Category: feelings and mental health

daily living, feelings and mental health, quick picks, recommendations

he’s an angry bird: “the mad eyes of the heron king,” and other things

ray brantley
words writtenthing(s) enjoyedstuff accomplished
TODAY: 91/277This incredible blackwater aquascape!Mostly managing my mental health!
TOTAL: 19,437/100,000PseudoPod 717: “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. DanskyPacking. Lots, and lots, and lots of packing.
Fell just short of my NaNoWriMo goal last month, but that’s all right. Keep trucking along, as someone somewhere probably said at some point. Right?

Watching the retrograde advance of his erstwhile conversational partner, Leonard did not think, “I could have died.” Nor did he think, “I must be dreaming,” or “That’s impossible,” or even “It talked.”

Rather, he held one thought and one thought only to his feverish mind, and held it close with a secret glee: “It talked to me.”

“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. Dansky

Richard has written a story that’s brimming with a little bit of everything that I love: lush, gorgeous prose; dialogue full of fabulist, atmospheric whimsy; all the dramatic irony of knowing that, while something truly terrible is approaching, the protagonist won’t spot the danger until it’s far too late. And birds. Tall, stately, predatory birds, who know very well who is their equal, and who is prey.

Poor Leonard.

“Fuck all this moving nonsense,” said Jasper sourly with only his eyes.

Literally everything else in my life is up in the air at the moment, and I expect that’s unlikely to change until at least the first week or so of September. Husband and I are spending our last week in our apartment packing up as many of our worldly possessions as we can cram into the cardboard boxes that now compose most of our interior decor. Then next week we close on our condo, and properly move in a few days later. We’re going to be home owners.

I can’t accurately describe how surreal this whole experience is for me, but I will give it a shot.

Six years ago I arrived in this country from Alabama with two cats and only as many personal belongings as I could safely cram into the trunk of my car, in graduate student loan debt to the tune of $70k USD, and unable to afford a place to live in the city of Toronto that would cost me more than $500 CAD/month.

I spent my first winter in an apartment where my roommates and I couldn’t risk running our space heaters at the same time without tripping all the breakers, and my first spring being told by our landlord that we couldn’t use the water for more than five minute increments at a time without risking the integrity of all the pipes in the house. I was miserable. I didn’t know anyone, no one knew me, and there was no way for me to know whether this grad school gamble would pay off–or if I would find myself limping back home two years later. But that didn’t happen, not only because of the support network I managed to create for myself here over the last six years, but because I put in the work to grow those relationships, to succeed at my degree program, and to secure a job that would do the miraculous: let me pay down my debt, and put 20% of each paycheque in savings. Six years later, that figure is half of what it was in 2014.

And, as I discovered recently, I managed to accomplish all of those things with misdiagnosed Celiac’s disease, and ADHD.

Wild, right?

I don’t say all of these things to puff myself up with unearned pride, or to diminish the support I did receive from my father while I was getting my feet under me here in Canada. My dad was, is, and always will be my rock, and he knows it. I say these things because too often I don’t look at the obstacles I surmounted to get to where I am right now, and don’t give myself credit for my successes. I am committed to owning those accomplishments now, even the ones that might look only like partial successes to others–because when you’re going through life like a car trying to speed off in six different with a brick dropped on the accelerator, it is a win to recognize that you’re going no where, and to make the conscious decision to stop. It is a win to ask yourself, “What am I feeling, right now? And what do I need to feel better?” And it’s a triumph to start down the path towards answering either of those questions.

So, for certain values of “describe why buying a condo is so surreal for you right now,” I suppose the rambling words above qualify, right?

daily living, feelings and mental health

gratitude

ray brantley

I got married seven months ago. (Give or take a couple of days, but what is a couple of days in pandemic time anyway?)

“if your man won’t do your wedding makeup for you, is he even worth marrying?” and other extremely queer takes by me. A thousand thanks to Maxwell Giffen for the beautiful photographs.

Prior to the lockdown I made the seemingly inconsequential decision to make my computer desktop background a randomized slideshow of our wedding photos. In retrospect I think I did this a little before Halloween in anticipation of a small family get-together, and figured it would be a nice surprise for my in-laws, who hadn’t seen the polished versions of the photos yet. The slideshow had the desired effect, of course, and everyone enjoyed gushing over the pictures while chatting about how much fun both the ceremony and the reception had been.

(Pro-tip to anyone out there planning a wedding in the somewhat near future: go small. Go to the courthouse. Wear comfortable shoes. You will be handsome/beautiful regardless, and complete strangers will cheer for you. That is a magical experience.)

Anyway, this post isn’t really about my wedding, or my wedding photos. It’s about how now in this time of social and physical distancing, one completely absent-minded decision I made in preparation for a holiday party last October now reminds me daily, hourly, every time I minimize an application or lock my laptop screen, that I am loved by so many people. The people in those photos crossed continents and international borders and, in one instance, even the Atlantic Ocean, out of love for us, for me.

And that love has nourished the shit out me these last three months while I’ve struggled to claw my way up and out of the black pit of despair known as Depression(™).

