And reasons to keep swimming
I don’t know if you were ever as entranced by Greek mythology as I was in my early teens, bored out of my mind, waiting for my braces to come off and for the torture of junior high to be over.
If you are curious, you can click this link to see me just one year later, still comically bored but in high school.
Anyway, school did indeed end, eventually, but the strangeness and complete draw of Greek myths and Edith Hamilton’s magical translations stayed with me. I often think about the story of Tantalus, the mortal king of Sisyphus, son of the water nymph Pluto and Zeus, damned for eternity with a great thirst forever submerged in a pool of water he could not drink.
This is all to say how often I feel absolute fury about having to deal with the necessities and indignities of being human.
I want to do so many things and projects, and I just burn out, especially in November. November, how I hate you. Newly dark days, and for some reason, it is almost always when I feel for-real existential crisis looming.
I am not the only one in my house feeling blue. My son (who I think is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, but I know I am biased) was describing how his depression feels by comparing it to how sharks have to keep swimming all the time even when they are asleep for water to run through their gills, or they will die, and how exhausting that must be, and how he has been feeling that way. Sinking. Suffocating.
When he shares this with me, I am stunned. I have no wisdom to share with him except agreement that, yes, being alive can be a lot of work sometimes. Instead of trying to talk him out of his feelings, I just told him I can relate, reminded him that the worst of depression is temporary, and played him this song.
I think of the first lines of this song almost every single day, sometimes several times a day. A song that perfectly captures that heaviness of feeling like you are not able to rise above but still, still, always still, you have to find reasons to keep swimming.
Lyrics to Raining in Darling by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
Darling
I can stay awake all night
But I would make mistakes, alright
And the body asks so much
Sweet thing
I give you what I reach
Taken what I had to teach
And re-rendered it with such
With such
With such
O, it don’t rain anymore
I go outdoors
Where it’s fun to be
And I know you love me
I know you do
