Day Eighteen: I called a timeout on life

Have you ever been in the midst of an all-consuming serious emotional crisis and just needed a break? Of course you have, we all have. A loved one dies and after days of grief and funeral arrangements you laugh over something silly or not even funny, just because you needed the emotional relief. My husband left me and I cried and drank and sat listening to sad music for two weeks, then I scraped myself together and tried to function. A few months later I lived by the three D's: drink, denial, and distraction. It was enough to get me through the worst of it.

The human mind, or spirit if you prefer, forces our hand somewhat to keep us relatively sane and stable. Only those that are truly clinically depressed manage to avoid those periods of levity that the rest of us need to survive. In a way, it's like dreams. You can live without laughter and ordinary distractions just as you can survive without dreams, but your body rebels and starts to shut down in some ways. We need emotional breaks in life to survive the gravity we will most definitely face once again.

These days I'm less depressed and I'm not drinking much (though I'd like to if it weren't for school), but I am dabbling in the denial and distraction game. I finally came to realize, so what? What's the harm in not feeling lousy all the time, aside from the fact that I've gained a few pounds thanks to my "eat to forget" plan? It is possible to feel one thing over-ridingly and yet to still act in ways that might seem contradictory to it. 

So I go out and socialize and have a good time and meet new people and have fun and  . . . ugh, it's tiring to deny reality. Still, it's better than being a depressed lump who refuses to venture out into the world or to enjoy the laughs when they can be had. So what interests me is that at the same moment when a part of you wants to scream or cry, you can do something completely contradictory to those emotions and to actually pull it off. 

I find that if I spend time with friends laughing and talking, I am able to put the emotional crisis on the back burner for a couple of hours. It resurfaces the minute I am home and quiet again, but how odd that we can be all-consumed with something and still find a way to call the emotional equivalent of a time-out. This is how we deal. It's not that I don't feel it. I do. The heartbreak, the guilt, the anger, the overwhelming sadness, they are all my constant companions, I've just found that I also need to ignore it for a while. So yes, sometimes I am able to do things and to act in ways that seem contrary to my real feelings, but then again reality isn't just one thing or the other, it's all things.