1 post tagged “well”

I thought I was OK, but depression is lurking, ready to strike. I have a deep well of unhappiness that sinks right down to the core of me. Was it always, innately, there?. Or have experience and disappointment dug it for me? I put a lid on it most of the time, but almost everything I do reverberates around the damp and dripping walls down there in the dark, and the echoes colour my feelings and reactions on the surface.

So I'm starting to act like an unhappy person again - tetchy, cynical, short-tempered... at one time I could often blank it out/rise above it, but now it's a constant, though often still subtle, state. The soul-searching, re-appraisal, and mulling-over of old, mainly negative events take me only one way: down. My battered wooden-pail-on-a-rope dredges deeper with every clawing draw, bringing to the surface all manner of fragments of painful, broken, long-cast-away things. It's an up and down cycle that it would be better to stop, because thrown-away, buried, or drowned things should stay that way. But that's easier said than done, as those of you with wells of your own will know.

But visualising it thus - the classic well of a Grimm fairy tale -  helps me to see the mechanical nature of the process: the casting down; the slow winding up; the fishing around in the murky container for another shard on which to cut myself; and down again... I can stop this at any stage. Think 'well'. Take the handle, turn the gears, release the coils, lower the bucket... stop. Put on the brake and leave it there; imagine it swinging, just out of sight, in the shadows - empty. An occasional drip leaves it at its apocheir and hangs in the dark, searching for any spark of light to fill it and give it life, before falling into the glassy treacle-black depths. Put on the lid. Walk away. Done.
 
Xmas is a sad time (what are we celebrating exactly? He's not coming back now you silly buggers), and I wonder why all the world cannot see it for what it is. If you were OK before, you may be totally depressed now... probably not... Sorry, either way. But (a problem shared and all that) you'll be pleased to know I feel much better.

Al x