winter hues/winter blues

Everything before now is just that.  This is what you have failed to remember, what you can no longer afford to forget.  The question is, why do you blind yourself?  What about being your own master brings you fear?

 My need for time alone is something I've never quite been able to reconcile with the rest of my life.  It's a hungry habit whose appetite becomes more ravenous the more that it's fed.  It's never satisfied, and there is no in-between.  I'm either shutting myself in or running myself ragged with obligations.  It makes me feel uneasy, nervous.  Like I'm two different people.  I worry I might get sucked into one extreme or the other for the rest of my existence - a misanthrope, devoid of the ability to connect outside of herself or a mad woman with too many spinning plates to keep in the air.

These characters?  I don't very much like either of them.

Depression and I have been well-acquainted on and off for many years.  I remember my first experience with it, I was 11, sitting in a car thinking, Why do I feel so heavy?  

I have never felt any sort of desire to hurt myself, I've never reached that level of despair, which I am grateful for.  But I can say that I have had a desire to disappear.  A unsettling feeling comes over me, in which I suddenly want to be nowhere at all.  Everywhere feels uninviting and draining.  Human contact is like jumping into freezing water.

In the art class I took, we did an exercise that consisted of re-naming ourselves.  Our teacher passed out name tags, and we got to choose a word that described what we aspired to be.

Hello, my name is Empowering.  

The thing about being empowering for others is, first and foremost, you must be empowered yourself. I can safely say that my entire life up until this point has been treading water, bobbing only just above the surface of a sea of insecurities I chose to project onto the people around me rather than own.  

This has been the year of learning to own it.

To own it and love myself, love myself, love myself in spite of it.  Because we cannot begin to show love for others until this self-love is firmly in its place.

I can't say I've mastered it, yet.  It's a constant struggle and it feels like I start at square one again every day.  I'm not sure if it will ever get easier, but I've also learned the importance of not being threatened by questions I don't have answers to.