content/content

In the last two-and-a-half years, I have somehow, improbably, amazingly, shockingly, grown rather content. It’s a bizarre idea for me to accept—that I have not merely broached an edgy entente with my inner demons, but that I’ve actually crossed the Rubicon into some semblance of happiness. I find myself slightly agape. It’s a strange feeling for me, a person who has lived most of her life feeling everything but happy.

For most of my life, my emotional Chinese menu has been comprised of main dishes of depression, angst, vague malaise, and inchoate discontent; side dishes of black ennui, red-hot rage, indigo resentment, verdant envy and bilious self-loathing; as well as occasional sprinklings of glee, pride, insecurity, pessimism and futility. I can’t say with any honesty that I’ve been a happy person for most of my four-plus decades on this wet blue planet. I remember being a pretty happy toddler, but at around five, I stopped being happy, and—in the words of Ferris Bueller’s sidekick Cameron Frye—then the depression set in.

A big part of my depression is hereditary. I might as well be Swedish, considering how genetically and culturally programmed I am for self-extinction. My biodad is bi-polar. My maternal grandfather killed himself, so did my step-father’s mother. My sister is schizophrenic. My genes are a roiling pool of mental instability. Previous to my newfound state of contentment, I would count myself lucky that my personal anthem of insanity took its form as a constant bass-note acceptance of the my latent suicidality. I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t really want to throw myself under the A train; I just wanted to think about it a lot. I considered myself lucky that I didn’t hear voices; that on the chaotic spectrum, my thoughts rested on the “ordered” end, not the “disordered” side; that I didn’t have to rely on psychopharmaceuticals to live through another day.

I’d grown so accustomed to feeling down that feeling down looked up to me. Pain was normal. Any other state was sleep.

About four years ago, I started going to therapy. It sucked. I hated it with a white-hot extra-flamey passion. Words rarely fail me, but I find myself unable to express the sheer difficulty of my first year and a half of therapy. It was ranked “10” on the technical difficulty level in the gymnastics of emotion. Every Friday after my appointment, I would have to crawl into my bed and  cry myself to sleep. I felt myself plunged like a lobster into the boiling pot of my emotions. For weeks I’d be sunk into black-hell depression, only to find myself a few weeks later mummified by white-burn rage. I didn’t know exactly how I felt, but I knew that whatever it was called, this guerilla emotion of the moment, it sucked. And sucked prodigiously.

It’s a testament to exactly how crap-awful I felt, I mean really felt, that I stayed in therapy. It’s a testament too to my therapist, who is really very good, even if she has recently returned to the incomprehensible animal-bunch hairstyle of yore. If she weren’t so good at her job, and if I hadn’t spent a lifetime in so much pain, I wouldn’t have stuck it out to visit her every week, week after week, 45-minute hour after 45-minute hour. I would have quit if I hadn’t known somewhere, deep inside me, that I’d feel worse if I stopped. But for a really, really long time, it sucked, it sucked really bad.

And then something started to change. It was like the first few glimmers of spring, when you look at the buds or that slight green mist on the ground, and you wonder if it’s real, or if you’re just imagining it. You look and you stare and you wonder if it’s too good to be true, or if somehow winter is indeed ending. At first I felt like that. Like I couldn’t trust my own changing emotions, the less-bleak tundra of my soul sprouting incongruous new life. At first I was afraid I was manic. At first, I couldn’t parse my happiness, for I’d not been happy, not in forty years.

Now, though, I can and I do. I have both the inward and the outward signs of actual contentment. I have, it seems, found a man I love who loves me too, and we love each other with a strange and new genuineness. I am, it seems, going to get married. I will, it seems, be paid to write. I can, it seems, trust myself to sculpt a life worth living. I am, it appears, happy. Or if not outrightly happy, then I'm content.

Wacky, that.

And no small part of my life—its burgeoning successes and its mellow contentment—is owed to this, my writing, my pretty dumb things, my blog. I started this writing almost three years ago, and my early entries were raw, harsh, confessional, angry, edgy, confused, manic. They were funny, too. And honest. And lots of other things. Mostly, though, they stand mute testament to my earlier and still-convalescing self. I felt a lot of pain. I made this place as one more space to express it, and by expressing it, free myself of it.

