Author: Sydney Hanson Mandt

I slept in my own bed last night, benefitting from the warmth, physical and emotional, emanating from my husband. The hour-plus drive from the airport to our home felt like a few minutes, filled with catch-up conversation.

My 5ish days in California were ones of obligatory rest and passenger-ship. I sat in chairs, in cars, in restaurants, I walked with no particular timeline to get somewhere, I was led across sidewalks and asphalt driveways by a tiny dog on a forward mission to smell the world. I spent quality time talking with my brother-in-law, my sister, and my nephew, chatting about their lives, and watching educational and/or humorous television.

The outdoor temperature was lower than I originally expected for the majority of my stay in CA, but the daytime skies were big and generous with sunshine. It felt like love. Rain did visit in prolific quantities on a day I had planned to pull weeds, but there was plenty of television to partake of instead, along with good company and snacks, so I was content.

The going-there part of the trip included a 6-hour wait for my plane at the airport. I planned ahead to fill my long airport intermission with writing poetry and leaving it in random places to be found by strangers. I will post those on the poetry page, linked above, with their titles followed by the designation “Airport Poetry”.

I’m going to visit my sister in California tomorrow! My suitcase contains clothes and travel size toiletries, my purse contains masks and makeup and money, and my mind has plans for packing the last-minutes like: computer, phone, chargers, earbuds, etc.

Doug showed me the visual weather report for American Canyon, the town I’ll be in, and I was met with a line of round, yellow sun symbols, unhindered by cloud shapes or disproportionally large raindrops. Sunshine and almost 70 degrees is a fast-forward into the heart of spring/pre-summer for me.

I suspect a continuous state of sunshininess will hit me like a healing drug. It happens now when I am granted an hour of morning sunshine before the clouds move in, or when the clouds move away for a few hours for an afternoon sunbreak. And yesterday, I felt elated to see that we were eating dinner before the sun had set. Winter is often my shut-down time, my hibernatory 3 to 4-month reboot. But I see hints of awakening motivation on the horizon. A week’s worth of sun might just jump start me into full wakeup mode.

For years now I’ve thought of writing improv poetry at Farmer’s Markets. It sounds part terrifying and part good experience. It could be great practice to task myself with expression under certain parameters. However, I am afraid that my anxiety aphasia will kick in under that kind of pressure, and I will end up being unable to express myself well or on paper or at all.

I’ve heard and read about people doing improv poetry before, but I’ve never experienced it. There are so many ways it could be structured. The folks in the following article (link) asked to be given a topic, then they composed their poems on old fashioned type writers. In front of them was a sign saying: “Poems: Your Topic. Your Price.”

https://poeticchampions.com/tag/ballard-market/

I’ve considered announcing my intentions with a sign that says, “Poetry on Demand”, in which case I could call my spot the POD. “Welcome to the POD!”

But the word “demand” doesn’t feel very comfortable to me, so I considered, “Poetry at Your Polite Request”, or “PAYPR”. (Pronounced “paper”). “Come get some PAYPR!” my sign might say.

If I write the poems for free, or for voluntary donations, I might call the station “Gifting Random Ordinary Words.” GROW. “Come GROW with me.” Hmmm. Could be interpreted as sexual? If so, then no. This might be better: “Welcome to the GROW Zone!” Maybe that’s not so great either.

Another title I came up with reminds me of my “Word Fertilizer” theme: “A Piece of Original Poetry,” or APOOP. “Come over here for A POOP!”

I’ll keep thinking.

I organized my journals recently. They come in many different shapes, sizes, and formats, and though the entries don’t always follow a chronological order, they are now all in clear plastic bins, roughly grouped by year.

During the sorting process, slips or folded sheets of paper would occasionally slide out of a book or spiral binder. It was in this way that I found a story I thought I had lost. Written during the time my sister and I were roommates in the University District of Seattle in the early-to-mid 90’s, it was printed in the pixelated dot matrix format of the printer I used back then. I typed everything I wrote into my “Mac-in-the-Box”, a tiny computer/monitor combo about the size of shoebox (a large one, for boots) turned sideways.

I may have these writings saved on a “floppy disc” somewhere, a hard square-shaped, flattened Wonderbread slice-sized piece of plastic that is neither floppy nor the round shape of a disc. But even if I found it, I don’t know how I would ever get the data off of it. The lesson is to keep printed copies of everything I write.

The story in question, called Value Village, brought back many images, memories, and feelings – flashes of walking alone in the dark, sitting on buses, moving around in the world amongst mostly strangers. I Googled the locations of Value Village in Seattle, so I could go back and visit the one my sister worked at so long ago, but none of them seemed to be the right one . Did that particular branch of the store close down? Is the building still standing? Did I imagine the whole thing?

Please find the story, Value Village, posted under Stories (in the Writings category).

