On a Hot Summer Saturday Morning

 

This photo was taken last year at the beginning of the trail race that I am now registered for and training to do a second time.  It will be my 13th half-marathon, but first one I have ever repeated.  I loved that race.  This morning I am getting in my car and driving to the place where it is raced – it is only 2 miles from my house.  You might ask why I would drive, but if you saw the 2 miles, you would agree that I don’t want to do 2 miles straight uphill at the end of my 8 miles today.

I am working on remembering my dreams, which I had thought was pretty impossible until yesterday.  When I really thought about it yesterday, I could remember.  And today, I tried to keep the dream in my consciousness.  This dream is fascinating!   I dreamed that I was meeting with a blind man who wanted me for a guide and coach as he started running.  We were talking about how we would do this.  I was explaining our route to him.  We would go 2 miles from our start point and turn around.  If he felt like it, he could call it quits at 4 miles.  Or we could go another 2 miles in the other direction, and then we would both quit at 8 miles.  (of course, that would be insane for someone who is just starting, but I guess I had 8 miles on my mind.)   But first I had to get dressed for the run.  And I couldn’t find any of my running clothes.  When I went into my closet, I could see that my ex-husband had been there, had rummaged through everything, and that about half of my closet was now empty.  I continued to frantically search for my running gear…. and that was the dream.

I will take the risk to tell you – I am hideously depressed.  Like I don’t know how I am going to continue like this.  It will not work.  I am barely functional.  But, you can see I am trying like crazy.  Maybe I should stop trying.  I was once this depressed – at five years of sobriety, I ended up in the hospital for 10 days.  On the wrong side of the locked doors. Or the right side.  I found ways to make that a spiritual experience, but let me say that I would not care to repeat it.

Everything I KNOW tells me that I have to keep moving.  I can’t surrender to this desire to stop.  I cannot lay down in the daytime and pull the covers over my head.  I think I will never get up again if I do that.

So I will go out this morning and run 8 miles on trails in a beautiful foothills park.  I will come home and get dressed and meet a friend and go see a movie.  After that, we are going to a street fair.  Then I will come home and get ready for Mass.  I am driving to the church relatively far away where the music is sacred, the priests are solemn, and the sermons have meaning.  When I get done with that, I will do some grocery shopping and then come home and make dinner.  Eat, watch 15 minutes of the Olympics, go to bed.  Call it another day I survived and maybe got one day closer to the lifting of this dark evil cloud.  I called my doc’s office yesterday, told them I was feeling horrible and didn’t know what to do, and was told someone would call me back – and they never called.  That makes me want to cry.  My wonderful doc is on vacation, maybe his nurses are overwhelmed.  I will try with all my might not to take it personally.

Do I feed this depression by writing about it?  I could write about all my plans for today and I would sound like a healthy vibrant woman.  But this is clearly a case of “fake it till you make it.”  Maybe I ought to write about what I want to be instead of how I really am. I worry that I am investing in it by writing about it.

Off I go, onto the trails.  I’ll have nice pictures tomorrow.  Please take care, all of you.

To recognize and accept God’s Fatherhood always means accepting that we are set in relation to one another:  man is entitled to call God “Father” to the extent that he participates in that “we” – which is the form under which God’s love seeks for him… No one can build a bridge to the Infinite by his own strength.  No one’s voice is loud enough to summon the Infinite. — Pope Benedict XVI