Out of Frame

Has it been over half a year? Wow. I'd meant to post before this, but it's been hard.

I spent the better part of a decade grappling with darkness. A darkness complete enough that I noticed people shying away from me if I talked about it. When I was in the midst of that stuff, and I lost sight of the end of it and no longer entirely believed there was an end, I spoke without hope. When I talked about it, I talked about irrevocable grief, insoluble mystery. I was a jumble of story arcs that had crashed, been crushed, and there was no sense of completion or respite. Enigmas were menacing; potentials threatening. The pessimism borne of that can sour the sweetest friend. After a while I felt people shutting down when they realized they had to talk to me. So I began to fall silent. To spare those I loved, but also to save for myself those I still had left.

So, much of the time ended up being time spent in hiding.

I took to blogging as an exercise in hope and empowerment. Making myself heard and tearing away any sense of being able to hide. And hope's a process of reframing, which is also empowering. I'd begun to realize the difference between hope and despair isn't anything in the situations I faced; it was found in how I faced those dire situations. Last I'd read, science suggests that depressed people have a greater connection to reality than do optimists. The world is depressing. Unless you decide that reality's less important than happiness. Then you take to yourself the task of reframing everything you see. Never to blind yourself, but to find how each dire portent of doom holds a kernel of success.And then you learn that those kernels are more important than the rest of reality. All the rest of that jazz is filler. So it's not a lie, not selective vision, but selective focus.

Blogging held for me a chance to reframe whatever I was facing, where my initial reaction was to sit in dread of it. And as such, it was an outreach as well. For as I retook every mystery for myself and resolved all those enigmas so that they said whatever was most significant and supportive for them say, as I reframed I put it into words that at once deepened the truth of it for me, and gave the people who cared about me a narrative that didn't grind them down to hear me speak it.

Which is great, but only up to a point. Isn't that always the way?

There's a double edge in such reframing. I found myself waiting. I wouldn't post until I'd found a way to find the light in something. And I'd manage that best when I had worked out what place in the narrative each incident held. So I wouldn't post until I had nicely bundled packages. Whole. Crystalline. But sometimes pat and too nice by half.

A little over a year ago, I started messaging with S. We found such a wonderful connection. Messages gave way to IMs, and then to voice chat, then video chat. Hours every day, then a trip, then we were both moving, her between continents, to be together. We have an apartment together and my life is full and filling.

And really, what pat little packages can I even hope to wrap any of that into? I didn't want to jinx it, too, sure. I still don't. I felt I ought to speak about it. But also felt it was no one's business. I wanted it to grow away from such clean platitudes.

Also, in moving, and in moving IN, my context fell away. I've never done anything like this. I had no narrative in which to put everything. That's not just a narrative shortcoming; it's left me disoriented every day. Which is to say, it sits in the back of things beyond any necessity to care much about it, behind the sea of instant, profound joy she and I fall into together, but it comes out maybe three random days a month and then I'm stunned by how vertiginously disoriented I am. Wow-we're-building-a-life-together disorientation, sure. But also, where-is-this? and I-miss-my-old-dance-classes and all-the-comforting-crutches-I've-been-leaning-on-are-gone varieties of disorientation. All pointy things that time wears the edges off.

Without prim little boxes of triumphs to share however, I had nothing much to report. So my blog's fallen silent for months.

But I haven't. Entirely the opposite. And I'd like to see if I can't bleed the edges a bit here, take a few of these posts out of their nice packages. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Let's let those edges bleed a bit, as well.

Hi.