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Ice Cycles

© Katherine E. Rabenau

I feel like I have nothing to say. I have been sitting here for several hours staring at a blank screen, waiting for the article that I have put off writing to come pouring - or even trickling - out through my fingers and onto the screen. No such luck. I am stuck in a continuing winter funk. My neighbor and her dog love winter. LOVE it. They romp in the snow and think the cold is a grand and glorious thing. Not me. I am a Spring and Fall girl, myself. Not too hot, not too cold, that's how I like it. Snow is beautiful - especially here, lacing the trees and covering the mountains. It stays pretty too, not like in the city. And the house I'm living in gives birth to some of the most spectacular icicles I have ever seen. But despite the aesthetic aspects of winter, it tends to make me even more anxious than normal.

The human mind is remarkably complex and creative. Many of us who carry deep psychological wounds, have a gift for turning that complexity and creativity against ourselves. When it snows, even when it isn't terribly deep, I feel like I have lost all control of my life. This is insane, of course. Nothing much has changed. Since I seldom go out, why should cold or the addition of a layer of white stuff make any real difference? But it does. I start to feel trapped in a way that is above and beyond my normal stress at the idea of leaving the house. There is some reality to this. Canes and snow are not particularly compatible, but I have gone out in snow. Last year and the year before, I even shovelled. This year I have been lazy about even that. This is partly because my neighbor is very efficient. She does all the hard stuff and I get lazier by the day. The more I don't do things, the more impossible they begin to seem to me.

I seem to be snowed in in my head as well right now. I think I probably need to try a different medication than Lexapro. It doesn't seem to be doing much for me at present. In the two plus years that I have been writing articles, even the most difficult of them has not come as slowly as this one. It is like I am writing in a mental blizzard hoping to stumble into the doorway of an idea. Super Nanny is playing in the background. I wish she would pop by and lead my innner children to shelter and teach my inner parents how to handle me. But alas, she is off in Arizona somewhere dealing with real parents and children and I'm snowbound in an inner blizzard groping for something to hold onto.

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