Words Like Pepto

Sometimes the memories flood my brain and fill me with the emotional wreckage of my not-so-popular life choices.  But at least I have something to write about.
I have taken to writing or doodling every night before I go to bed and this practice seems to have put cracks in the damn that I have been building to help me deal with the rush of emotions that I sometimes experience.  By writing down whatever I have in the front of my mind, room is made for the next set of thoughts to step to the front of the line.  It's like the act of putting it on paper actually removes it from my mind.  It is my coping mechanism, which is healthier than my old method of stuffing it down into a sack in the basement of my brain and hoping it would never get to see the light of day.  But it always does.
So, I have an emotional emesis nightly spread out in my rather nondescript scrawl over lined paper.  The taste it leaves in my mouth depends on the contents.  There are nights when the taste is sweet from removing the taint from my heart and I sleep deeply with dreams that entertain with insanity.  Other nights, the heaving brings tears and sobbing as I work out the emotions of past indiscretions and apologize to nobody for things I have done but have never spoken of.  The visions that come to me in my sleep will leave me choked up and tearful, as if I had been crying all night, when my alarm clock forces me awake in the morning.  The strangest discovery for me is the taste of hate and anger on my tongue.  There is more than I thought, and if I had to guess I would say there is probably even more than that.
I don't like hate.  It is ugly.  I didn't even think I had that emotion amongst my lexicon of feelings.  I guess I do.  I guess I am as human as anyone else.  The taste it leaves is sour as it passes onto the page.  The worst part of its ugliness is that it sticks in my teeth for days following.  Hate is the Pablano of emotions.  Sometimes you think you could use a little bit to spice things up, but you always regret it later when your heart burns and the indigestion leaves your mouth sour.
I am captivated by the the nights that I tap into something that I didn't know was looming behind the scenes.  Those nights the words spill onto the page in a fury and are nonsensical afterward.  Those are the words that most accurately reflect the darkness that dwells.  They are the guilt and the sadness and the anger and hate that creep into my dreams and cloud my vision when I wake.  They are the words I can't speak out loud.  My only reprieve is that of pen to paper and they only surface in letters forming words forming thoughts or in drawings that are rarely more than sketches of the recesses of my mind.
Sometimes they scare me.  But when emotions are seen clearly they are never as bad as they are in your heart.  I think your heart tends to see things bigger than they are.  That's why initial emotions are so strong in both love and hate.  When the blood slows again, things fall in to perspective.  For me, putting the emotion on paper is my way of seeing it clearly.
Even writing about my writing is like seeing the silt in the river begin to clear so that the largest stones begin to take shape.  I can't see the little fish yet, but they are down there.
Words are thoughts taken shape.  They are the reflection of the things we can't see.
Words are what will eventually set me free.

Bored of Melancholy

For a brief moment I was legitimately happy.  That strange kind of happy that you feel in your chest in the same spot where feelings, even the bad ones, seem to find a home.  Anxiety was the immediate reaction to that feeling.  I have been miserable for long enough that the thought of being happy was run off by fear.  Fear of what?  Fear that I don't deserve it?  Fear that it will won't last?  Probably both. 
Then I let those fears go. 
Curiosity has taken their place. 
I know I have asked this before, but am I so wired for feeling down and out that feeling something else is so alien that I fear it? 
It must be true.  Otherwise, why would I have that reaction?
I can feel myself changing inside.  I feel more in control and I am not as affected by dreams and memories and nostalgia of my past life as I have been.  I have also begun to see that being sad is really shitty.  I have grown bored of it.  I have a play list that was pieced together over the course of the past year and a half.  It is full of great, mellow, emotional music that holds a lot of meaning to me.  It is also really depressing.  But that was where I lived.  That was what felt right to me.  I can barely listen to that list without feeling the mood of those songs wash over me and I have to get away from it.  I find myself moving from the beautiful melancholy of Ray Lamontagne to the positive and shiny optimism of Brett Dennen.  It is very odd to look at my musical selection this way. 
I will still listen to some of the music I was in to in school.  Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  Alice in Chains and Korn.  Music that was angsty and anxious.  Depressed and angry.  I still listen to it.  I probably always will, but it doesn't have quite the same effect on me.  At one point I sought out the sounds that reflected my stormy soul.  Or perhaps fed it. 
I don't want to feed it like that anymore.  I seek out music that moves me in a different way.  Songs from The Temper Trap and Band of Horses that resonate with something other than the dark parts of our emotional psyche speak to me.  I love this.  My nostalgia holds on to those bands and songs that were a part of me for so long, and it really is hard to let go of some of them.  But the effect they had on me was not always positive.  It created a poetic romanticism to my depression. 

I am kind of bored of being depressed as well. 

The constant cloud looming in the distance is tired.  A lot of it stems from things that I didn't realize affected me.  The divorce and lack of a consistent, solid male presence has had a deep and powerful effect on me.  Dragging up the fact that I taught myself to shave almost sent me into a fit of anxiety.  I have some serious baggage to deal with and I believe that all of this stuff that is locked up inside of me was a driving force behind some of my poorer life choices as of late.  But I am working at it and this work has led me to the moment I had just a few minutes ago.  A moment of happiness and contentment. 

Anxiety for those moments is stupid and I am done with it.  I am done with being all dark and broody and melancholy all the time.  It sucks.

I don't doubt that I will slip and fall from time to time.  My therapist tells me that one of my character traits seems to be a tendency towards melancholy.  This is partially drawn from my introspective mind set.  The dreams of my old life that wake me with sobbing are a billboard for the fact that I have some healing to do.  Today, I choose to dwell on the fact that I recognize that I am still a bit fucked up, not on the fact that I am still a bit fucked up. 
Allow a moment of cliche when I say I am looking more at the silver lining and less at the dark cloud.