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As often happens I cannot make much sense out of what I just figured out because in order to turn what I think I just stumbled upon into something I can use to improve myself in my life, I have to articulate it in writing or it won’t make any kind of linear sense.

Not that even the above sentence makes much sense to most people — so let me make it perfectly clear and tell you (and myself) what I just learned from invisible bugs and a feather duster.

I had no memory that I owned a feather duster until just a few minutes ago.  I am trying to clean my house before my daughter and my first grandbaby arrive this coming Thursday.  I never un-kept a house like I do now at almost 59.  When I had children at home for those 35 years of my life, nothing EVER got very ‘dirty’.

I puzzle about that sometimes, and usually all I end up with is that my lack of caring much about my house-home anymore has something to do with my being the only one here and with my depression.  I am disappointed in myself that I am not enthusiastically and happily attacking these months of blown-in fine desert dust that’s in every imaginable place in my house.  I am having to FORCE myself to clean — and that just ‘don’t feel RIGHT’!

So, there I was with my shop vac with its recycled emptied and stapled back together again bag inside it, with my worn, frayed and barely useable (but still vitally necessary) little ‘dusting’ end attacking my back hall shelves.  Nope, don’t start cleaning in the bathroom or living room or kitchen.  I started in the dirtiest place of all, the back hall where I come in with my mud-caked shoes, dump my collection of tools, maintain the cat litter box — well, you get the picture.

So there I was scooting things around on those metal shelves to clean underneath them when lo and behold, there was my unused (bought with best intentions) dark brown ostrich feather feather duster.

“Oh, that’s cool!” I thought to myself.  “Maybe I can figure out a way to move around dust with THAT while I somehow capture it with the vacuum cleaner — at the same time I don’t suck the duster up at the same time!”

I made the mistake of picking UP the feather duster.  Now, you have to live in the desert to appreciate what happened next.  Although the duster appeared intact and good-as-new when I spotted it — it WAS NOT.  In fact, once I grabbed its handle and picked it up, barely half of its feathers came with it.  The rest scattered in every imaginable direction in tiny fragments and breeze-floating pieces.  My only consolation is that I found it before my cleaning was finished or I would have been far more irritable than I WAS.

OK, so there are invisible little mite buggies that eat feathers in the desert.  That’s all I know about them.  They eat feathers — and never again while I live down here (obviously) will I buy another feather duster!  But something clicked at that instant I saw all those teensy bits of ostrich feathers take off in every direction and as I watched how I responded.

I FELT INSTANTLY IRRITATED!  And, with the energy that irritation released, I cleaned the dang bits up!

BIG DEAL?  Yes.

When I get into my work with my book “Unspeakable Madness” where I will fillet and autopsy my mother’s account of those years that spanned my childhood, I am going to face — face-to-face — the truth about my depression.  Without details at this moment, I can say that when I write about my childhood I will be writing about what COULD be called depression.  Simple enough to call it that now.  I was terribly ‘depressed’ as a child.

That depression went magically nowhere when I left home.  I had no idea what it was — of course — and for many years (looking back) I used pot daily to ‘make the depression go away’ so I could get on with my life.  I didn’t know I was self medicating like that, either.

In 1980 when I quit all drug use, looking back from my perspective as the owner of a disintegrated feather duster a few moments ago, I realized that I operated to take care of myself and my children — along with EVERYTHING that entailed — without having to ever realize the extent of my depression — because I knew how to do exactly what I just did when I was HIT with the mess today with that mess of  flying-away feathers.

I used the energy of irritability to live on.

No, I didn’t FEEL the irritability until these recent months.  NEVER did I feel it.  I just USED the energy it created in my body.

DANG!  At least that was SOMETHING!  But that’s like running on an empty gas tank – on the fumes.  That’s like running straight off a car battery without a working charging system in the car.

In fact, that just barely counts as any way to live at all!

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So, what I want to articulate here is this:  I bet the irritability comes from (at least for severe child abuse survivors) a profound RAGE that one’s life was stomped on to the point of near extinction.  THAT AIN’T RIGHT, and we KNEW IT!  We knew it THEN as little children and we really (though not consciously unless you are fortunate to have a run-in with a mite eaten feather duster just when you think you can use it most) KNOW IT NOW!

When I am ready now to fillet my mother’s words, I am going to be working face-to-face with my own INNER RAGE at what my mother DID TO ME.  That experience is going to be closer, more powerful and more real than it has ever been in my life.  I can feel it coming!

And with that rage is the terrible, terrible, terrible undeniable sorrow and sadness that was beaten into me nearly every moment of my childhood — at the same time I never knew it was WRONG.  More of that later…..

But for now, I understand more about why it is so hard for me to tackle the cleaning of this house right now.  It isn’t that I don’t love my daughter.  It’s not that I don’t care.  It’s hard because I can no longer find that IRRITABILITY that is a side effect of the anxiety of depression — that is connected to the rage of knowing what caused this depression was a CRIME — so that I can live off of its energy.

I have to do it the hard way now, but using my WILL and by plugging away at the task as if I am deep under the ocean and everything is very heavy and I move very slowly.  But this has to be done.  The feather duster incident only released exactly enough irritation energy to clean up THAT  mess.  No more.  Nothing extra.  No extra irritation there to use to go hand up the laundry.

So, I better get to it — one dang way or the other!!!!!!  It’s a job that really has to get done — but at the same time I look back at my child-raising years and marvel at how effectively I managed to LIVE off of the irritation energy of my depression — and not even know it.

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