Four Day Fog

Depression brings with it a fog.  It is a cold gray morning that will not be burned out by the sun, because the sun has lost its warmth.  This is not a fog brought in by little cat feet.  It is a fog that bubbles up from within, pouring from your eyes, ears, and nose and tainting those senses as it goes. It is the voice of the ego made whole and it resonates through everything you do, see, smell, touch, hear. 

For years I was in it thrall, a subject of a Stockholm Syndrome.  So deep was I that I didn’t know any different.  I thought that hole was all the world.

For me, now, the fog lasts a day or maybe four.  It locks me inside my head with a promise to keep me warm from the cold dampness outside. What it has never told me, but what I have begun to realize, is that the very thing it promises to protect me from is the very thing it brings with it.

But I see that now.  I know it to be true.

And when I feel the familiar cold and find that I can’t open my eyes enough to find light, I turn inside and there he is.  Ego.  Smiling like an old friend through soulless eyes he reaches out a cold, long fingered hand and beckons me back to the hole.  But I say “no”.  I reject him. 
I hear his words, I listen to his pleas and I say “no”.  I reject him.

I admit that I am not strong enough yet to be completely immune to his sugared, poisoned words, but I am strong enough that I know them to be lies and that is stronger than I ever was.

So now, after that day or maybe four, I push away the fog and watch it turn in to a cloud in a beautiful, sunny sky.  Ego goes back to whence he came with a promise to return.  I let him know that he is welcome like an old friend.  Now he looks amused and somewhat confused.  He is not used to compassion.  Ego is a part of me and when I bring love to myself I am able to see the light in all my many faces, even that one.  Even better, I am able to see love in the faces of people around me.