The Eleventh Month Mark is Tough
Although I’ve had stories running around my head, and life has continued to happen, I was finding it difficult to have the discipline to sit down and write about it. I’d started dozens of times, and although the words were coming, they tended to be very dry, and quite honestly boring. Due to an unsuspecting series of events I have again been inspired, and am ready to share again with you fine folks. The story begins a month or so back.
Recently I’ve been a bit depressed after my whirlwind adventure in Gabs, in which I was treated to five star hotels and poker games in marble palaces. I was able to spend time with the people I’ve come to think of my immediate southern hemisphere family, watched a movie in the theatre (“He’s Just Not That Into You”. Completely traumatizing in the sort of “someone has been secretly observing my life down to the Home Depot detail and has written a movie about it and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connoly’s names are in the credits and not Jennifer Katchmark’s and I’m waiting for my royalty check” kind of way.) and ate curry and had a altogether too brief romance with a mojito. I spoke with interesting people and learned the ins and outs of residency and citizenship in Botswana (Not easy. Not at all easy. The Queen and I spent a number of days roaming around the government administration buildings in Gaborone in an unsettlingly circular fashion without getting anything achieved. She had to leave the country about a month ago on a Tuesday. I don’t wanna talk about it). I attempted to procure art supplies. I finally visited the fish farming project and met with some really potentially helpful people who are helming the adventure that is the future of commercial fish farming in Botswana. I’m looking so forward to having some drinks with them in 10 years when I’d like to come back to this country.
Through experience I’ve found as I am living in a place like Seronga, by the time I leave I am really ready to leave, and in order to not go crazy when I come back I must always try to stay away long enough to really miss the place. When I come back before I’m ready it’s really hard to settle back into life here. The little things I thought I’d grown used to expecting grate sharply on my nerves, having been fleshly exposed to the way things can be in the world, whether it be ordering the sort of food I want at a restaurant (and the restaurant having food) or turning on the tap and knowing there will be water. Peace and acceptance are hard to come by. The queen has just left, and other circumstances have led me to sink into a bit of a depression stemming from helplessness and irritation. Add to this the anniversary of my coming to the country it appears to be the recipe for a perfect storm of personal angst.
Having nearly been here a year, I of course like to jump the gun and start ruminating about things a month and a half prior to actually being in the country for a full year. My projects seemed to number in the extremely few and any forward motion I’d tried to implement at the clinic has already fallen by the wayside in the absence of me hounding people to continue on with the things they had previously committed to doing. Being that I have spent a year of my life doing something, and left family and friends and the opportunity for a more reasonable income back in the states, I really want to believe that what I have done in the past year is worth it.
I develop an alternating aching and sharp pain that travels throughout my neck and my back. I would give my firstborn for a chiropractor right now. Running helps occasionally, but I sleep and the pain realigns in the morning. It lasts for too long, and no, ibuprofen doesn’t help. People email me that they have been trying to call and it won’t go through. The mail hasn’t been delivered with any regularity since before the New Year. I occasionally call people whose numbers I can remember in the States and hang up before their voicemail picks up, hoping they will see a strange number, realize it’s me, and call back, and relieve me from myself. This rarely works.
It would be accurate to say that I’ve been spending some quality time with myself lately clawing with my way out of a pretty deep, dark pit of despair. It reminds me of the dog that sometimes gets into my yard, and stupidly jumps into the rubbish pit after some rotting piece of Styrofoam that may have once had contact with a piece of meat. As he flies through the air into the pit, taking a leap of faith based purely on his sense of smell, he realizes that he’s really just in a big mess of trash. After his sorry, skinny self realizes there’s no feast to be had, he attempts to clamber out, each time he reaches out to escape the hole he’s found himself in he just pulls more dirt down on him. I don’t laugh at him any more.
But then nor do I cry, for myself or for the dog anyway. I think I’ve finally drained the embarrassingly large well of self pity and have nearly exhausted my supply of excuses. The one time I do cry is when I watch a movie, or read a book and someone is trying to do something really good, or they really want to help someone. Then I cry because I think, hmm, I used to be one of those people.
