Undead: Trial and Confirmation of Cope

Perhaps you’ve noticed it. And, perhaps I have not hidden it at all. Perchance you’ve spied it in the words and the tone of my posts.  I have a close friend, an intimate entwined around me, a garment of  seaweed.

Profound Sadness has been with me for as long as I can remember. And, I never want it to go away because it bears other gifts like perception, sensitivity, intelligence and thoughtfulness that I hold dear because they have been like instinctual guides.

But, like with any daemon there’s  a flaw, or a few even, that I accepted as is, and without the smallest effort to buck it. Along with the beauties of Profound Sadness comes it’s more pernicious elements: shyness, confidence deflation, personal esteem flux and the counter-intuitive pleasures of withdrawing from life.

On my journey, I have for many years mal-adapted my Profound Sadness. I reposed under its protective cloak, and with the distance away from the world of living, to fall into myself to privately drown, inhaling deeply to achieve physical asphyxiation. And, I could sense from observing others in life’s full sail that perhaps my sense of Profound Sadness was just something I had.

Something uniquely mine that gave shade and color to my personality. And, how did I animate my flesh? With the electricity of intelligence. A facsimile to seem like all people or a living wraith of flesh and bone vacant in the presence of living without even the vital inspiration motivated by hormones.

And, alone to myself and, perhaps, to other persons the real issue may have been known but without a name, an identifier that enables a method to target and constructively deal with it. And, sometimes it takes one’s own journey with active progress, adverse challenges and the willingness not to let the negatives of Profound Sadness retard the distant  goal of becoming whole and alive. To temper the wish to leave this world, to be destined to the next with exhilaration unknown popularly in the last 125 or so years.

Within me makes it difficult to name, segregate and circumscribe Profound Sadness.  If  appearing as an external challenge,  like a hard to deal with personality at work, or a concrete physical problem requiring intellectual or physical effort to resolve, an obvious, even if tricky solutions may also appear.

Without light translucence reigns ...,

My vitality, with the depths of oceans heavily clouded with the seaweeds of memory, psychology, dreams, hopes, desires, external interactions and experiences, completely restrained the light shining upon life’s surface. Even the hinting glints of light, the glowing presence failed to penetrate my veil. The confidence to swim through to break my head past the surface is something all together different.

This year, a revitalizing 2011 has been a remarkable one, because 2010 violently extracted emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual tolls with the pressure and force of fracking. A rough hand cracking my chest to manually pump my heart.

The result: an eruption of myself into life that shocked my awareness of its panoply of experiences, being a human being  - flesh, blood, offal that  I resisted, attempted to recoil and retreat to a sure untouchable remove.

There are no ghosts in the luminescence of the Moon.

Consciously asleep did I live the earlier decades  willfully  and unaware of it. Can you wake everyday, go to school, work, shop and interact as an undead? Yes. And, to awaken to life left me in despair and resentment, except it was to mourn the embalmed comfort of my previous state, the progress to the crematorium  that appeared incomprehensible to people losing their health and lives.  My comforting tomb of seaweed and darkness.

With new awareness: I live. Then, came another: how so? And, if I am to live well, then what is the procedure? And, there are no switches, pulleys or gears that can produce the result – only living each moment and experience to comprehension enables a method of surviving and thriving.

And, I have spent this past year taking steps, falling flat on my face, but falling forward nonetheless into self-discovery not   pickled or enshrouded in a haze. Yes, there have been missteps (no one is perfect) but unlike in the past this makes a successful year, one of an awareness of self-correction, and the strength of character to recognize it and do over.

In this comes revitalization ushered by the people coming into and going out of my life. Sometimes, I am still slow on the uptake, but with fewer words I get it. Only still, I hesitate to go ahead because in any new experience mistakes made, learned from and fortify for future success.

For the past few months here, I have been more reflective.

Yes, it’s easy to know and blissfully disappear into Profound Sadness.  Given my life, it is understandable. Yet, coping with it: Focusing on the word “coping” is something that had not occurred to me until today, as I lay wide awake in bed bereft of sleep.

The deep is always there...

Yes, I have methods of dealing with external issues, but successfully dealing with the internal eluded me. Yoga and meditation present great routine, but they are  not incisive. They promote distance, not critically close inspection of fleeting thoughts. The tool for that: rumination.

I have reflected. Thinking. Writing this blog to begin to pull back the seaweed, catch sight of light filtering through the surface. I untangle the  cloaking Profound Sadness converted to it.

Does it mean I leave Profound Sadness? No. I will have always Profound Sadness as my composition, not environment.

Being told, and how to know how to do certain things to mitigate Profound Sadness requires different means.

Identifying it, giving it a name and distance with a label means to make its antidote.  To do this means other experiences of life remain distanced.

And, no one can do it for me, even if they could awaken me, it could have only been achieved through my experiences upon awakening.