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Things are pretty good for me. Lots of people care about me and it seems to me that when I spend time with them I like myself a little more. I even had a moment of actually appreciating how I look. Some of my fears about the future have started to seem more manageable and navigable, and I've had a pretty good day today, organising for a day's walking in the Peak District next weekend and lounging around before watching what was a pretty exciting Italian Grand Prix.

And so why do I find myself suddenly feeling slightly low and on the verge of tears? There's nothing to sadden me, I'm sitting in the summerhouse with the laptop and the new bureau I rescued from Ravensworth Gardens. It's a lovely afternoon. And yet there are tears welling up and something catching at the back of my throat.

I've taken antidepressants as usual, per schedule, and similarly hormones. Whyyyyyyy.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

:blobhearttranscat: Sometimes these things happen on the most beautiful of days. Don't feel bad for feeling bad.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

[hug] for you. Don't be sad, lovely Alex. I hope you feel better soon.
in reply to ceb

@ceb Could well be though I rather expected most of that to be over and done with by now! Bloody hell I’ve been on hormones for three years now. How did that happen?

Walking on Saturday 9th.

@ceb
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Is it possible that it's more "moreness" than "sadness"? I think a certain kind of sadness is maybe the most reasonable state in reaction to life, even to its good things. Not the full-grown ravages depression of course. Also, it's definitely the right time of year to feel Septembery. Is it The Waste Land or Four Quartets which starts in the garden in autumn?
in reply to kæt

@kæt The Waste Land starts in the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land. It’s Burnt Norton which opens Four Quartets with a rose garden in the autumn heat.
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Ah yes, the Four Quartets! (Roses in Four Quartets; hyacinths in The Waste Land).

At the start of 4Q I always think of someone a bit like Eliot himself, a bit like someone like Bertrand Russell or Whtehead, wandering through an autumn garden of a dilapidated stately home maybe after some great sadness and shattering, perhaps the great war (1), kicking up leaves, kicking up dust, running your hand along the sheets covering the furniture in the west wing remembering the great Edwardian dances, etc.

(1)via a linking image of my own: the way people can and have dry-drowned in disused fountains filled with leaves, from the CO2 of the decay, like the trenches in the war).

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to kæt

Sorry for waffling on randomly about images when you were talking about things you were directly feeling. That was insensitive of me.
in reply to kæt

@kæt Really no need to apologise. Feelings often come out best as images for me, and you’ve always had a facility with the metaphorical that prompts rather than challenges, that is never a tangent but always a chord.
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I suppose maybe I just mean feeling things more intensely, but also accessing things previously barred, or synthesising, reflecting, assessing, etc, those kinds of things in that general bucket.