There's not much new to report, aside from having completed my move out of Sue's place. Most of my stuff is in storage now, and I am staying with my mother for the next three weeks.
The first night sucked, I'll be honest. Though I was so spent from the move, and then a movie afterwards, I was still unable to sleep Saturday night. I'd inadvertently put some items into storage that I needed, including the inflating device for my sleeping pad.
As an aside: As to why I didn't just blow the thing up manually.... I don't know. My mind was fried, somehow this obvious solution eluded me at the time.
At any rate, I slept on a concrete floor with only a thin layer of carpeting, and my sleeping bag... and didn't manage to fall asleep until 8am Sunday morning for a fitful 3 hour session. I woke up hurting everywhere.
I also really started feeling this oppressive weight of depression and hopelessness that I often find myself falling back into when I spend time around my mother. I hesitate to say so as I don't wish to hurt her feelings if she ever sees this, but it's clearly one of the puzzle pieces of my own mental illnesses .... thus I feel it should be explored to some extent.
My parents argued a lot when I was little. It wasn't violent, and neither of my parents were abusive or anything... but their marriage fell apart after my mother fucked up our family finances with credit card debt and hid the bills and notices that came in the mail out of fear of what would happen with my father.
Of course, the longer she put it off the worse it became, and had she come clean sooner things might have been different... but by the time it blew up, his photography business was in jeopardy and my dad had to mortgage his mother's house, and I'm sure made a hundred other sacrifices to stay afloat.
As it became evident that she couldn't call a mulligan on this fuckup, my mother sank into the deepest depression I'd ever witnessed from her, at least overtly. She spoke of suicide frequently, and even made a semi-serious attempt to drive a car into a wall - which I "heroically" stopped by jumping on the hood of the car as my family yelled at her from the lawn.
Around that time I recall our last family vacation together as a full family, at Cape Cod, when my mother got upset and went down by the Cape Cod Canal by the suspension bridge, crying and sitting on the rocks by the water and giving us the impression that she might jump in. I was terrified and felt helpless.
Still, with the pocket money I had been given for souvenirs, I bought a jewelery box at some touristy knick-knack place along the boardwalk that had a poem about "Mothers" printed on it. It was all I could think of... to give her a present, maybe make her feel loved.
I never knew what to do when my mom got like that. Anything I did seemed to just make her cry, as did giving her the jewelery box.
I came to understand not too many years afterwards about the depths to true depression, and how words of comfort seem hollow and meaningless. How kind gestures are appreciated, but feel misguided and vain. In that dark place, sometimes you just want to stew in that despair. Attempts to penetrate the darkness are irritating, sometimes infuriating.
Just let me feel like the world is collapsing for a while, ok? Stop trying to make things better. There's no point. There's no... hope.
Well, at any rate... my mom never drove into those walls, or jumped into those canals... but she did carry that baggage forward in many unhealthy ways... and as dad moved out and my sisters both tricked off to college... it was just she and I, for years and years, just enabling each other's depression and mental illnesses' worse natures.
It took an entirely different unhealthy relationship - with my ex wife - to finally get out from under that shadow, and it took the prospect of hiking the Appalachian Trail to help guide me out from that shadow.
But I'm back in this shadow, doing one last stint before heading south to Amicalola Falls to begin my new, hopefully healthier life.
If nothing else, let this be the extra fire under my ass...
Three weeks, and I'll be on the Trail.
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