I’m sitting here and asking myself, what do I hope to accomplish by writing a series of blogs called The Dark Side? (Thank you, George Lucas.) Who would be interested? Who would be offended? Should I delete this and write about my mother’s gardens, the books she read, how she sewed clothes for our dolls?
Maybe the next time around.
I think it’s a mistake to hold back the truth when I’m writing my blogs. Leaving out descriptions of private and horrible scenes I, for my own purposes, need to be honest. So much of the time people, myself included, have to be concerned about political correctness and offending others. Besides, my stories of the dark side all contain more than one kernel of goodness.
I became ill in the middle of my senior year at Taylor Allderdice. Little was known about depression then; certainly there were very few medications for it. I think there was one called “Miltown” or something like that. The second half of the senior year of high school should be an exciting time and I guess it was for a lot of the people I knew. But the floor crashed under my feet and I was swept down into a spiral that lasted five years – 1968 through 1973.
What is that “kernel” of goodness that came along with sleepless nights and crying jags? I came to rely on my own resources. My parents were in a world of their own and my sister also. This was my first experience with solitude. Along with that, although I always was a reader, I began using books to guide me and soothe my soul. There were several books that I carried to school each day along with my textbooks. One was a small volume holding two novellas by DH Lawrence, my favorite author. That particular book eventually fell to pieces from use and constant handling. One novella was about an upper class English woman who derives more psychic peace and wholeness from her horse than from her husband. It is not sexual, don’t worry. The other is Lawrence’s own version of the life of Jesus.
How much farther could you get from the noisy, sweaty halls of TAHS? I wasn’t given pills to cure me–there weren’t any. My parents didn’t think I was sick, they just thought I was being miserable and obnoxious. So I held on tight to my little book and read it, over and over and over…
Decades later, when I was working as a family counselor, I was trying to counsel a little boy who came home from school one day, went into the garage, and found his father’s dead body hanging from one of the rafters. After that, when he wasn’t in school, he was at home playing a video game called Grand Theft Auto…and he played it over and over and over… So all I did, all I could think of was my dark time of lost love along with DH Lawrence. I sat with this boy and we played this crude video game together. All I said was: When I lost two people I loved I read the same book, just like you’re playing your game, and nobody could stop me. There was almost nothing to do in this case. It was one of the hardest problems I’d ever heard of. This boy’s father couldn’t find enough of a reason to live, even for his children.
It was an angry gesture, a mammoth slap across the face. I couldn’t try to find a way to exist on this earth even though I have three children who need me...
I’ve thought about all of this and I think that there was a direct line between the broken girl of 18 and the mature woman of 58. Is it possible that what I told this bereft boy about myself somehow helped? It’s what counselors and psychotherapists dream of.
lgmwriting 