Weather alert: a great wave of depressing crap will envelope the earth for all of January

It's not just me.

Everywhere I turn it seems that horrible shit is happening to good people.  Houses burning down, couples taking time apart, mothers having to make difficult decisions, people battling serious depression, serious serious depression, the universe conspiring to make life difficult for people, a good friend's father was in a serious accident, and dogs getting hit by cars.

You know it's all kinds of crappy when the best news you've heard in days is that the dog only has a broken pelvis.

In comparison, my life is fine.  So I should be all glad and shit, right?  I should just stop reading about sad things and focus on the happy happy or count my blessings or something...

Except.  Well.  Balls.

All of the women I've linked to above have helped me through some tough times.  Their words have lifted me up when I'm down or made me laugh at something I was taking far too seriously or have gone through some of the same shit (or worse) and let me feel just *that* bit less alone.  Or has just been my best doggammed friend since the dawn of time (which was in high school, in case you were wondering).

So their pain kicks me in the taco when I'm already feeling the SADs and I want to just reach out and hold them all in my arms and make it all better somehow.  Why can't I employ my superpowers to protect us all from this global storm of depression?  Why can't I purse my lips and blow the bullshit-crappiness away?  Why don't I have the words that will make it all better?

The depression comes like a thunderstorm, rolling in off the sea.  Whispers of regret and disappointment in the wind, an increase in pressure that is the very air, pressing pressing pressing until you can't breathe.  Tears and shuddering sobs of thunder don't bring release.  The urge to punch, bite, kick, makes me almost insufferable and only a great deal of apologizing (and one particularly understanding DB) settles the static before another charged particle sets me off again.

I try to yell at the ugly regrets that rear their heads and tell me that I've made the wrong choices in life.  Obviously I could have done it all differently, made different choices, gone in a different direction.  But I know that when I made my decisions I made them with the knowledge that I had AT THAT TIME and I did what I thought was best.  Sure, in retrospect some of the choices were stupid (hello first marriage) and others led me down a different path that ultimately led here and not, say, to a professorship or a job as a professional archaeologist.  But those other paths don't include the DB or the Spawn and I wouldn't trade either of them for another life.

But for whatever reason, knowing that this life is better, feeling like I have exactly what I want, does not keep that little voice saying "you totally could have been that other person" and "you let down 16 year old you" at bay.  Despite knowing that 16 year old me also thought that Latin was a language that no one knew any more and that "rendezvous" was pronounced ren-DEZ-vuhss, I mean, let's be honest, 16 year old me was an idiot (yeah, ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the American education system!) - despite all that, the storm rolls in.

So on Monday, feeling the darkness all around and trying to fight it, I employed the Furiously Happy method of dealing with shit.  I turned the radio up and the Spawn and I danced like lunatics in the kitchen.  Not like lunatics-in-the-kitchen, but like lunatics.  We just happened to be in the kitchen.  And technically, a 10 month old can not dance like a lunatic, but like a 10 month old, which is to say, she bobbed and wiggled and looked dammed cute.



And for a while, I felt light and free.

Spring and it's feeling of new beginnings can really not come too soon.

To anyone else out there feeling the sads, keep dancing, you aren't alone.