Holding Pattern

So, the past few days I've been in a funk. It started with my ceiling leaking last Friday night in the monsoon-like rain. A few years ago, the corner of my ceiling collapsed in my bedroom after a bad leak went unnoticed. It was then supposed to have been externally fixed via a major brick-pointing project last summer. Groundhog day: at 1 a.m. the drip-drops began and I scrambled for a large container. I think it hurt because it felt like a metaphor: some deterrence to my moving gracefully into the next, more sunny chapter of life that awaits me, and which I await on pins and needles. A rude shock too, and a parallel event to my manic episode: some problem in my life that I had thought was solved. The brick-pointing was done. I take medicine.

I found myself shaking my fist at the building, at the rain, at my medicine switch failure, at the limits of science, at whatever God is. A good friend of mine who has suffered regularly some extraordinary hardships said to me, "People will tell you that you won't be given more than you can handle, well, guess what, you can be..." I agree with this. Usually I think a defining trait about me is my positive attitude. I busted my knee open this spring and blithely riffed as it was stitched in the emergency room. I can wear the PollyAnna Easter Bonnet quite nicely. But today I feel "negative." I can't tuck away pain into corners where they will politely keep from offending. I am raging, raging because I don't feel like the universe has been very compassionate to me.

After the stoicism, after the euphoria of the mania wears off, here it is: the pity party to which I feel completely entitled. I am complaining. It feels good to let it out: I have not been treated kindly by my own brain or the hospital or this terrible weather. So, please don't ask me to be positive until the figurative weather changes in so many ways for me.

So please let me be grouchy. I will come around when I am ready. I am kicking myself for not being positive which is in turn, not being kind to myself. *That* is where the real negativity lies. I need to bestow upon my own heart the space and kindness that I need to push through. As Sharon Salzberg writes, "We have to find the power in kindness, the confidence in kindness, the release in kindness; the types of kindness that transcends belief systems, allegiances, ideologies, cliques, and tribes. This is the trait that can transform our lives."