The Cerebral Mum

A while ago, for the 30 Poems in 30 days challenge, I wrote a poem critical of Robert Frost’s A Minor Bird…

I do not need
to speak of birds
I can say the word
Depression. _{A Minor Depression}

So here’s the word: I am depressed.

I mean “clinically” depressed: I have all the symptoms. Constant and complete exhaustion, physical aches, headaches, no will, no confidence, no pleasure, inability to concentrate, inability to sleep, a sense of being overwhelmed, a nebulous sense of guilt, and no sense of myself as a person. So I’ve said the word. It’s long overdue, but I’ve said it.

The first thing I want to say about this is that this has absolutely and categorically nothing to do with becoming a mother. Motherhood has not effected my sleep or my energy levels, it has not challenged my identity or made me lose perspective, it has not restricted my freedom or challenged my confidence. If anything, it has been a boon in every respect. But it has also forced me to slow down, to stop pushing my body to its limits in terms of hunger, thirst and sleeplessness, to stop filling my life with so much work and responsibility that there was never time to think or breathe, all in order to avoid my state of mind.

Why do I want to make that clear? Because I think there is a very real problem with our current social narrative about motherhood. I think that it is negative, and I do not want to be associated with it in any way. I do not want to give tacit support to it and I do not want people to assume that I am evidence of it. Because for all the very real women about there with very real problems, like post natal depression, there are dozens of self-aggrandizing women ignorantly promoting their narcissistic-martyr-complexes-with-a-twist-of-consumerism as the quintessential, modern day truth about motherhood, instead of what it really is - a sly imitation of age old stereotypes, hidden amongst words and ideas which were once a powerful call for change but have now been perverted for the same old purpose: Maintaining the status quo. If these women like their status quo, that’s their damage. But I don’t like the way that it is peddled, and I don’t want to be perceived as part of it.

Leading up to taking a week off, I started so many posts about things which are going on in the world, about societal problems, about philosophical problems, about other people’s problems. (A post entitled Motherhood is the easy part… was one of them.) I struggled with my writing, I laboured for the right words. I finished none of them. I posted none of them. I truly believe that words are the only thing that has ever changed the world - and there is so much that needs changing - but it slowly dawned on me as I wrote that I do not have the emotional resources to be a voice right now. It slowly dawned on me that this was yet another pressure I was adding to my life to distract me from what I really need to do.

Physician, heal thyself.

So healing myself is what I am going to do right now, before I again take the burdens of the world on my shoulders. Voices are clearer when we are standing on rocks than when we are sinking in quicksand. I have healed myself before, and I can do it again. But this is what is going to happen:

This blog is going to literally be my journal: The place where I spew my stream of consciousness writing, my dreams, my unleashed emotions, all of my mess. It will be uncensored, possibly unintelligible. I will post what I post, when I post. My guess is that I will probably post a lot. In the past, trying to come to terms with the things inside of me, my best and most powerful tool has been to let them out. I don’t know if I really remember how to do that, but it is a place to start. I will not only be “thinking my way back to myself” but writing my way back to myself.

I don’t have the luxury to release all the fucked up shit inside my head in my daily life. I have to throw balls to a beautiful boy who cannot catch them, and teach him that the triangle goes in the triangle shaped hole. I have to prepare three meals a day and peel bananas and mandarins I do not eat. I have to go to the park and run baths and wash nappies. So this blog will be my luxury. For the time being, it will be written solely for me.

Everyone is welcome to stick around, welcome to comment, but I won’t be offended if you don’t want to. I will probably say vicious, nasty things. I will probably be cruel and unkind, especially to me. I will probably go off on tangents. I will ramble about symbols in a language made of pictures. I will say things that are “wrong” and I will not explain myself. I will dig around in the archives of my history looking for breadcrumbs. I might do weird exercises. I might write in the second person. Or the third person. There will be no structure, no conclusions. There will be posts without narrative or opinion. I probably will not make sense.

So this post is the warning sign at the beginning of a journey. I don’t know how long that journey will take, or where it will take me. I don’t know what monsters are in my closet, or what beasts will block my path. I do not know what I will see when I look in the mirror.

All hope abandon ye who enter here. _{dante alighieri}