Last night, J mentioned having a massage and I started crying. I received a kind email from a friend and started crying. I walked into work and started crying. The tears are the clear and clean kind that flow easily and without obvious provocation. They aren’t accompanied by sobs or sounds or preceded by any particular thought. They just come. As much as they worry me, they are also a relief, a release. They remind me of the tears I shed after my father died. Righteous, innocent and somehow appropriate. But, these feel like more than grief. As a die hard advocate of being conscious and self-aware, I am uncomfortable not understanding either the exact source or the lessons behind my current bleakness. I am usually good at rising above the fray and gleaning insights but not this time. Joy seems far off. My mouth feels oddly comfortable in a downward cast. The oh-so-scary word ‘depression’ is fitting. Luckily, I take comfort in my knowledge, gleaned from graduate school and the DSM-V, that this is the situational variety, not the chronic.

Ten days have passed since my surgery, most spent horizontal. Two tumors were removed, both benign. A sign of relief was heard ‘round the world but I am still measuring the days in 4 hour increments as directed by the pain medication. The hazy days...

Usually, I see the good in the bad. That’s Pollyanna’s job. But this week, the tables turned and I saw bad come from good. A fews days ago I grabbed a Post-it note and scribbled the following phrase: Dripping from the source of life and nourishment come visions of pain and degradation beyond imaging. And so has been my experience of late. My surgery has provided me a window into an ugly world I have never seen in such relief. Through this process—before the surgery and now as I assimilate my experience and tend to my wound—I was granted a glimpse into a world of unspeakable pain and suffering—and I’m not talking about my own. Like a parted curtain, my incision revealed a chasm of darkness I was previously not ready to see. As I stood naked