Over the past years, I’ve confessed a lot of stuff here that has weighed me down—the truth about losing my virginity, my abortions, my stripping, my betrayals—all  these things that I felt  resting heavy on my shoulders, like molting fur coats, like big bags of dirty laundry, like lead weights. I divested myself of them here. Like a surrendering soldier’s arms, I laid them down. I wrote too about sex, my love of it and my joy in it and my ambivalence about it. I wrote about a lot of things; I’ve written nearly 600 posts.

What’s funny to me is that as I grow more content, I have to search farther and farther for content to write. I have so much less to confess, now that I’ve made peace with my various spiky demons. I have a lot of joy. It’s weird. I don’t get it. I hope I’ll find stuff to write about, cushioned now as I am in my own light-stepped sanity.

I think my blog will be changing in the upcoming year. I hope you, my readers, will keep on reading. I have made one change today. Today, I resigned my post as Fleshbot editor (I have turned my Tuesday Fleshbot reins over to the capable hands of Always Aroused Girl). I’ve been doing this round-up for over a year and a half, and it has been great. But now it’s time to give someone else the chance I have had and to give myself the room to devote my self to my own writing.

Whatever that may be.

We’ll see. It’s a strange and changing thing, life.

Comments

[scott Kelly]

I've alluded in our blog to the massive depression I went through after my second divorce. I call that period in my life Chernobyl.

I gave up my career as a photographer and refasioned myself as a drunken poet, cruising inward, trying to find a parking place.

Eventually I did. It appears you have to.

I look forward to your new dumb things.

Congrats.

scott
Mrs. Kelly's Playhouse

[O]

I suspect that you'll always find things to write about, because I believe that writing is just a part of who you are. And there are always going to be people who will want to read you, because you're just damn good at it.

love
O

[Pete]

CG,
I can echo O, and as someone with a MS in psychology, good for you sticking it out through therapy. It is always tough to confront your demons, and tougher to deal with them. I'm glad you found happiness and it has been showing in your writing.
Pete

[Squire1999]

Speaking as a voice of one I can tell you that the reason I read your blog has little to do with the history or experiences underlying the content you share with us. I come to your blog for the personality with which you imbue your writing and to vicariously experience the growth and change you personally experience. What you have chosen to share with us has been fun, thought provoking, insightful, sad, encouraging, titillating, ribald, and a host of additional adjectives that elude me at the moment. After reading you for almost a year I am certain that your writing would be described in exactly the same way if you had been writing about raising llamas rather than stripping or fucking. We all grow, we all change and we all evolve as individuals. Well, most of us evolve. Your blog is an exploration of your growth and your evolution. As difficult as it has been for you in your past you are reaping the rewards of the unflinching, difficult and painful work that you have done on yourself. We as readers have been rewarded as well because of your choice to share your thoughts and feelings with us in your unique and imminently readable way. Whatever you choose to write about in the future I know that it will be just as enjoyable as it has in the past and, again speaking for myself, I look forward to seeing what the future will bring the newly happy Chelsy Girl.

[chelsea g.]

Gosh, Squire, thanks. I hadn't considered raising llamas (my apartment is so small), but I do rather fancy sheep. For one thing, there are so very many fantastic sheep jokes. Perhaps I'll just open two stores: Ewes-R-Us and Ramarama.

I appreciate your kind words very much.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

[russ]

thanks chelsea for being... what...? for being who you are. to put yourself "out here" for all of us to read, is staggering. Your consistant honesty of self... is no easy thing to write about, as attested even now by my bumbling attempt to convey what I feel. Anyway simply said thank you for being who you are and sharing with us on an almost daily page of cyber paper all of yourself... not only has that sharing helped you find a place of contentment - your words have helped, at least one, (and I suspect a lot of others) find, discover, admit, and possibly even understand things about themselves and in so doing created a catalyst for change. Wherever your path leads you I thank you deeply and wish you the best.