As always after a bout of illness I find myself sitting with a mild but persisting depression, feeling flat and dullheaded. We have a guest coming for supper and my housemate has made chicken pie. I have no imagination for the winter salad — am making chopped endives, apples, bulb fennel and walnuts with a dressing that includes pear juice and Dijon mustard. I wish I had more enthusiasm. because cooking is one of my favourite creative activities. Later I must shell peas and do something tantalising with broccoli. It is good to be more sociable and entertain again but I feel flat as a collapsed souffle.
As a child I lived with feelings of intense misery and despondency, in part to do with the hopelessness of my family situation. Abased and demeaned by my mother’s hysterical and often unintended cruelties, my father’s brutality, the extreme social isolation of the house in the forests, I simply endured and those old feelings come up in me when I am run-down and unable to resist them or unable to feel them in a way that allows me to process such intense recollections, feel them intelligently.
After eye operations I have noticed how the relief and pleasure of healing gives way to a sinking low. This is the same kind of thing. But this flatness will pass and I feel the despair for as long as I am able to tolerate it. It is a dark, cold day but if the skies clear I shall go for a brisk walk under the leafless trees, watching light change on the mountains. Just thinking about that cheers me up.
In sobriety we learn to live unanaesthetised. I have learned to recognise and tolerate the shape of ordinary unhappiness. It comes and passes over and returns. Others live with far worse. Nothing but simple unhappiness — nothing to drink over, nothing to avoid. The undulating landscape of life, with small troughs of sadness and flat barren plains that have to be crossed from time to time.
Posted by louisey 