Navelgazing

January 15th is meant to be the most depressing day of the year and I think, maybe not? Maybe not in the Southern Hemisphere, where we have light long lazy days, summer and water filled, warmth and beauty. When our gardens are full, and if there’s snow on the horizon, it is confused snow, and hilarious in its ridiculousness.

Yesterday was the 15th, the most depressing day of the year for my northest northern friends, and yet, there I was, with a garden and a book, and summer sunshine. My children are old enough to walk to the creek alone, and explore. They found wild-gone cherry plum trees dripping with fruit and picked buckets full. Apple trees fruiting in readiness for Autumn, and a space where platypus play.

My tomatoes are green, but changing, my weather is Tasmanian-confused, but the days are warm. Mostly.

I love this time of year, where even if my heart is heavy, then I know it’s a chemical reaction of exhaustion and school holidays grinding me down to bone and dust and dirt. When I just need five godforsaken minutes of silence and stop talking at me please.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done summer depression and boy it is the worst, but it isn’t a day or a date, it’s oxygen refusing to fill your lungs and a desire for everything to just stop and let you off this stupid rollercoaster ride of broken brains and broken hearts. Amongst other things.

And I will never forget how terrible awful it was, to be stricken with PND and be unable to even appreciate the smallest things, like how my baby probably wasn’t dying, how the summer paddocks smell at dawn, how the light paints the hills in shades of purple and blue when the sun goes down.

(Spoiler: My baby wasn’t dying, which was good.)

I don’t know. It just seems so dismissive to mark a single day of the calendar as the most depressing day of the year and call it good, call it even, call it done, like that’s it, you can’t feel any worse than you do on the 15th of January, off you go, bootstraps pulled up. Suck it up sweetheart, it’s the 16th now, you’re all good, move on.

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

Ask me again how I feel on the 15th of July. Maybe I’ll have changed my tune.

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I stopped writing, and I have a thousand excuses for why I stopped, but none of them hold any weight anymore. Not when the words press down on me because I’ve lost the habit of dropping everything here (or there).

There’s no quiet inside my head any more. No space, no peace.

My youngest baby started school /where does the time go/ and here we sit, with a pile of school clothes to wash, and market boxes to pack neverending. Soap piles up everywhere, along with paperwork, and wholesale clients, and joy and I love it. I love bringing something tangible to people’s lives, something real, with the power to make them smile.

But.

I miss writing.

(So do it more, you idiot, just start again)

My children grew up. The mummyblogging died in a haze of advertorials and sponsored trips. I was tired, so so tired. Tired of justifying myself, of the side-eyed-glances at the school gates, of talking about my feelings. I just wanted to write without having to mention it ever again. Cone of silence. I don’t want to talk about my latest blog post, jesus christ, I wrote it, you read it, isn’t that enough?

But no, it was never enough. Everyone wants more. People want to know why you don’t mention anxiety/dislocating joints/pain in public, and it’s like, I have to live this. I don’t want to rehash it over and over. I just want to send things out into the ether and have them disappear. A weight off my shoulders. Gone.

“I didn’t know you felt like that.”

I didn’t know I felt like that until I typed it out and there it was.

This then, is the damage done when you write under your own name. When there’s nowhere to hide. When you just stop instead of finding a new tribe. The RSS feeds die and no one knows you exist anymore. When there’s too much criticism and not enough acceptance. When your children grow up and can’t be fodder for the stories anymore.

This is what happens.

The odd dichotomy of wanting to be listened to, and wanting to fade away into silence under the weight of everything I can’t talk about any more. Stories which aren’t mine. Stories which are.

I used to be funny and poignant and sad. Now I’m just tired and anxious, buried under a stack of paperwork and a need to make something real.

Who am I? What do I even want.

God. So self indulgent. Yet here I am still.

Is there anyone out there anymore?

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I spend the day in bed.

A mild virus, combined with the middle of winter blues, and a shoulder injury all conspire to see me feeling shitty and getting shittier.

I spend the day in bed, a warm toddler snuggled at my back and crappy TV on my netflix. I cry, and cry some more. My shoulder hurts. My soul hurts.

Death anniversaries are always hard, but this one is hitting me harder than I expected. Maybe because I didn’t expect it. Maybe because after six years (six long years, tomorrow, six years, six years, it’s a litany over and over in my head) I expected to be okay, finally.

I am not okay, and everything is not okay.

June is hard. The puppy chews all my books, stealing them delicately from the bookshelf and shredding them while we’re out, while we’re distracted, while we’re sleeping. She pulls out the books I like most and destroys then. Roman Mythology. Alice in Wonderland. Zombie Survival Guide. They’re all dead and I am so so tired as I pick up pieces of my books from all over the floor.

It is hard enough I had to pack away most of my books to make room for business, squishing down the pleasure of reading all day, of researching and learning and writing, in order to work and make money, in order to improve our lot in life, without a puppy chewing all the favourites I lovingly left in the few remaining bookshelves which do not hold soap.

There is shredded paper everywhere and I spent the day in bed, pretending tomorrow isn’t the anniversary of anything, pretending my shoulder is not damaged, pretending everything was going to be okay.

Tomorrow will come, stay, and pass, like it does every year. Like every day before it, and every day after. I will try to distract myself, but my broken shoulder is making it hard, and I suspect I will spend the day in bed yet again.

Six years. Six years and so many missed milestones and events.

The sharp knives of grief might ease, but the missing never truly does.

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