The Hand That Cannot Write

“So, have you abandoned the blogosphere,” my best friend asked me this morning during a rare telephone conversation (I hate telephones).  She is not the first to inquire after my sudden silence after more than a year of weekly posts.  I consider her question and give her the only response I can summon. “I’m so depressed,” I say. “I can’t seem to focus to write.” That’s partly accurate. “I am afraid that anything I write is going to just sound depressed and angry.” I don’t want to drag readers into my morass.  That’s also partly accurate.

I’ve been here before. The first time was when I was just nineteen. After a few months of crying that seemed to surge from the depths of nowhere, someone in my circle of adult friends read an article about the levels of estrogen in birth control pills being a culprit in depression. I had been prescribed those very pills to manage debilitating cramps that had flattened me every month for my entire adolescence.   The solution was simple. Stop the pills. I did, and the depression loosened its grip.

The next time was in my early thirties. I’d fled to New York City. A guy I was crazy madly in love with wasn’t crazy madly in love with me.  I was failing at parenting, confused – no, paralyzed about what to do with my life, broke, stuck inside my personality which at its core is terrified.  I remember standing in a grocery store in Queens, leaning on the cart trying to shop for food for my daughter and me. My limbs, my body, everything was so heavy, I was not sure that I could continue to put one foot in front of the other.  I didn’t want to put one foot in front of the other. I simply wanted to stop. Right there in the store.  Not move. Sink into the floor.

I was lucky.  A woman I call my heart mother picked me up and cradled me for a long while, whispered in my ear when I didn’t know what to do or say, and helped me figure things out. “Say everything,” she’d cajole.  I resisted. She was patient. And slowly the anger that had been lying dormant far beneath my very thin skin came bursting out projectile style. I wallowed in that while she was the epitome of forbearance and after a time, my depression departed.

Two decades passed. I marveled periodically at my depression-less life, grateful for my freedom from those tenacious tentacles.  Of course there were (and are) ups and downs. Jobs end. Children grow up. Parents die. Terrorists attack.  Humans disappoint. But none of this sent me into a tailspin.

So what has derailed me this time?  Many things – it’s sort of the perfect storm of factors.  There is the cumulative effect of a demoralizing professional situation about which I am not free to write, blogs being the public forum that they are. There are difficult relationships with narcissistic people who lack self-awareness, which moves me to rage.  Can’t write about that either.  There are existential dilemmas of loss and abandonment that arise from numerous sources to be wrestled to the ground yet again.  Stir in exhaustion, the afore-mentioned thin skin, a touch of paranoia, and there you have it. Days spent struggling to suppress tears that threaten to leak out at the slightest provocation (real or imagined), creative energy stuck by unexpressed anger, a hand that cannot write because its owner doesn’t have the energy to be diplomatic.    

It will pass.  Most things do. Perhaps writing this will help.