Looking at this enneagram test made me a little sniffly tonight. It was so hard to answer a lot of questions because so much of my behavior over the last four years has changed because of my depression. I have become so much more aware of the weaknesses in my character — I knew I procrastinated when I was 17, but when I was 20, procrastinating and avoidance came damn close to fucking up what I had wanted for my life since I was a child. I have learned to be cautious, to hold back, to watch myself, and while this behavior keeps me healthy, keeps me functioning, I wish I still ...I wish I didn't feel like second-guessing myself was so necessary, maybe. Something like that.

In many ways, the person I was at 17 was a stronger, more myself-ish, person than I have been ever since. Or maybe I'm just falsely nostalgic. Some days, I feel like depression took everything from me and it left the gaps; my experience of depression was primarily one of diminishment.

Well, she said, I suppose it's good that I've never been overly invested in the body-as-self thing.

My glasses broke last night, and so today I've been wearing prescription sunglasses all day — it's a long story about why I can't get a new pair until Friday at the earliest, and I'd be surprised if Monday weren't pushing it — looking at the world through a glass darkly, frustrated with the warping of color and how damn heavy the lenses are. I can read print without my glasses, I can walk, I can write and type, but I can't work on code. Guess what I'm working on for the next week? yeah. But that's not the important thing.

The interesting thing is how my near-blindness divorces me from the world; I can see color and movement, some amount of depth of field — I'm not legally blind, I don't even think I'm that close to it, but I am barred from participating in the world without technology, assistance, aid. Which I'm used to, I've worn glasses since I was seven, I feel more naked without my glasses and wristwatch (which I've worn every day since I was eleven) than I do without clothes. But I rarely identify myself with glasses; I tell people, I'm the woman in the white shirt with the laptop along the back wall, you'll recognize me, I have a turquoise messenger bag and a big red coat. You'd think I don't have a face.

And to have something so valuable brought home as so vulnerable — it is hard to function without being able to see except in great swathes (she says, from her position of usually being able to do so without overly-complex machiations), and I can't rejigger the world to function better for me while I wander through it. All I can do is hope not to get hit by a car.

But I wrote some good code at work today despite how hard it was to see the screen, and I don't feel broken; I feel irritated that the kitchen full of my roommates' dishes, pleased that I have time to do laundry tonight, achey in the good way along my shoulders (it is possible to use the erg without being able to see what you're doing; stupid, but possible). It's the minutiae, the practical details, that get my attention and my concentration — I am left to ...I can't even think of a verb. What does it mean, to carry a common symbol of deficeit with me always? My vision is not connected to my depression, not exactly, but they both come (at least partially) from the same genetic source, and even if near-sightedness has no moral resonance in the modern world, it shapes my world just as my anxiety attacks do. I can't be a pilot, I can't spend my morning taking the phone calls off my to-do list; these things are so far outside the realm of possibility so as not to even exist for me. I barely even think of them as limitations, boundaries, something that separates me from other people.

When I wrote about depression, my body is a metaphor, not a location. And yet — I live in my body, I'm attuned to and aware of it, I respond to it and demand things of it. I'm a dancer, have been since before I've worn glasses — and yet.

You can't even tell I hennaed my hair the night before last. I can, but no one else can. I mean, not that I want to go screaming red, but I would like to feel as though someone in my life actually looks at me, not just acknowledges the space I occupy.

Reposted from IJ, 16 March 2009.

I am trying to believe that the fact that Elizabeth Edwards's memoir just brought me to tears is a good thing; for so long I have been convinced that I am an emotional cripple when it comes to grief. I don't cry easily. I did not weep when my grandfather died, nor when I fled my father. The last time I remember crying was both in anger and in grief -- no, that is not true. I cried myself to sleep a few months ago when a friend of mine (and my father's) upset me by pushing me to reconsider my stance on him. The time before that was, god, months before, when I asked my mother why my father had gone back on a promise to take me to France when I was thirteen. I had never known why, and when I finally found out, I cried that night, so hard I couldn't breathe, almost a decade late.

Maybe now I am comfortable enough with my own anger and my own capacity for grief in a way I have never been. Maybe that means that my empathy, always stifled, is something I can express now. I don't know, but that's okay.

Reposted from IJ, 16 March 2009