A former friend once remarked to me, and as I reflect on the exchange, I am wondering if he had just heard someone else say this, that people's network of friends were like a network of superheroes, that each friend represented a kind of super power and added together provided what a person needed.
I liked the concept. And I am quite sure I'd like to have a super power or two and a network of friends with their own super powers.
This guy, who I no longer am in relationship with (he ghosted me after treating me poorly for years, after I endured him treating me poorly for years. . . . ). As he put it in one of our last face to face visits, he said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference." Yikes. He said this nearly 8 years after he had socialized with me. Who socializes with someone for that long if they don't see the other person as a friend. Those words cut me painfully. In hindsight, I think he was doing he shithead best to sever ties with me when he said that.
I have had years to reflect on this guy, to review many of our long-ago-now interactions. I think he is dishonest across the board, a sneaky, sniveling, fearful little man who projects his insecurities onto women and blames them for whatever he is feeling and experiencing. Fuck him. Yeah, fuck him.
I like the idea of one's friends as a team of super heroes, each providing a super power I need.
I need these superpowers, but not necessarily only these. I am just popping off the top of my head. I need love. I need a magic touch that generates a lot more money into my life. I need a committed male lover who wants to be with me and who can't get enough time with me -- is that a super power or does this fall under the power of love? I want a happy sex life. I want my daughter to love me: a specilalized superpower of daughter-mother respect and love: I need this one most of all.
I need hope as a super power.
I need tenderness as a super power.
I need lots of time in nature.
I need a car (not a super power but geez, I want a car so I can leave Berkeley and venture into the beautiful land I live in. And I want to take road trips again. Right now, I'm jonesing for a road trip to Chicago, then swing by Minneapolis. Are these super powers?
The power to blink and produce what I want might get me a lot of the things I have listed. Or a magic lantern. Or my own genie. Or my own magic power.
That's what I need: magic.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
the gray drizzle
“The gray drizzle induced by depression,” William Styron wrote in his memoir about his depression “takes on the quality of physical pain.” In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it was like to feel any other way vanishes, until your entire being contracts into the state of what is, unfathoming of what has been, can be, and will be. If Emily Dickinson was correct, and correct she was, that “confidence in daybreak modifies dusk,” the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn.
And yet daybreak does come, with a shock and a rapture, to find us asking ourselves in half-belief:"What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?"
I have no faith in this moment that daybreak from my depression will dawn. And Styron got it so right: when I am most depressed, I can't remember what it felt like to not be depressed. This is the worst aspect of my deep depression: I have no memory of happy. And when I fall into such holes, I tend to fcus on my Katie wound, the neverending grief of her shunning me all these years. I don't htink she cares one whit about me yet I can't stop longing for her. What is wrong with me that I long for someone who took took took from me, all my financial resources, all my ability to give, all her private education, all my love and ceaseless giving and she just turns me off, out of her heart. I don't feel anger towards her. Oh no. I feel anger towards myself, blaming myself for her choices. She has contact with her father, who incested her when she was five, but me she shuns? she took took took frm me until I had nothing to give and then she booted me out of her heart. Why do I want such a person to act like a daughter, to show me love, to care about me?