What has happened here? What has changed? I suspect I’ve become a little bitter here, a concept most notably clear when I compile my quarterly report for Peace Corps. As I fill in the form, and try to figure out which tangible, measurable little goals I can mark off to account for the ways in which I spend my time, the things listed seem so few. What the hell am I doing here? How am I spending these hours that seem to be creating days that in some ways are flying by. The song from “Rent” plays through my head on occasion, asking me how do I measure the joy in a year? What about all the other emotional shit that has been shoved full to overflowing in this poor calendar of mine?
It’s been a pretty self indulgent dish of misery- swirled with loneliness, sprinkled with homesickness with a nice helping of boredom and feelings of purposelessness, defeatedness with a large side plate of what have I done here, what can I do with the time I have left, and what will I do after. Nothing like living in the present, huh? ;-)
Owing to my flare for the dramatic (who, me?) it seems I’ve become one of those people whose social skills have become extremely limited, and I find myself saying things that appear to shock whichever audience I’ve been lucky enough to come across, whether the topic be the village, the country, my own country, the past, the future, nearly anything.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with uncertainty, which I chase down by making plan after plan about what to do. Here, there, after this before this during this. I am such a ball of anxiety that I can’t even really focus. I’ve stopped sleeping as much at night after one of the longest periods of my life of having enough sleep due to both lack of actual electricity as well as lacking anything concrete past more of what I spend my days doing. It can be difficult to relax.
I make excuses, excuses for excuses; I abhor myself for my lack of discipline. I sit around staring for long periods of time sometimes. I am a toxic mess of emotional nastiness, and quite unpleasant to be around. I resent people, here and back home, for ridiculous, uncontrollable things. I am jealous and envious and covetous. There are times when I can’t stand myself. This is officially some sort of desperation, which I also detest, because I tend to think it unattractive.
In my former life, my course of action would have been to chase the depression away, to run like a demon, to read and strive and achieve. Here in Botswana, as in Rome, I’ve found the most effective cure for melancholy is to approach my self pity the way the locals approach nearly any challenge. They wait. And wait. To see what happens. In Southern Africa it seems that when one if not actively “making a plan” one is waiting. Everything always sorts itself out in the end.
(Around this time the Peace Corps medical officer did send out an email which I skimmed and understood to be a quiz about compassion exhaustion or some such “how are you fairing mentally” questionnaire. It struck me as ironic that this was the distribution method which they chose to use reach the volunteers that were likely suffering most from this condition as a result of poor accessibility to communication home and otherwise. I snidely scoffed at it, deciding for myself that with my limited internet time it would do my mental state more good to speed read my emails from home and attempt to pluck out two line responses rather than complete the survey that could likely give me a rating of exactly how hateful I was feeling. Sorry, PC.)
I’ve danced the tango with enough instances of various low grade depressions over the years to learn a few steps to cope with it. The most powerful is to just accept it. I sit right down next to it, breathe it in, invite it to dinner (although not always the best idea as it can usually bring with it the uninvited guest emotional overeating).
And so again, as I seem to do doing more and more here, with an alarming level of regularity that leads me to believe I can’t do it again, I let go. I seem to be living my life’s largest experiment in letting go. I accept the depression. I own it. I try to stay out of people’s way (or at least keep them out of the war path that is mine) and dwell in my misery until I can’t stand it, and until it goes away. I breathe and try to create things to look forward to. I begin to preemptively announce the dark cloud’s departure, knowing it’s not completely gone, but forcing myself to look for the rays of light I know are there. The sun comes back slowly, and I suddenly find myself smiling again.
It’s been a few weeks. I’ve been here a year, and I’m happy I made it. Some projects are moving forward again, and I’ve developed a renewed sense of purpose and hope, and drive, while also becoming more able to accept the things that can easily frustrate me (for now). I hesitated to post this one, as it’s pretty sad, but felt it needed to be included in this record of my experience. I know this is not the last black cloud that will shadow these few years in my life, but I feel more confident each time of my ability to deal with it until it passes however long that may take. I am occasionally blessed with moments of grace, in which I can feel gratitude for these dark times, and can give thanks for the lessons they teach me about myself. I guess this is peace.
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