She sat in the café watching the dust compose sonnets to itself.
Drastic climate shifts draw attention away from the cracked patina.
Sitting in a theater watching the moon hang over a thousand nights.
The raccoon walked in the moonlight, watched by the cat behind the widow.
Two little girls, one kneeling before the other, “Don’t cut off my head!”
I am crying as I write this. But I am going to keep writing. I have just started reading Emotional Chaos to Clarity, by Phillip Moffitt. While I tend to resist self-help books, I am going to try to use this one as a tool to strengthen the use of my mindfulness practice to combat my depression. My emotional state tonight feels overwhelming. I don’t want to be feeling what I am feeling at this moment. I don’t want to be crying. I don’t want to be feeling so guilty about not doing my work for my job. I don’t want to be struggling with how to pay my bills. I don’t want to feel guilty about how I am failing to manage my money. I don’t want the emotions that are manifesting themselves in my crying and my fear and my anger. Moffitt states in chapter 2, “You Are Not Your Emotions.” What does this mean, that I am not my emotion? I feel sometimes as if my emotions have hi-jacked my identity. I know that I do not want my emotions to be my identity, but maybe wanting to deny my emotions has given them more power than they deserve.
Maybe this makes self-labeling a mistake. Do statements such as, “I am a depressive,” cause one to identify with one’s emotional illness, or do they help one admit, and face up to difficult conditions? I suspect that admitting to suffering from depression is very different from claiming one’s suffering as identity.
I think that I know my emotional states are not true reflections of who I am, but rather illness-fueled distortions. I am trying to develop the tools to manage these states so I don’t give them more weight than they deserve.
A bird bumped into my window, not troubling the staleness inside.
