"Not Always So"

“What you do in your life you will often do in spite of your fear.”

“Where does the pain go?” asks Donna Masini in her poem “Eye of the Skull.” The poet just had come back from the dentist when she had a cavity filled. She walks down the street with her mouth numb and notices a crazy woman behind her. “An older woman / dressed as a young girl. She had gone to a good school / liked good things had them too. You could tell. / She is screaming into herself, into the air. Vulgar things, shouting them to no one in particular / that I can see.”
I read that poem with a shock of recognition and identified with the numb part and the crazy woman. I know the pain came from somewhere. I am afraid if I let myself feel the accumulation and the enormity of those feelings, I would become that woman and I would go to a place from which I would not recover or return.
The rest of the poem; “What is trapped in the bones, the gearlike teeth / that join the two cramped parts / of the shell? What clenches and curls in the marrow? / Did the pain surface, just then? Did all that / numbed pain come in one great rush?”
To write is to have an ongoing script with your own pain. To scream to it, with it, and from it. Do I keep it and try to study it at a later date, or do I scrap it like a passing thought? It's a hallowed mess inside me—something I wonder if I inherited. Who's genes can I blame when I try to reason with the crazy woman screaming behind me?
The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once said that all of life can be summed up in three words: not always so. We plan our day going one particular direction? Not always so. Can we expect people to behave the way they always have? Not always so. Do we know when we've missed the mark? Not always so. Life is a pattern, then there's a defining moment that depicts the pattern as life as we know it making each day more complex. Can we recognize or define that singular moment which changes how you used to think or how you used to feel? Not always so.
Occasionally, you can feel the momentum of a wrong day running against you, and if it does, maybe the best thing to do is crawl back in bed and wait for it to pass so you don't end up with gum in your hair, or step in something unpleasant. But ah, if it were only that easy. Life goes on and we learn to take the bitter with the sweet some say. We live with decisions we make for the better of the over all good. Do we think of others when we make those decisions? Not always so. Do we think of our self? Not always so.
Someone recently pointed out when I'm depressed I tend to fall back on the same language. It's the road map that maps out my most hidden and most sensitive wounds. And yes, I often tend to fall back on the same words—repetitive and tiresome to those who haven't been down the same road, but like poking a bruise to me. I use this darkness as an opportunity to externalize what's inside me. I don't always fully understand things that occur in my life, but writing affords me a different perspective, and allows me to work out perplexing events or emotions. When I do, the world recedes and my words are the only thing that will save me and bring me back to enjoy the rising sun of another day.

I am very fortunate to have someone in my life who understands these jumbled up, mixed up words and can read in between the lines. That person also knows depression and knows it's not worn like a badge of honor. It makes me know my misery has company and is understood as long as I take it one day at a time.