Echoing

Bitterness: As soon as you consciously wish to forget something, it becomes almost impossible.

It's hard for me to remember physical pain once it's passed, but I can remember how it felt to be profoundly depressed, and re-collecting the original pain, holding it whole again in my hands — old, but whole — strikes an echo hurt, a meta-pain.

Melissa wrote [trigger warning for eating disorders] that this grief for the past self and for those unforgettable things is a good sign, even when it hurts deeply. Because it means that sympathy has grown where the hatred used to be.

You should read Lexi's post too, about the mean reds vs. the blues and "it's like depression has its own version of ptsd." I'm grateful for her brain.

In what sense can you leave it behind, the days of leaving scars, of wanting to be dead? And how, without forgetting, without pretending that I don't still have to watch against depression?

I want to say, Too much lost. That's part of the pain.

What lost? Some innocence, I guess. Hatred and violence and hopelessness put an end to a certain type of innocence, and those have had their place in parts of my saga with depression.

And so much to leave behind.

Theodicy. Is it the essence of evil, that suffering is meaningless?

"Humans, including women, construct meaning. That means that when something happens to us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them, some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of tempered steel."
– Andrea Dworkin
  Intercourse

The evangelical in me says that that's what grace means here, that this will all mean something, and that it's not just self-illusion to think so.

I have to believe that. In an integrity of experience and purpose that will be clear in the end, with enough distance, or in those rare minutes. That there will be a story to this, to me, and that it will not be senseless.