For weeks, I have been surviving the daily anxiety attacks or depressive drops, but it was not until today that I realized how critical to that survival having an open and immediate line of communication to someone who understands really is. Moments, when you cannot read a book, or watch a show, or concentrate on anything at all. When you just need someone to say, hi, I’m here. Someone who knows where you are emotionally. Spending time with people who don’t know is torturous. It’s like you have gone over the side of a boat, and they are continuing to converse with you as if you still had a tea cup in your hand. You just want to yell, hey, I’m drowning here. Yet you cannot.
When you dialogue with someone who does know, the conversation need not be enlightened. It can be completely banal, but somehow they just understand that each shared sentence is a lifeline.
Over the last week or two, I’d developed a regular diet of dialogue with Lee and/or a combined dialogue with he and his partner. As with anything I consume greedily, it grew addictive. But the last two days have been largely silent days, and I’ve been completely lost at sea, with vast gulfs of space between me and anything and everything else. The sea is not particularly volatile, but the desperation and anticipation that grows with every wave as you wait to see if it is a wake exhausts me. My hope keeps ebbing.
So, yesterday I cast out lines again to my other aquatic friends. Each in their own place. Ted has been a tethered buoy beyond anything I could have imagined. Ted has kept me afloat. Lee is too like me in his despondency. If we cling to each other momentarily for support, we submerge together. But just as I’m actually going under – when inspiration/aspiration fails, and I start to sink, somehow Ted is there with me keeping me above water. John and Carole provide their own support by just being on the horizon. I have needed both of their dialogues, to know that I’m not the only one adrift. But Ted, somehow he has managed to make the sea part of himself. He’s anchored below and sunning on top of the water. He doesn’t make it look easy. I know that. But he makes it look doable.