Seasonal depression always catches up to me slowly and sneakily. But by February, I am deep in it. I have found medication and routines that help, but I can still feel the pain of it.

I watched a show on Amazon Prime the other day – Raising Bipolar – about children who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and the challenges faced by them and their families in living happy and healthy lives.

I was particularly struck by the story of a 10-year-old girl, one of the older kids featured. Video of her as  a preschooler shows her growling and clenching her fists, throwing furniture, and hitting people.  After years of therapy and medication she seemed much more stable, so her doctor tapered down her meds, which resulted in a relapse; yelling and crying uncontrollably and retreating under the covers of her bed.

She’s more stable these days, and she can recognize her symptoms of depression.  The cameras show the girl’s sweet younger brother standing outside her bedroom asking, “Can I come in?” Her answer from behind the door is a calm and sincere-sounding, “I don’t want to hurt you.” It’s not said as a threat but as an acknowledgement that she sometimes can’t control her behavior.

I often think of an anecdote about a doctors conference concerning depression.  An Indian doctor gave a presentation in which he described how most depressive patients in India present with physical symptoms, compared to American patients, whose depression is most often presented with mental symptoms. At the Q&A part of the presentation, an American doctor commented that people in India tend to somaticize depression. He said it as if that was the inferior way to be depressed. But the Indian doctor’s response was that Americans seem to psychologize depression, implying that maybe Americans have it backwards.

That made a huge impression on me, because, of course, the mental and the physical go together. A mental illness may have its origins in the mind or in the brain, one of which is thought-based, and the other which is body-based. But we conflate the body and mind together, when sometimes it might be good to look at them separately.

For example, one of my winter depressions was particularly harsh. Getting out of bed was a struggle. I would drag myself to work, but when I came back home, I would fall onto the couch, cover myself with a blanket and shiver, unable to get warm, sleeping my only relief.

I was feeling terrible about myself, knowing there were things I should be doing, but being unable to move. I starting thinking my character was faulty, that I should have the will-power to push through. These negative thoughts would form a mental cloud over me, until I thought about the somaticize versus psychologize concept. It seemed clear that I was in physical pain; my muscles ached, and my body felt stiff, heavy, and cold to the bone. It was one of the first times I acknowledged that my depression might have its origin in physical pain.

With an additional medication, those particular symptoms of depression abated considerably. And in the meantime, before the meds kicked in, I reminded myself to be nice to me, to recognize that my body was having a hard time, and that it was no excuse to berate myself.

When I have a cold, or I’ve twisted my ankle, or I have a painful sunburn I don’t tell myself I’m worthless. Why should I do that when my body is suffering from some other condition, like depression?

Sometimes my depression seems to have more thought-based origins. Disappointment, anger, twisting of thoughts into complete negatives.  In that case, I need to recognize that my mental challenges don’t have to prevent me from participating in what physical things I can handle and might help pick me up.

I was touched by the girl in the documentary film, by her maturity. Instead of yelling at her brother to go away, some part of her could appreciate that he loves her, cares about her, and that she cares about him, too. Instead of going to anger to protect herself, yelling at him to go away, she had the skills to make a decision that protects her and others when she knows her limitations. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

I’ve been able to do that more as I get older. I know that I can handle a situation within certain parameters. For example, I can go shopping when I’m depressed, but not just any kind. Depressed me can shop for food with a list in my hand. But if someone would ask me to go shopping for clothes, maybe go out for coffee, check out a few different stores, depressed me might have to decline. I would want to say yes, and maybe worry that the person who invited me would feel rejected, but I know that the unknown, the socializing, the having to relate on an emotional level, the need to project empathy, and sorting through lots of stimuli, would get to me after awhile. And though I might be able to keep my pain from affecting other people, the toll it would take to hide it would wear on me and do some sort of damage.

I’m glad I can recognize the pattern now. February is always difficult for me. But I try not to let the physical pain of depression, so sneaky and hard to recognize, soak into my mental/ emotional state. I practice modified hibernation and wait for spring.

As a person without a traditional job, I feel a bit lost. I don’t have an employer  who expects me to be somewhere at a certain time, to accomplish specific tasks daily and weekly. I have no supervisor to give me feedback or train me, no co-workers a cubicle away to help guide my activities. When I had a job, my time was full of directions and instructions that resulted in a beginning, middle, and end for each day. Monday through Friday I would leave with an experience all framed up in a picture called “my time at work”, until I had hundreds of them stacked up in the storage of my memory, each one barely distinguishable from the other, and none of them a work of art. But they were neatly packaged and organized, which gave some sort of comfort, if not personal value.

