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In continuing to look at my journal writings from half my lifetime ago when I was 29, I don’t see in them the one word I wish I had been able to say back then that I can say now:  I was lost.  Completely, utterly, totally and absolutely lost.  Lost to myself.  Lost to my life.  Lost IN life, and I didn’t even know it.

The rest of the month of March 1981 following my return from my 30-day bus trip is covered here (link below), along with the month of April.  These writings cover the period of time when I was assessed for depression, ‘diagnosed and given my first prescription for antidepressants.  I feel dismayed to see that my therapist ‘dropped’ me as soon as the medications ‘seemed’ to be taking effect.  Like I didn’t have a lifetime of trouble to talk about with her?

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How much of ordinary people’s lives could best be described as accidental?  I can see that I was trying to apply what I now know is called Mind Sight.  I was trying hard to understand myself in my own life, but I was blind.  I didn’t have anything to compare myself to.  I didn’t know I didn’t really have a self, had never had a self, not even the self that was supposed to form by the time I was two years old.  I was a blind woman stumbling down the path of my life just as I had been doing from the moment I walked out the door of my home of origin.

All I knew how to do was to go forward.  That is how I survived my insane and abusive childhood.  I had simply continued to live, breathing in, breathing out, putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward — without mind sight or fore sight, into my own future.  If I bumped into something on the road and tripped, I caught my balance, stood up straight again, and marched on.  There was nobody there to tell me life could be any different.  Nobody had ever told me that my life could be anything different than an accident.

What is worse, being lost and not knowing it, or being lost and knowing it?  I had stumbled along blindly making choices when they had to be made until I had myself completely blocked into a corner and I believed it was my life.  If everyone else thought that taking pills was all I needed to be ‘better’, then I was willing to go along with the ‘program’.  I didn’t know there was anything else I could do.

Having a life, any kind of life, was better than having no life at all.  That’s all I knew.  I kept on trying.  I kept walking forward.  My life had been built out of pieces and parts, bits and pieces, like trying to turn a pile of sawdust into a good, strong, wholesome board.  The very simplest thing anybody could do was call it depression and give me some pills to ‘fix’ me.

The hardest thing somebody could have done was to help me go all the way back to the beginning so that I could see what had gone so terribly wrong in my childhood and how it affected me with every breath I took.  Perhaps then I could have become strong enough and clear enough to understand that the whole darn pile of pieces was not a ME at all.  It was just an attempt born of desperation to create a life when I really had nothing to go on.  As things were, I saw no other choice but to try to make a better me so that I could make the most out of a life I simply wandered around lost in.

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*Age 29 – Beginning March 1981 Journal After 30-Day Bus Trip

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