Gaudete

It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything. Read More

Pay Attention. Keep Watch. A Post for Advent.

This is my first year observing Advent. To be honest, in the past I only had a rather vague idea of what it was all about. I associated it with the Advent calendars we had in my family growing up (only one each year, which meant that if you had six siblings, you only got a chocolate every seventh evening and had to suffer the indignity of watching a sibling eat the chocolate on the other six). And I’d been to Lessons and Carols on multiple occasions. But my general impression was that Advent was just the time of excitement and fun leading up to Christmas. Read More