The Great Spring

To live through suffering is humanity. To want a way out, perhaps more so.

It is not the blooming of the flower buds that provokes my haunted heart, no more than the falling of the leaves brings me any deep joy. I can look out and see the orange and red of autumn trees and feel my heart spring upward in excitement, just the same as when the petals of the first daisies spread to meet the sunlight. The world spins the same as it always has and I've come to know of myself with each passing that I am sad in the springtime. It is a part of me, and has always been this way.

Still, the seasons of my life have changed as as I once again pass from a solemn spring into a summer, this year there is more that tugs upon the restless corners inside of my soul, something that looms in shadowed portions of my mind and simply makes itself known, no more disturbing than any of the things I've long dreamed of writing about. Each year I find sorrow in the springtime and joy in the fall, and if I were still 18 I would tell you that the "joy in the fall" is a message to be inspired by. To devote your life to that joy and ignore the blooming flowers of April, that they might never haunt you again. To live inside of the overcast life of autumn with no regard for the changing of the skies.

Of course, I'm not 18 anymore and you know by now that is not what I am here to say. After all, it isn’t the blossom that drags my heart through hell. It is much more than that. If the seasons bore such tremendous weight I would perhaps been dead a long time ago. It is no season that haunts, but instead a piece of me that allies with the spring. Something else that blooms on schedule with the tulips and the roses.

I have always prided myself on my perseverance, my willpower and my desire for understanding. Even in the darkest times I clung to those facets. They are the traits which make me, me. I have written thousands, if not millions of words on the very topics. I created a business based around that concept, that "life is not meant to be awful" and the method by which I preached to keep life from being awful came through perseverance, willpower and understanding. I still believe in that message as much as I did at the beginning, but now, I believe in it because those things are the only things that are still keeping me going.

I couldn't point out the exact moment that it changed, but somewhere along the line, my heart has changed shape. No longer a mansion house to relieve the perils of my loved ones, I do not carry the concessions or the comforts of a warm hearth inside of me anymore. I find it difficult to light that hearth for myself most days. What once was a bustling private getaway has since become a shelter, hobbled together from broken pieces of relationships and hopes, wrapped tightly with the frail elastic that my dreams are still alive inside of me somewhere. In the places I was once so eager to share stories and hopes and dreams, instead I've left them dusty and growing mold and not because I want to abandon them. But instead, because I no longer bear the energy to keep the lights on.

I've always been told I was burning my candle from both ends, and I knew that. But I believed that with a little bit of willpower, I could make it through. When the eventual day came that both ends of the flame would meet, I would fight my way through the darkness having memorized everything I had suffered through until then. Yet, when the day came and the wick finally burned away the wax, I found myself in a grand banquet hall, standing in the dark, with a plate of cold food in my hands.

I had a little left, which I hoped I could still serve, but the funny thing about a vacant house with ailing light... No one wants to enter. So I made a habit of pushing others off of my doorstep and back out into the rain while I did the only thing I knew how to do, tend to the leaks and broken fixtures all at once. A burst pipe on the second floor would need service the same time as the chandelier on the first, so I would pace back and forth inside of myself and work diligently, following the mantra I had always poked and prodded onto others and never really proved to myself, that life was not meant to be awful. I worked this way until the broken parts had become serviceable. With less water leaking in I invited loved ones to return, and when they did they saw the state of disrepair. If it hadn’t been for the incredible, magnificent and enduring love of my wife I would not have known myself. Instead I was on a path to grow content with the malnourishment of my own heart. She was the first to bring to my attention that this mansion I’d erected for everyone in my life was no suitable place for them to rest. When more cracks broke through, I refused to accept what I’d come to know deep down, that I was broken. “I can’t be broken” I told myself. “I am a beacon of love, and joy, and friendship.” Still, when friends came to visit me in my downfall, they didn’t see the mold in the cracks between the floorboards. They didn’t mind the standing water in the sitting room. The arrived and without knowing it, showed me what I had been failing to do as they floated to the surface of the flood, foreheads scraping the textured ceiling as they told me they appreciated what I'd done with the place.

I wondered then if I was going to be able to save what had been broken so badly, and each time a friend would leave, I would return to my work. Dutifully I removed the rotting boards and stripped the peeling paint. I would move from room to room to find memories I'd once cherished, but had since become bloated with the weight of falling rain.

I don't know how long I pulled boards from the frame and piled them outside my front door, When the process really began I couldn’t tell you. Such is the nature of having a large house with many rooms, some you use once and never see again. Others, you spend all of your time in and they become comfortable. That comfortability is perhaps my greatest downfall. I felt so safe at times I never thought to investigate my own being, to check myself for dings or scratches, and the leaks were left unattended for God knows how long.

When 2021 turned tail and fled, I prepared myself for the coming bloom and what more rain it might bring. What came then was not merely rain, but a quiet hurricane that tore through what still stood. By February I found myself stripped of meaning, no music echoed through the massacred corpse of my home. No words were spoken in the sopping halls. I shuffled through, no longer able to stem the rising tide as it swept my remembrance of happier times away to the horizon. Still, my wife, who remains my only bastion in this storm, brought me pieces of scrap that she had kept dry for me. She admitted that she didn’t know how to help, and truthfully, she couldn’t, but she tried. She never gave up on me, despite the rundown state of my home in the material world, or my own.

With what was left and what she’d offered, I built a raft and stood upon it as the raising tide shows no sign of stopping, still. Whatever I had held on to before, I can still see some days, remnants of the house I’d built for everyone else that bob up to the surface. When I can reach out and take a piece, I do. But not everything belongs with me on this small raft. Some pieces of that house I’ve left at sea, and some are still so heavy that they’ve never returned to me. I suspect that they never will.

Without those memories and sounds that once filled the halls of my heart, it has been lonely. But not for nothing. I have honestly never felt more alone. When the rains fall, I know that I am not. I can recognize that, but still, it feels as if reaching out is a burden more often than not. That what I am struggling with, is not worth reaching out about. I tell myself that I have weathered worse before, but that is a lie and I know it. It is another piece of my old house floating to the surface to remind me that who I was, was not me.

With the turning of the seas, and nothing but horizon around me, I have had time to think.

I once heard it described that depression is like being alone on a boat, and you can see the shore, you can see others floating along, but no matter how hard you sail you can't get to them. You can't close the gap between where you are and where you think you should be going. Every stroke of your oar brings with it another wave that only pulls you further away. I've always romanticized it, believing that the loneliness should be cherished, that when you identify that you are on that boat you will be able to get up and push yourself back to where you belong...

I've been pushing for a long time, and little has come of it. Still, I am learning to accept this storm for what it is. Though I’ve been alone inside of my heart, I have not been alone on this ocean. I’ve been surrounded by hundreds who are just like me... One stretch of inclement weather brought their entire life to a grinding halt, and just like me, they are trying to resurface, trying to break free, trying to survive the loneliness.

You know, they tell you that when you are drowning, you shouldn't panic or struggle, that you will not survive unless you are calm. It's hard to do that when you are in the midst of disaster. When your home is crumbling around you, the first thing on your mind isn't to take a deep breath and remind yourself that this is just a storm and it can't storm forever. Because sometimes, it does.

Sometimes the storm doesn't end, but the sun doesn’t go away either.

I thank God for that.