Hold on. Don't worry.
Don't take this the wrong way.
Yes, I know I have in the past written about living with Depression.
I am not depressed.
I am stating a simple fact.
I make mistakes. I piss people off. I say and do stupid things.
I am not perfect.
Never have been and never will be.
So what is the point of this posting?
You will have travel below the cheese-doodle to find out.
As a teacher I try to provide a framework in which my students can take risks. In taking risks they will sometimes fail. Perhaps, if they are lucky, they will learn from those failures.
My problem has been that with respect to myself I have been a very slow learner.
Here I am, almost 6 months past by 68th birthday, and not only am I still making mistakes (which might be a good thing because it means I am still trying to learn), unfortunately I am making many of the same ones.
Sounds like cause for depression? Or anger? Or something??
Let's try "something."
For most of the past 5 and half decades I have carried small notebooks with me, and from time to time jot down thoughts and observations. Much of what I have written has been inane and banal. But in the process of writing regularly sometimes it unlocks something, sometimes I am able to grasp something, perhaps even a piece of the truth.
Part of what I grasped while writing yesterday comes from my practice of yoga. My principal teacher, the terrific Greg Marzullo of Flow Yoga Center near Logan Circle in DC has said that the purpose of the practice is to break us.
I thought of this yesterday. I remembered a conversation I had years ago with an LCSW who did marriage and family therapy, with whom we talked for a while. I was discussing several points in my life where I had been "broken" - where effectively I had crashed psychologically and spiritually. I told her that if it happened again I might simply choose not to "come back." She nodded "sagely" and opined that she recognized the risk inherent therein.
Only both of us were wrong. It was not a risk. It is a requirement.
I "broke down" before because I was struggling so hard to control things. I was insecure, and felt that if I did not control I would be wiped out. That creates a kind of paranoia - at least in my case. I expected people to find me wanting, was hypervigilent to perceived criticisms and negative judgments. Hell, even when people said things positive my mind would go "that's only because they really don't know me, and when they do they will be angry at how I deceived them."
Despite the wonderful love and patience over now more than 40 years I have received from Leaves on the Current, at times I have been impossible, because I was expecting her to find me wanting - and believe me, she had cause.
I realized a few years ago that if I kept my heart and soul clenched like a fist I could neither give nor receive love. It was only by being open that I could connect.
I determined that this year I would try to stay open, which meant vulnerable, to my students. Yes, I had to be the adult presence, but that did not mean I had to keep up walls.
In reflecting yesterday, I realized that the loneliness, hurt and depression that I so often experience are solely of my own making.
I am reminded of my favorite tale from the Desert Fathers, the earliest Christian monks. A novice asked his master what they did in the Desert, and the Abba responded that we fall, we pick ourselves us, we fall, we pick ourselves up . . .
In riflery if one gets all of the points because of firing a perfect round, one has gotten a possible score Impossible in that framing is just less than perfect. Which reminds me that word from which we get our word sin means missing the mark - our aim is less than perfect.
I am a failed human being.
I am not perfect.
That is the beginning of my becoming, finally, at age 68+, more fully a human being.
In the Lord's Prayer, we read "And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us." In the framing of when Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, the lawyer recites the idea that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
The questions is due we truly love ourselves?
Love forgives. I have often wondered if the Lord's Prayer is incomplete because it does not include our forgiving ourselves.
Recently someone who is dear to us exploded at me totally inappropriately, I immediately accepted the apology that was offered but s/he kept returning to how inappropriate and wrong the explosion had been, as if s/he could not be self-forgiving.
I sympathize. It would fit the mind set with which I so often struggled, the one that would say that if only the other person really knew me they would not think so positively of me.
It has been why it has been difficult for me to accept praise of any kind, even when it was well-justified.
I am a failure as a human being because I am human.
Here's the thing. That's okay.
I may be the one most responsible for my loneliness, my sense of hurt, when I experience depression.
Which empowers me to address them.
By forgiving myself my failures.
Please note - I am still required once I recognize to try to change the words and actions - and silences and inactions - that contribute to and create those failures.
I will probably fail some at those attempts.
Which is also okay.
A long time ago on a visit to Mount Athos I realized that I did not want to ride between the monasteries on the logging trucks but to walk the ancient wooded footpaths, because on a pilgrimage the journey is as important as the destination.
I am on a pilgrimage.
It is also known as a life a journey.
I may from time to time make a false step, turn the wrong way.
No matter.
I can recognize it, perhaps in the reactions other offer me, perhaps in my own experience of the moment.
I am a failure as a human being.
Because I am a human being.
Because I am not perfect.
Because my life's journey is not yet complete.
I'm fine with that.
I look forward to much more failure, because that will mean much more learning, and I will still be alive.
Peace.