if it weren't funny, it'd be sad.

Sometimes, I amuse myself. Like most people, I think I know myself, my body, pretty well... and then there're times like this. You see, two weeks ago, my doctor let me stop taking that 20mg of Paxil I've been on for months, since the plan was always to replace it with the Wellbutrin, and I've now been on the Wellbutrin long enough that I wasn't going to crash hard once the Paxil was gone. So... I stop taking the Paxil, and forget about it. Except... midweek or so that week, I start feeling sorta blue, and by last Thursday, I was really frustrated with myself. WTF was wrong with me? I couldn't concentrate, nothing seemed to interest me much, even friends didn't seem to engage my interest, I felt disconnected and isolated and... wait a minute.

So, yeah. With my usual black-and-white thinking, I'd forgotten that depression's something you measure on a scale. No, I wasn't gonna crash, but I certainly did see some effect. It'll balance out in another week or so, I think. And in the meantime, knowing what's going on definitely helps.

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Two days of work on this one... I really have to get out of the habit of playing with something until I break it because I forgot what I wanted in the first place. But, in any case, here's the happy accident.

** Here's a version that's closer to finished. I may crop it still further, but this works for now.

Disturbance

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You know by now, I suppose, how I spent Valentine's Day. Quietly, no fuss. I sat back and watched, mostly, and did some thinking, all of which isn't clear but which I want to remember for sometime later when I have all the words.

carouselrose raised some questions about what love is to us, what makes someone able to attract love, as opposed to someone else. Obviously, I don't know all the answers to the second one... all I know is what makes me love someone, and that's a responsive quality I found hard to pin down.

It seems to me, though, that a lot of the time, when we're attracted to someone, it's because on some level, they fit with us. Our strengths fill in for their weaknesses, they fill a hunger in us. They're strong so we can give, and lean into us in the ways that we need them to, to really feel that we reach them. And I think it's all about needing to reach each other. There're a lot of ways I mean that, of course. Sex is the quick way to be sure that you've gotten to someone, we're taught; more, it's supposed to be the one sure way. If you have sex, it means you matter to someone, right? ... that's why it's so empty when you find that it's only sex after all. Yeah, there's a need for sex itself sometimes... as my twin put it once, your body wants someone to be close to and to hold. But it's not as common as you might think, to find that need all by itself. We're just not made that way. We want to know that someone, somewhere, is living a more vivid life, is feeling more and being more just because we exist. And that's what they try to sell us on Valentine's Day... the surety that, for this one day, with just a gift, someone is going to feel deeply for us and because of us. They forget to say that it doesn't last, and that you get the same response every other day of the year.

Sometimes, though, you look around and you realise that you've found another way to fill the emptiness. Even if you didn't know that that's what you were doing, even if you didn't go in with that in mind. There's more to love than romance, after all, and you're luckier to have love in all its other forms, than to have just romance. So Valentine's Day this year was a little bit strange and a lot good for me, because amid all the grumbling my friends did about Valentine's Day, I saw the love they were overlooking.

We spent the day together, each of us wrapped up in our own lives but still taking time out to be with each other, to talk and laugh and reaffirm silently that we matter to each other. I saw fearghaill and my twin go out of their way to make me smile, just like they always do. I saw puppeteer and shadur cheering each other up and being the same people they always are, being friends to each other and the rest of us. I saw all of you, rushing in to let the ones who didn't feel excited about the day know that they weren't alone... and I saw that you always do. And on every day that doesn't raise our expectations sky high and tell us what we ought to be feeling, doing, and thinking, we fill each other's needs as a matter of course. We reach each other, we stand by each other. And though I'm admittedly one of the ones who has a romantic interest, I have to say that even if I hadn't, what I've got beside that is enough love for a lifetime... and that's good enough for me.