It’s an ongoing struggle, for the record, and not one that I anticipate definitively ‘defeating’. But I’m going to make time to talk more candidly about my experiences here because the instinct to play one’s cards so closely to one’s chest when depressed is precisely the opposite of what one needs to do to heal.

feelings and mental health, photography

what words work when the world is on fire

ray brantley

I don’t know the answer to that question, honestly.

I’m an American living as a permanent resident in Canada; I feel a bit like a goldfish in a cracked aquarium looking through the glass at another aquarium as it hemorrhages water.

I’ve got four separate blog posts drafts in my drafts folder about some incredible audio drama podcasts I have been following, and getting myself into the correct headspace to finish any of them is proving to be a real trial when every day I check the news and encounter another grim portent about COVID-19. I’m doing everything that a person can conceivably do to help flatten the curve: I’m working remotely, I’m washing my hands constantly, I think I’ve left my apartment twice since last Wednesday and then only to walk around the block for some fresh air. I spend a lot of time with my cats, and my husband, mourning the loss of a sense of normalcy while finding gratitude for the ugly truths about our society that this crisis has forced even the obscenely wealthy to confront. It’s been an emotional roller coaster, and it’s only been one week.

At the moment my key takeaway from this experience is that individualism and our society’s near-sighted fixation on individual wealth accumulation (“my money,” “my success,” “my net worth,” “my choice to choose my insurance,” “my company”) over the health and well-being of the collective is directly responsible for how unprepared we are to manage the spread of this pandemic. I knew it when the Federal Reserve hurled $500 billion into the markets and the Canadian stock market collapse made headlines, all while public health ministers and experts beg for more hospital beds, more ventilators.

It is all just so much. So much to take in, so much to process, so much to wrap my head around daily that I have been forced to limit my news intake, my engagement with social media discussions around COVID-19, to a couple times a day. The limits help; so does grounding myself in hugs from my spouse, in fussing over the cats, in doing what I can to check in with the people I love to make sure they have what they need, in meeting those needs where I can and showing empathy when I can’t.

This all leaves me with so little strength and energy for creativity. But writing my way through trauma has always been my best means of coping with the long-lasting consequences of that pain, and I need it now more than ever before to help process this overwhelming sensory and psychological experience. And I would like to help others do the same.

So, if you want to, if you feel able to: please share with me some piece of writing, of art, of some kind of creative work, that you feel most proud of. It can be a story, a poem, a knitted shawl, a photograph of your cat, of your breakfast–I don’t care what form it takes so long as the making of it made your imagination sparkle a little bit, and the finished product brought you some joy.

Here, I’ll go first: photographs of my cat’s toes.

Mrs. Moo’s delicate toe beans, and toe bean beards.

Take care of yourselves, friends.

constructive deconstruction, feelings and mental health

“what do you do with the mad that you feel?”

ray brantley

/arrives 2 years late with Starbucks and The Big Questions, how’s everybody been, etc.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately–mostly because I’ve been mad a lot*, about one thing or another, and have felt 1) completely unable to change my circumstances, and 2) guilty about feeling mad in the first place. Which is ludicrous because feeling anger is a natural thing, particularly when there is lots happening in the world to be angry about, but even stating the obvious doesn’t make the guilt go away.

Someone cleverer than me could come up with a proper way to segue into discussing Mr Rogers here, but that clever person isn’t me.

If you haven’t seen what is by now a viral video of Fred Rogers (yes, the Fred Rogers) defending the value of PBS on the US Senate floor, you can find a decent quality version of the footage here on YouTube. But even removed from the context of defending the role of public television in the United States, the video has a lot to say about emotional and mental health, and the importance of talking to children about their feelings from a young age.

Here’s the first quote from his testimony before the committee that gets right to the point:

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?

Like… what a wise and good and simple thing to ask a child. (Or an adult.) To make this extremely personal for a moment, I cannot help but wonder what my adolescence, teenage years, and early adulthood would have looked like, had an informed adult had the patience and foresight to walk me through the layers of meaning in these questions. Because there’s a drastic difference between asking a child to explain the feelings that precede their behaviour, versus only addressing the behaviour. What a difference it would have made in the life of child!me to be armed with tools for solving the dual problems of “why am I feeling this way?” and “what should I do about it?”

It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.

Fred Rogers, May 1 1969

Acknowledgement of the anger, empowerment to choose how to respond to that anger, and taking ownership and responsibility for the choices we make in how to express that anger–that’s a pretty powerful message for anyone to take in at any age. I’m not ashamed to admit that, after 3 decades of navigating the emotions of both myself and others largely through the power of intuition, I’m just now learning how to accept the existence and experience of anger in myself and in others, rather than viewing the feeling as something inherently shameful or dangerous.

…and I suppose this emotional milestone felt significant enough to interrupt (end?) my hiatus on this blog. Hi, everyone–hopefully I’ll be seeing a bit more of you in the near future.

* all of my feelings about various things are being managed, please don’t worry. …but you have to admit that the world is an upsetting place at the moment, and having Feelings about it is kind of to be expected. because y i k e s.