Grace & Compassion

It's not very British, I know, and it will upset my mother (Mamma, I'm okay now, I promise), but I'm afraid that the looming ogre, meh-lank-ily, has been after me the last couple of days.  The signs are consistent. For example:

1. This article in the New York Times, on the joys of living on one's own in the wilderness, sounded very appealing.
2. I was reluctant to get out of bed this afternoon and showed up ten minutes late to meet the school bus. (Massive guilt sets in usually, even at the thought of a nap.)
3. Los Angeles was my enemy; every billboard, every hip teenager, its pristine over-watered lawns, every manifestation of conspicuous wealth, even the fast-food joints made me miserable.  I wanted to be in England, now that Spring is here (with apologies to Browning)
4. I cried, nay, I sobbed, for about two hours, without a break, sitting up in bed, looking entirely hideous, face red and wet and crinkled, both dogs staring at me, ear cocked to the side, with an occasional empathetic bat of the tail.
5. I culled nearly 200 ersatz friends on Facebook because I decided they wouldn't even know what I looked like if I bumped into them. (Interesting story: When I was with Minky in an Italian restaurant at the Grove the other day and she was projectile vomiting, I spied a man I know, who has sat around the table of a non-profit board meeting with me, and he said not a word to me, even when my child had fainted and the fire department rushed in. Not a word.) 

Only this morning I was giving advice to a girlfriend who was suffering from depression.  I said something like "Meds like SSRI's have come leaps and bounds in the last ten years; there's really no stigma to mental illness anymore."

Anne Lamott, whom I had the pleasure of seeing last night at Caltech says something like, why is it that you can be kind and loving to your best girlfriends but you can't treat yourself with the same grace and compassion.  I must try to remember that.