What I see in the dark.

    

unexpected gift of depression. 

 I fell into a deep depression five years ago and have been trying to find my way back up to the surface. Sometimes, even tho I can not see the light, if I go deep enough inside myself, I can see clearly in the dark. As if my eyes have adapted to the darkness and I find I’m in a beautiful crystal cave of glorious abundance. And in those moments I can reflect on all the Gifts my depression has brought to me. 

One of the most profound and bizarre gifts is something I don’t have the words to describe . I guess I’ll call it. “ Sudden Onset Lightning Flash Identity Recognition” Or SOLFIIR ha!! I  just made that up while typing this sentence because I gotta call it something , and realize it is almost like soul fire and that is so charming to me. 

Anyway, 

I experienced SOLFIR for the first time during a particularly challenging passage of depression, when suicidal ideation chased me like prey. I could not outrun the terrible constant thought that I didn’t want to be here. I had just enough memory of the purpose and love that once existed in me, to get myself to a healing retreat in upstate NY.  The treatment I received there brought me 6 days of freedom, and that  thin thread of remembering has given me something to cling to and build on. 

The first day I met Tasha Mae. I saw her walking towards me and I had the strangest jolt. I heard myself think and say loudly in my head “Oh it’s me” “I’m her”

This is nuanced but it was not saying “you and I are similar or equal to each other”  it was a very distinct “that’s is me I am looking at myself” 

    Now I have seen some doppelgängers, with whom  that experience might make sense. But Tasha Mae  and I look nothing alike. And yet the jolt of recognition was like catching my reflection in a shop window.. A casual glance of “hello me!”  

    Tasha Mae is a strikingly gorgeous, shaman and healer, she is a petite, African American woman with long dreads, peaceful eyes, the brightest smile, she is strong and fit and healthy and helpful. None of those are descriptors I would use to describe my own self. Not then anyway. 

    I chalked the phenomenon up to some sassy shaman shit, and didn’t think of it again until the plane ride home. 

   Thumbing thru a magazine I turned a page real fast and saw myself. I looked back and it wasn’t me at all. It was a photo of a woman who looked nothing like me doing nothing that I would do. And then It happened again on the television, I saw myself in a commercial and had to rewatch a commercial (the agony) just to prove to myself that it wasn’t me in the commercial. It happened like that every so often , out the corner of my eye, I would see myself in someone wherever I was. 

Wow, it’s a joke amongst my nearest and dearest how I make

Everything about myself . Everything is the ED Show! I can, if untethered take over your party, your wedding, your special moment, even your funeral. I don't love this quality about myself. 

   I can rationalize that I am simply viewing things thru my perspective to better connect with you, but I know that it would be nice if I just occasionally shut the fugup and listened. 

   So it is with both amusement and deep concern that I viewed these increasingly frequent bouts of Sudden Onset Lightning Flash Identity Recognition .

    Until one day an episode of SOLFIR scared the bejeezus out of me. I was walking across the street and I saw myself ….in a lamppost. Friends, I am NOT a Lamppost! Maybe it was the way it was leaning kinda just slightly forward, Like it’s back was aching, I don’t know , because I am not lamp post shaped anywhere, not even just one of my legs!  I am NOT a Lamppost! And yeah somehow , there I was!

     Ok surely this is a brain tumor. There was a book on my mother’s coffee table growing up titled  “ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” and I don’t remember a single thing from it!? What did it say, was that book about me? do I have seeing hat disease ?  (it’s a special kind of egocentric to think a book written 40 years before my depression and subsequent recognition issue was written Just  for me!) (I’m so vain I totally think that book was about me) 

      I never went to the doctor for this new “brain tumor” I just got used to seeing myself in everything. We are adaptable creatures . I once saw my self as an individual but overtime I became the mothership to 40 trillion unique cells I could talk to.  I became the windchime and The UPS driver, I saw myself in the three legged cat, a photo of a polar bear, a Sleeping buffalo. Not all the time, Just an occasional “there I am” in the cantaloupe,in the dragonfly, in the steam of the soup  “it’s me!” In the dried out crumbling crust of a cicada carcass, in that annoying person who is soo soo very annoying omg

”Yep… It’s me“.  I see myself in them. 

     As I have rested and wrestled with who I am, it is this beautiful gift of layered unexpected sight that quenches me. Because once I started seeing myself in everything, I could also see everything in myself. That I am the rainbow and the steel drum beat, the peeled paint, the look of longing and the love story. I see now that I am every bit the starry night and Spanish moss dancing in the storm. And I feel it too. I can feel the energy of the fountain, the static slow hard bricks and the proud grass pushing thru the dirt beside it. 

   And I can see that the thing that separates us …. Is one ply of tissue. Just the scarcest film of difference between my hefty body and that store bought mushroom. When I know I am the rock I treat stepping stones like sisters. I savor the flavors that are me, I tread on the earth like it is the precious love of my life. 

     I turn my back on this knowing , I switch it off, iIs too much, it’s not comfortable, I need a wall,  I let garbage pile up and turn my head away from the broken fence that I am and the dirty dishes that are me. I don’t feel like the reminder that we are all made of the same stuff is just a cute little greeting card entry, I feel like it is a call to action… and I find it exhausting … One can’t always be one with everything unless they are a pizza. 

So I turn away. 

People talk about how we only have this one life, YOLO they say. You only live once. And I see myself in that both in the fear and the paradoxical relief , The fear that time will run out is like a motivational shaming ,  to do more and act right,  shames us into tidy behavior and forces us to choose a path with our one possibility and define ourselves by the things we do in this one body during this one fragment of time. And it is the saddest idea to me that we get stuck being this one small thing… 

When we are all everything. 

    My depression has shown me a thousand simultaneous lives, It has connected me with my bird self and my mushroom self and my lamppost self and my stunningly gorgeous dreadlocked shamanic embodiment of strength self, depression has introduced me to my every  being that exists in the universe self. 

The heaviness of that is unbearable. And the necessary adventure of being alive. 

To see myself in every horror, every terrible news story, untimely demise and destruction pains me. I feel the twisted rebar bones of every bombed building, the desperate plea for food from every starving human being in my consciousness. I was stabbed on a train and chased jogging thru a neighborhood and murdered and beheaded and hung from trees and dragged behind a car and feathered and tarred and burned at the stake ….. and you were too. 

Not  just in this moment that we have assigned as 2025, 

We have all died on every battle field, throughout history. We have wailed with grief and longing.  We are all Ghengis Khan, and we were all killed by Ghengis Khan and we are all babies of Ghenghis Khan. We were the indigenous people of this land and we killed the indigenous people of this land, we were slaves and we were slaveholders . We all hid in that attic and we all killed Anne Frank. We are all everyone.

In that way I think a glitch in recognition can save the world.  If we can shift from  the idea of ourselves, as this one  person with this one name wearing this particular body, and recognize instead the possibility that everything is everything. We would walk differently on this planet. 

We would not sling arrows directly into our own backs . We would know that all violence hurts all of us. We would Not dump toxic waste into our living rooms , we wouldn’t drop bombs on our own homes , we would not fight and point fingers and call names to our own selves. 

Even the most complicated contradictions could be debated with tenderness. Maybe we have an Opportunity to transform the darkness, If we see ourselves in every person even those with whom we disagree we might utter every word with the gentleness reserved for someone we deeply love. 

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