Little Earthquakes

I feel a shift coming on and the need to begin writing again in a more formal way. I created this blog in order to have a place to capture my experience as I move through this shift, where ever it takes me.

Music and dance are in my mind and body today. My blog title is named for a song by Peter Gabriel and this blog post is named in honor of a song by the same title sung by Tori Amos. What these songs have in common for me is that they both ring true to my experience being a woman, dealing with anger and silencing myself. I feel drawn to start dancing again. I studied belly dance for eight years when I was in my twenties. That experience helped me to heal the split between my mind and my body and has been a very important part of my healing process. I learned from my dance teachers that old wounds get stored in the body and movement is a way to release and heal them. I have also found dance, particularly belly dance and other forms of interpretive movement, to be a form of meditation.

I am trying to come off of the medication I take for depression. I have been on it for nearly three years now and while I am grateful for the relief it has given me, and to a certain extent the numbness, I feel it is time to see what life is like without it.

For me, depression presents as irritability and a welling up of anger. I entitled this blog post Little Earth Quakes because that is what the past week has felt like. There have been little tremors or maybe to mix the metaphor a little...brief, but powerful erruptions of anger. Before I went on medication I struggled with this anger and the question, "Was it justified?" According to the enneagram, I am the peacemaker. I crave balance and harmony. Often I push down my feelings in order to maintain peace with the other's around me. Through the practice of getting to know myself better, I have come to realize that the bursts of anger are a result of pushing down my wants and needs to a point where I no longer have the ability to deny them.

I think the depression medication colludes with me to push down my wants, my needs and my hurts. It dulls my feelings so that they do not overpower me. As a result I brush things off, I cast things aside, I don't listen to myself. I maintain that happy harmony. I become invisible. And then I become angry.

As I write this, I wonder whether I can trust my thoughts. Is this just my mind's way of keeping me sick? Shouldn't I stay on this medicine so that I can maintain the numbness...my stepford wife facade. If I don't take it, won't I simply become the mad woman in the attic?

I asked my husband last night if he had any input about the medication. His reply was, "Keep taking it." The answer stung. I had been irritable and much of it had been directed toward him. For a moment I agreed with him. Yes, we cannot go on living like this...but, I began to think, if I never get angry or irritable how will things change? If I stay numb, how will we ever go deeper?

I haven't been happy in my marriage for a long time. Not because I don't love my husband or feel attracked to him. I do very much. But we have created separate lives and our way of coping has been to push things down, deny them and to try to keep the peace. As a result, we have grown apart. I don't remember the last time we had sex, let alone snuggled together on the couch at the end of a day. I know my husband loves me, but I often don't feel loved. I don't see or hear or feel the things that would provide concrete evidence and with the medication I lost the desire to ask for them. I feel my husband is suffering as much as I am, but he doesn't say it. I don't know where to begin to connect with him or be loving towards him because I haven't any idea what he wants or needs he doesn't give me many clues, even when I ask. I wonder if he would have spoken up about how he was feeling about my mood if I had not asked.

So, last night, I stood in the kitchen and let my grief and my anger boil over and I shared what I had been feeling for months and now years. And, my husband listened and after the tears dried and the waves of anger passed I felt closer to him...and peaceful. I felt connected in a way that I had not for a very long time. It was a healing that I was not getting from medicine. When I allowed the anger to boil over, I was being present with myself, acknowledging and expressing how I felt in that moment. Staying with myself and my feelings. Not denying. Not pushing away. Riding the wave of the tremors until they naturally came to stillness.