A Beautiful Bug

For a variety of reasons, it seems to me that reading lets my brain filter itself out. My greatest creative insights and revelations have always corresponded with a good book, and usually hit me while reading. It's strange, how thinking that my mind is completely engaged allows it to somehow disengage and put itself in place. Well, some how I went off onto a tangent while reading and wound up thinking about depression.

I had just gotten a cup of green tea ready and was staring out of the kitchen window at the gray monsoon day and saw one of those little yellow and black bugs on the newly painted window sill. It was laying on its back, just struggling and kicking its legs and straining its antenaes. And I thought, that is what depression feels like. Like you are behind a window pane, in a vastly huge environment that is stark and white and you are struggling so hard to get yourself turned around and back on your feet, but it just doesn't seem to be working. And there is this incredibly alive and juicy world just beyond the glass, and you can see it, but its all upside down, but it's there. It's possible, if you could only get yourself turned over. So I grabbed an old tooth brush that we are using to clean some of the painting tools and held it over the little bug so it could grab on. It did. Then, turned itself over and stood there for a really long time. The numbness. Then, it walked away. Back to the wonderful humdrum of being a bug.
I wonder what it would be like to be a bug. I remember someone talking about one of the dark Russian novels about a twenty-something who woke up as a cock-roach and nobody noticed, and yes I know there is more to it than that. I can't remember what the novel was called though. But, still on the subject of literature and depression, here is a quote, from the novel I am reading right now, that really jumped out at me: in reference to a little girl's tempertantrum "Looking into the pit, she called. The drop went so far down you felt giddy and all you could do was stand by and be there for her until eventually, when she was ready, she would come back, knowing you were there waiting. We had talked about it for hours afterward: how almost everyone has a darkness somewhere in them, one that is born rather than made, and why should we somehow expect less depth of personality just because there have been fewer years? It had made me think again what a good mother Anna had turned out to be because she wasn't afraid of that. What a good mother and a good friend." - Sarah Dunant, Mapping the Edge.