

I went downstairs and transcribed a few bars of that tune into composition software. And then I looked at my tattoos. The tiny scabs itched a little, but for the most part they had healed.  I had inflicted pain on myself and derived meaning from that pain. That thought bounced around in my head a few times and then started to repeat.

I had inflicted pain on myself and derived meaning from that pain, 

I had inflicted pain on myself

(all pain is self-inflicted, this has been a core belief of yours for almost twenty years now)

...and derived meaning from that pain.

(and that's what life is about.)

I could go alone. So what if my plans didn't involve going alone? Didn't John Lennon tell us that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans? In fact, I WOULD go alone.

The instant I decided that, and I mean the exact instant, I heard a bong from my computer, telling me I had a private message on Facebook. That message was basically "Ken-you ready to go?"

I was. I went, and I had a fantastic time. The acts were all impressive, and one of them--Dream State Circus, was world-class. Being with friends old and new--the whole town turns out for this thing, so I saw several people I knew--was wonderful. Even more wonderful since I realized I could have come alone and enjoyed myself too. Maybe not as much, but certainly enough. 

I moved through the crowd (and it was a huge crowd) like somebody who wasn't afraid of crowds. I actually took the lead a couple of times, which is something I never do. And I felt..assertive.  Like I had every right to be where I was. That, too, was new. I got home, kissed my wife, and told her everything. Well, everything except what these tattoos have done, because I couldn't put that into words until today.

These tattoos have hardened me. It's almost like I have a second skin now: a skin of my own devising that has a power all its own. And it's a pretty potent power.

Yesterday, somebody hurt me. I'm not making this up, or grasping at oceans in a desert: I was very deliberately hurt by someone I care very deeply for. I won't give details as to the situation itself, it's highly personal. But I can say this:  it came out of a clear blue sky, from one of the last people I ever expected to try to hurt me. It came through no fault of my own (I was told by the person hurting me--those are the worst kind of hurts, don't you find? The ones you didn't earn?) And I'll say one other thing: had this happened two weeks ago it would have sunk me, maybe for good.

Not going to say I didn't feel it. I'm a feeler, it's how I process the world, in shades of emotion. But I was not depressed about it. Angry, totally bewildered, a species of dumb amazement that this can't possibly be happening...and then something so utterly alien to my usual mode of feeling that I was even more amazed at it: a gritty acceptance edged with steel. This is how it has to be? Fine. I don't have to like it, but damn it, I deserve much better than this and if you don't care enough to see that, too bad for you.

I'm not kidding: my tattoos actually seemed to throb a little at that, like engines. Surely my imagination--or maybe it was just my mind working at deriving meaning from the pain so quickly that I wasn't even feeling the pain overmuch. I looked at my infinity heart. It seemed to blaze: yes, I still love, always have, always will, whether that love is returned or not. I looked at my tree, it looked back at me, aglow, and I realized I wasn't afraid of rejection.

No matter where it came from.

Unbelievable.

Persian has, I have read, two expressions: al-fa'il and al-mafa'ul. They translate, roughly, as "the doer" and "the done-to". I have always been al-mafa'ul, content to live life in the passive mode. On some level, of course, I have long been aware this was a problem...but the solving of it was unthinkable. I am not a doer. Doing involves risk; risk involves some kind of break--head, heart, pocketbook (we say "broke", don't we?)

Now I don't think I'm cut out to be one of those leaders the world rallies around. But in my own way, I'm learning that I am capable of being the doer. I'm actually not letting the hurt I experienced yesterday stand in the way of what I'm going to do next week. You'll get the scoop on that, dear Breadbin, when it happens.

In the meantime, once again, I need to thank my friends who have seen me go through this and who didn't run away screaming. You know who you are: hugs and love to each of you. Most importantly, I have to thank Eva, my love, my rock. You have not only seen me through something I never expected, you've given me the emotional and physical tools to cope. You are one reason I love without limits and I can handle my fears.

And I'm another.