The Swamp of Despair. The Pit of Gloom. The Dismal Abyss.
You get the idea, yes?
John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond was a place where his protagonist (a rather obviously named “Christian”) wallowed in the weight of his sins and his sense of guilt.
My personal Slough is more to do with my feelings of failure.
What Brings It On
It’s hard to say what brings on these episodes. I find myself sinking into a gloom, as if the weight of something is sitting on my chest.
The smallest tasks become overwhelming. The slightest things become major irritants.
It’s a debilitatingly contradictory combination of numbness and hyper-sensitivity. It fixes me in a gloomy funk and can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, or in extreme cases, a few weeks or even months.
Focusing on Failures
This gloomy mood happens to all of us. Many people are feeling it more with the isolation that the pandemic has brought.
When it descends on me I tend to focus on my perceived failures. Which particular failures change from spell to spell.
This time my brain seems fixated on how I have failed to be as well-informed, well-read, thoughtful, spiritual, generous with my time as…
My Mother.
This is not a new way I have devised to punish myself. I’ve compared myself to her often enough in the past.
The comparison has also been made by others, and often times the expectation for me to be like her is very real. I’ve been told of it outright.
It’s unfair. It’s unfair for me to do this to myself. It’s also unfair for others to do it to me.
My mother was an extraordinary woman. There is no doubt about that.
I am also extraordinary in my own way. I’m a woman of remarkable abilities. However…
I am not my mother.
I’m not even all that much like her. I think that’s part of why we got along so well.
While she was alive, I felt no pressure to be like her (at least not from her). We shared the joy of our mutual love, our admiration and our capacity to push each other out of our different comfort zones.
Since her death, however, both I and others seem to have transferred a lot of what she was to me.
A spiritual mentor of hers writing to me as he would have to her. A friend of hers expecting me to share all my mother’s knowledge of literature. A family member expressing dismay that I do not take the same joy from cooking as my mother did.
And then there are my own feelings of failure at not being such an active participant in my community as she was in hers.
The list goes on.
Gloom or Grief?
It’s almost as if I knew better who I was and what my place was before my mother died.
Losing her, I have lost some of my sense of self.
It’s hard to say if what I’m feeling is a “depressive episode” or simply grief. More than three years on, it can still sneak up on me.
I miss her. I also miss who she helped me to be.
