dales shared a piece of writing that informed our "stay mad" mural. Here is this piece of writing, which was posted on the wall next to our collaboratively generated mural in our Mad Home.
There is an otherworldly intensity to the deep dark blue A blue that not only registers in your eyes but in your heart, in your body, in your soul. It has a weight to it, a density like no other. The deep dark blue holds you in this way you never have been held. You are sure it will crush you, demolish you, extinguish you. But as this deepest blue engulfs you, it holds you. As it swaddles you, it reminds you of your wholeness.
Being engulfed in the deep dark blue collects you in a way you have not felt since before you thought about feeling. The deep dark blue surrounds you until you become nothing and you are able to become something again.
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They tell you not to dive into the deep dark blue. They tell you to fight it, to swim against it, to tread water no matter what. They tell you that to sink into the depths would mean you have lost, you have let the sadness and pain get the best of you. They never stop to think that maybe the sadness and pain are part of the best of you.
They tell you to avoid the deep dark blue, to find ways to erase it from your life. They tell you to cover over the deep dark blue. They tell you to not let it have a say in who you are and what you do. Wipe the slate clean. Let the past be the past. Start anew.Move on from the deep dark blue.
So you decide to lay planks, to construct a wall between you and its depths. You can still feel it flow beneath you. So you amass a collection of distractions: things, people, relationships, habits. Ways to ignore the ocean that rolls and creaks below your wooden blockade. You become determined to prove you don’t live on the ocean anymore; to prove you have done away with the deep dark blue.
Overtime, you begin to forget about the deep dark blue. You come to believe that its depths were a dream, maybe a childhood story someone told you. And maybe, you even begin to forget the fantasy itself. You learn to practice a denial so skillful you don’t feel the slight sway of the deep dark blue under your planks. And in time, you even erase those planks. You aren’t at sea. You aren’t afloat. You are solid. You are grounded.
But one time when you are alone, maybe laying in bed, maybe reading a book, you feel this ache. It starts somewhere in your pelvis then spreads to your chest. This pain is strangely familiar, alerting you to something missing. Your brain tries to brush it off as something from your day, something you saw on tv or heard in conversation with a friend. You brain tries it hardest to keep you forgetting.
But this ache persists. Not all the time, not in everything you do. More like an unexpected hiccup: it pops up when things seem quiet. You sporadically hiccup this pain for a while, it getting harder and harder for your brain to find excuses. You begin to ache more often, until it is almost a continuous pain. Until there is nothing you can project it onto. Until there is no practical answer to its cause.
This amplifying ache, this intensifying loss undefined, pain unexplained, begins to take over. It becomes panic. It becomes mania. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just do my regular things? Why can’t I fix this? What’s my problem? Anxieties bombard you as you remain numb to the sway of the deep dark blue beneath you.
So you set about fixing it. You set about gaining control by controlling yourself. You make an inventory of good and bad parts of you. And then you go about eradicating all the bad. And each time you complete a cull, each time you think you have purged all your evil, the pain arises again. Louder and more overwhelming. You must not have been honest enough with yourself. You must not have worked hard enough to fix it. So you intensify your self-extermination, letting less and less be good. You sever almost all of yourself from yourself. And yet the ache persists.
You are all but gone and the pain is still there. You are barely surviving all the violence you have inflicted on yourself. And, while you lay there, almost gone, almost nothing, you notice the planks. You are too tired to maintain the denial. You feel the woodgrain of the rotting planks underneath you. You begin to feel the sway of the deep dark blue.
The planks, like you exhausted from years of lies and denial, give way. You feel your battered body slip into the deep dark blue. You are sure this must be the end. Finally. You are sure this will extinguish what little light is left in you. Thank goodness. You let go.
But it’s not the end. It’s the deep dark blue. As you sink into it you feel the banished parts of yourself return. The parts you defined as too much. The parts you extracted to try to be okay. They are not too much for the deep dark blue. They are exactly what the depths desire, what they crave. The ocean collects you, holds you, embraces you, lets you be. All of it truth. All of it you. In the deep dark blue you have become nothing and everything. You have come home.