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Sunday, October 23, 2016

my thoughts that confluence around my current #avalonreads #dailyreads

In response to Trauma Stewardship, Lipsky and Burk, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon.

I want to change the world, because ever since I have had awareness of reality, I have found this world to be tangibly sad; so different from the worlds in my storybooks when I first learned to read. Whether it was because I have depression that began in childhood, altering my worldview, or because the world truly is a sad place, that has no bearing on my ambition to do good in this world in a big way. My perspective may be skewed; the lenses of my proverbial glasses definitively not rose-tinted - tea-coloured, more like. It makes for keenly-felt suffering, either my own but more pronounced than its actual proportion, or that of others, human or animal, as though it was borne by me as well. This is very painful, sometimes even more so than is usually felt during extremely depressed states; this weltschmerz may be triggered simply by current affairs. But it also empowers me; after I have reckoned with this pain I have the the unction to act upon injustice in aid of preventing this suffering, or on healing efforts after the fact.

I ask myself today, who am I apart from being God's child, apart from my parents or a string of significant others? In humility my answer used to merely be, "nothing," as it is sung, "I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone tomorrow." But, if I need to be tethered to reality in aid of my own suffering, I need to know more facets to the truth of who am I, not in arrogant exalting of the self, but a refusal to deny looking at the mirror. Without observing my own reflection, acknowledging it, studying it, depression causes me to wholly believe I see nothing but a wraith in the mirror. I have learned to love everyone but myself, but I have failed to love my neighbour as myself, because my neighbour is God's creation and not a hollow-eyed wraith, long-dead and snuffed out. I have only known myself always as a part of another, like a moon orbiting Earth, when in fact I am greater than a star without a need to be attached to another. I must learn, that I am no longer a daughter in lack of parents' affection.

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