there is no ground to stand on

And what a joy.

I was riding along in the car tonight feeling pretty miserable, heading home from school at 9:30pm after a long fucking day that started at 6:30am and kept on, full-blast, for fifteen hours. Fuck. Driving along feeling sorry for myself, so frustrated with school and work edging out all my free time, all my personal time, all my me-time. Edging me out, it almost feels, of my autonomy. My personality. Certainly of my self-confidence and sense of well-being. I decided on campus today that I'm depressed again. Haven't been depressed in awhile. Just realizing it made me even more depressed. And that's the thing about depression. It's self-perpetuating. Like a lot of bad things.

So I was driving along having a pretend conversation in my head with someone I hoped would be able to somehow restore my sense of balance and confidence. I notice I've been looking to a lot of people for that lately, and I have pretend conversations with them in my head while I'm driving because I can't have real conversations. Or sometimes I realize that the real conversations haven't worked, were unsatisfying, so I have pretend conversations, like do-overs, where I can say better things and make my case more convincingly. Tonight I was having a pretend conversation with my internship supervisor, Meg, who is a really sweet woman with a horrible feedback loop. All conversations with her are unsatisfactory, especially the ones about birdlady. She can't just agree that birdlady is a complete fucking nut-job, she's always giving her the benefit of the doubt. I don't want to give birdlady the benefit of the doubt right now, I want somebody to help restore my confidence by being on my side completely!

So, as I was saying, I was driving along tonight having a pretend conversation with Meg, a good conversation where I tried to make the kinds of convincing arguments for myself that would leave Meg no other choice than to agree with me completely and then to somehow, magically restore my confidence. Then it just occurred to me, out of the blue, that there is no ground to stand on. I realized I was looking frantically for some ground to stand on. I've been looking for some ground to stand on for months. Ground. In a home, in school, in the internship, in work, in a relationship. And I keep getting edged out, edged out, edged out. Like getting edged further and further off the edge of the bed until finally you just fall right the fuck out of the bed onto the floor. Only, in this scenerio, there's no floor even. You just keep falling.

And that brings me back to that dream, my dream, my big life myth -- falling out of the boat. But not just any boat, a boat flying in the sky, high above the water. I don't just fall out of the boat and splash, I fall out of the boat -- and fall and fall and fall. And that's what I have to be able to do. Keep falling. There is no ground to stand on. I can't expect birdlady, or Meg, or SK, or my counselor, or my coworkers, or my house, or my projects, or my writing, or anything, ANYTHING, to give me the ground I think I need. I have to fall out of the boat and learn to relax in the falling. Relax in the absence of the things that have always felt comfortable. Relax in the absence of ground.

I have to learn how to fall, no ground to stand on, no place to land. Just fall.

But more than that -- what's more important -- it's not about "I have to do this, I have to do that" -- when I realized in the car tonight that there is no ground to stand on, I felt this huge wave of relief. "Aaahhhhhh -- no ground! Nothing to worry about! Nowhere else I should be, nothing else I should be doing! Perfect! No ground!" It felt great.