Drishti - Focus

Greetings!

It's the most wonderful time of the year...at least in these parts it is. Main Street is bedecked with lights. The wait time at restaurants is an hour. And you can't find parking for shit because Scrooge, Jack Frost, the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Father Christmas are out patrolling the town, along with about 50 of their friends.

I love living here this time of year, but inevitably December also makes me wistful because I think of the things I thought I'd do this year or the people I wish were still with me to celebrate. So it's a mixed bag. Like most of life.

The key is the focus, which has always been hard for me.

At 24, I was diagnosed with OCD and clinical depression, and I was given lots of different medicines until something started working. These days, I don't say "magic" words over and over in my head anymore whenever certain triggers occur. I don't panic anymore if I can't step on all the leaves or touch the mailboxes during a run. Nor do I feel compelled to run for hours until my feet are covered in blisters if I get angry. The marvel of medicine has freed me from those things.

But I still see the world in black and white, and I frequently get lost inside my own head. Even though I've been taking medicine for a very, very long time now, I still count numbers every day when water is running and I still fixate so much sometimes that I break out in hives. Maybe I will have those things forever. I don't know.

What I do know is that it's really hard for me not to obsess about things.

Recently I dumped red wine on my MacBook, which it turns out, is actually really bad for your MacBook. I hadn't purchased AppleCare because I never used it on my previous computer, and at the time, AppleCare was only available in an expensive multi-year package.

So I spent the money I was saving to buy a Yamaha Clavinova on a new MacBook.

This is digital so has a smaller footprint and never needs to be tuned; yet each note was recorded by amalgamating 100 keystrokes from one of Yamaha's concert grand pianos.

Then I became very sad. I was talking to Therapy Elsa, and I told her the sadness started with the MacBook disaster, but it confused me because that hardly seemed a reason to experience an extended sad period. It was only a computer!

In fact, I was actually rather impressed with myself after the MacBook disaster. I didn't fixate on it and make myself sick. I was upset but grateful that I had a piano fund with which to buy a new computer. I credited this to my (as of right now) 800 sessions and 86+ hours of meditation.

So why, then, was I so despondent?

It then occurred to me that it was November, and that is when the time changes. In November and April (inexplicably, both), I become dangerously depressed. Yet for the first time in perhaps a decade, I hadn't completely lost my shit. Cara hadn't had to come over to sit on the couch with me and talk me into breathing. Nor had she needed to drag me out of my home and to a bowling alley with her kids. I was a fully functioning -- albeit sad -- human being!!!!! Never had I been so happy to be sad!!!!!

In yoga, drishti is your gaze, or point of focus. When trying to hold a balancing pose, it's often helpful to find one stable point on which to glue your eyes. That way, whenever you become wobbly (and with Tree pose, I always picture myself as a Whomping Willow when this happens), you're looking at something that can hold you steady -- or if you're feeling Shakespearean, your drishti is the star to every wand'ring bark.

So I guess what I'm saying here is, Life has been rough in more ways than one lately. But that's okay. Because Life has also been good. Why, just the other day, I volunteered for improv in front of the entire faculty and was surprisingly thanked (along with my fellow thespians) with a year of free Chick-Fil-A!

So yeah. I'm blue. I'm spending 10 hours a day at school and cleaning my own classroom. I have no digital piano of any kind. And it's dark as fuck outside. But it's going to be okay. Because drishti.