Fast forward through a year of purposeful chaos, life being turned upside down & back again, and now I live in a new town, in a new house, with no fixed daily routine, no need to wake up at a certain time, and no physical connections to friends, family or co-religionists to suggest how to and when to spend my time. I am completely free to stay in my pajamas all day or eat a blueberry muffin for lunch at 11:35am because I suddenly remembered there was one left in the freezer. I can let the dirty clothes pile up until I have no clean pants – and suffer no negative consequences. I can watch TV all day on a whim. If I have a headache or leg muscle pain or depression heaviness, I don’t have to force myself to do anything – no social interaction or task accomplishment is expected of me, so I can sleep or read a book all day if I want.

I suppose having the time to rest and heal is a good thing, but it often feels more like I’m stagnating.

And then, when I feel well and energetic, I tend to flit around from whim to whim without goals or direction. I feel like I might float away on any little breeze and have no way to get back to my center.

Thinking of this situation, I am reminded of when I cared for a young child about 10 years ago. I will call this child Little.

Little was (and is) the daughter of a dear friend. I started watching her at my house a few days a week when she was a baby, and as she got older, I began caring for her every weekday. It became clear to me that Little needed structure, as all children do. Her mind would flit from desire to desire, and trying to fulfill every single one was exhausting and ultimately impossible.

Here’s a general example of how a day with Little could go:

Little says she wants to paint. So while she plays with Legos, I prep for painting. I cover the table with plastic garbage bags, taping down the corners. I set out paints, water, paper, brushes and paint smocks. But Little has changed her mind. Now she wants to go outside. So we get our shoes and coats on and go out. When I suggest we go in for lunch, she doesn’t want to, so when we finally go inside, she’s very hungry and tired. I now have to undo all the paint preparation so we can eat at the table. But no! Little wants to paint now! So I have to be firm about it being lunch time – I’ve waited too long to feed her, she really needs a nap, and here comes the tantrum meltdown. We finally eat some lunch, but her bed is covered in plastic blocks which she doesn’t help put away, and bathroom time and book time go roughly, with actual sleeping a long and hard time coming.

Indulging her whims has sidestepped her needs, and I’m left with hours worth of damage control.

That’s just an example – not an exact detail of a day. But it reminds me of my current situation, in which I am both the toddler and the caregiver. My inner toddler is running from shiny thing to shiny thing, while my inner adult is sideswiped by the enthusiasm, loving this energetic spirit, but not helping it in the long run by indulging it, letting it call all the shots.

In the case of Little, I learned that I needed to have a plan for every day. Hour 1: welcome, chat, play, eat breakfast. Hour 2: Inside project. Hour 3: Have a snack. Leave the house to play in a playground or store. Hour 4: Lunch. Hour 5: Nap. Hour 6: Wake up, eat a snack, play. Hour 7: Indoor project or game or play outside. Hour 8: Clean up and get picked up by Mom or Dad.

One thing I just realized is that no matter what time it was – meal/snack time, project time, even nap time and pickup time – it was all playtime. That’s how toddlers learn. Lunch time was a time to play with food. Little would painstakingly assemble her sandwich, getting bread from the bag, spreading mayonnaise, adding slices of lunch meat, cheese, tomato, pickle, lettuce. She would carefully , slowly cut her sandwich in half with a butterknife. Then she would pull her sandwich apart and eat it from the inside out.

Playtime was also playtime, of course, but so was cleanup time, complete with cleanup time song and high 5’s when done.

 Even pickup time was playtime. Almost every day, when we would hear Mom’s car arrive in the driveway, Little would “hide” (a telltale blanket squirming and giggling on the couch), and when Mom came through the door I would have to give her the bad news.

“I’m so sorry, M,” I would say, “But I can’t find Little.”

Of course, M would be very upset at this. “That’s terrible news!” she would say. “I’m so sad. I need to sit down.” And then she would sit on the giggly couch blanket which would suddenly fly off to reveal a child  underneath. “I’m here!” Then M and I would celebrate Little’s return. Variations of that scenario happened almost every pickup time for months and maybe a whole year.

So here I am, both toddler and adult, tasked with constructing days that are productive, playful, and meaningful. I’m excited that I have so much time to do things I didn’t do much when I worked. I can write, read, watch Master Classes online, make sketches of garden ideas, spray paint metal washers for a wind chime, experiment with baking gluten-free bread, go online to buy furniture for our new house, check out Facebook, play online games. Whee! Fun!

But I also have to remember that I am an adult, with responsibilities to myself, my family, and my community. I have to clean up the messes I make, wash dishes and clothing, organize working spaces, pay bills, make meals, shop for food and other necessities.

Maybe I need to treat myself like a toddler for awhile, while this job-free, newly awakened side of me matures. I need to lovingly give myself structure, but remember to keep a spirit of play. I’ll work on my writing, gardening, and crafting. And when I’m ready, I’ll throw my hiding-blanket aside and say, “I’m here!”