Melancholia Lapping At My Feet

It started as Monday morning blues that began on Sunday afternoons…not long after I woke up, late, often after two consecutive weekend nights of merriment. Ironically, on the day of the Sabbath I would take my deeply irreligious self into a short hibernation…hiding behind the Sunday newspapers, complemented with steaming hot coffee and maybe a piece of cake or a sandwich at a Starbucks or in the early days, at a Barista. I’d ignore calls from friends and from Global Telelink’s irrepressible telemarketers. I’d check emails with an unblinking red Stop sign on my chat client. I’d lie on the grass by the Marina tennis courts, eyes shaded from the sun but also from the glances of over-friendly passersby or picnickers who might try to strike up a conversation, book open but unread by my side. Sometimes I’d sit in the outdoor section of the diner in Ghirardelli Square, my chair turned towards the broad sea-view and away from other patrons, actually reading a book. Only smiling politely at the waitress refilling the coffee, but otherwise keeping to myself. Other times I’d stay at home and watch TV and surf the net until there was nothing to see and nothing to read…and then I’d read some more and watch some more. After five weeks’ worth of a sane person’s talking squeezed into a regular work week and a couple of nights of catching up with friends, Sunday was My day. It was the day that I let the melancholia in.

I only put a word to the mood a couple of years back. Until then it was…as I mentioned…it was just an early onset of Monday morning blues. But even when work was good or not stressful, I’d still find myself slipping into the warm, cozy, misty, floaty sense where I was shut off from the world in a daydreamland of my own. Its difficult to describe the feeling. Its not a happy feeling, nor a sad one. Its not an intense feeling of any kind. Vaguely soothing is the best way to describe it, I guess. I’ve never really looked up the meaning of the word melancholia – always just worked with a vague sense of what it meant and the emo-picture it conveyed to me. But once I verbalized it as what I was feeling – it just felt completely right. And so now that’s my word.

Often the mood comes unbidden if I’m alone but I can summon it too by listening to the right songs (I have a playlist called Melancholia on my iPod). Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here will do it every time. So will George Michael’s Older, Corey Crowder’s Here’s Looking at You Kid, or Michael Buble’s Home. I can just as easily chase it away by putting on my Club playlist or calling a friend or just putting on a Will & Grace rerun.

For a short period back there, I wasn’t feeling melancholic any more. My life was full of activity every day of the week. At work and outside. On Sundays the closest that I could come to it, was feeling mellow. A nice feeling but not the same. The first few weeks I actually found it refreshing that I’d somehow found a way to charge my batteries without a periodic bout of semi-isolation. That was also the period that some of you may have noticed, dear readers, that I wasn’t posting very often. But then as more weeks passed and there was still no sign of the bloody mood (or of a post), I found, to my surprise, that I was missing it. Missing melancholia…It sounded silly even to myself. I mean its not like I liked being melancholic did I?

The truth is, I actually like my bouts of melancholia – its when I usually end up writing…and I like writing quite a lot now. Once I’m done watching TV, browsing sites, lazing in the sun, driving aimlessly and there’s nothing more to do…that’s when I find I can clear my mind and let the words spill into the void, words that I’ve been watching form themselves into fragments of sentences in the back of my mind…for days, sometimes weeks and months. My friend Cheery Cynic during his short Bay Area interlude would sometimes ask me, if I told him I’d been out on a drive through the Presidio or at a movie alone, whether “I was depressed again?”. “I wasn’t” I would tell him “I’m melancholic. There’s a difference.” There is. Ask the Irish.

I think its my way of resting up – recharging my batteries so I can go out and feel ecstatic and crushed and sad and smiley and social all over again. Perhaps it has to do with my Piscean nature – per Linda Goodman, we’re condemned to be constantly torn in two directions (hence the symbol of two fish facing in opposite directions), one part, full of life and vitality wanting to jump headlong into the surf of life, the other seeking comfort and escape from the rigors of it, even if for a short period.

Whatever the explanation, I have come to realize two things. One – I like my regular melancholia time-outs. Two – this is not something that everyone can understand easily without also worrying if you’re perhaps a nascent manic depressive. But one of the great things about growing older is that you get to understanding yourself better, your likes and dislikes, and you generally start being kinder to yourself. So; just as a waist-watching foodie will over time allow herself that extra helping of pineapple upside-down cake, so will I let myself regularly have dreamy lie-ins on a phantasmic beach, letting soothing waves of melancholy break gently around me.