Let's meet at Hope Street

I asked my friend Mark Ivkovic if he would contribute to my Saving the Only Life I Can project by taking a photo of my favourite street sign in York and he certainly did me proud ...

Hope is a word that I've used a lot over the past couple of years but it's a hard word to pin down the meaning of - Charles Snyder defined it as "the sum of the mental willpower and waypower that you have for your goals”. Earlier this year I think I was running low on both willpower and waypower. At that point carrying on the battle against my own mind often became an act of faith with only a small slither of hope that I would ever feel like a halfway normal human being. I wonder now whether I lost hope completely for a short bleak time and that maybe it was running out of hope that signalled the lowest point for me before I started to resurface again. It's hard to know for sure - when I look back at the first three months of this year it's still as bewildering to me as it felt at the time. My hope now is that I stay well and that I help others hold onto hope and seek help a hell of a lot earlier than I did.

You can see more of Mark's talent on his professional photography website: bang | Photography

Mark's photography is inspiring enough but the way he mixes it with words on his blog is something else and this post on his own self-doubt resonates wildly with me and my own cliff edge.

And if you want to visit Hope Street yourself then you can find your own way there with the help of this Google map.

Mark and I are talking about collaborating on some more photos for this project and I'm hoping that some of his photography skills will rub off on me in the process :)

Footnote: In the 'See Also' section of the Wikipedia page there is an entry entitled 'Anything is possible when it means everything' which I love but it turns out that it's a non-existent page and there are only five search results for that phrase in Google, all of which go to dead ends ... how delightfully strange :)

The Wait of the World: Act Three

The Wait of the World, a poem in three acts 

by Helen Harrop

June 2012

Act Three:
The universe waits,
The universe watches
Its juvenile galaxies
Of birth stars and death stars
Leaving their light legacies.
Destruction and destiny
Played out through
An infinite sky ballet.
 

All stagnant satellites,
All ghostly globes,
All spinning baubles
And enslaved pebbles.
Numerous as grains of sand,
Smooth and bright
As playground marbles.
All fire and brimstone,
All hell and highwater,
All gas and vapour,
All clumsy collisions
All futile and futureless.
An orbiting ossuary.

The universe waits,
The universe watches
For the final falling star
For the celestial light to fade
For the future to fold in on itself.
One dark night of the soul
And then ...
Nothing.
All blank horizons
And inert energy laid bare
Across the wide waiting sky.

The nothingness waits,
The nothingness watches.
And there is no end
To the endless beginning.

The Wait of the World: Act Two

The Wait of the World, a poem in three acts 

by Helen Harrop

June 2012

Act Two:
The world waits,
The world watches
Each extinguished epoch
With the ignoble grace
Of a billiard ball
Unwrinkled by time.
The world is a spinning spectator
As race follows race
With no winners or losers.

The earth continues
With no worries of science
Or physics, or gravity.
Simply everything in its place
And a place for Everything.
No historic histrionics
Just a past-less presence
With no fear to furrow brows.
The world just is and always was
The universe’s eternal yes.

The globe endures
Impermanent parasites;
A barely perceptible,
Innumerable nuisance.
From ethereal single-cells
To insignificant Jurassic beasts;
All imaginary mosquitoes
Evidenced only by their egos
And their venomous bites.
All fury beasts,
All faithless and dreaming,
All fearful and hiding,
All hopeless and hurting,
All hate-filled and hunting,
All pestilence and predation.

The earth devours their dead
Builds mountains from their bones
And forests from their fallen flesh,
Drawing their blood into its corpulent core.
Deaf to their desperate prayers,
Unmoved by their moods and means.
Blind to the damage they do,
The earth lives on in fermitude, not servitude.
Each eon blinked by and instantly forgotten.

The world waits,
The world watches
As the moon conducts tides and
The sun devours time and
The universe opens its waiting arms.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Wait of the World: Act One

The Wait of the World, a poem in three acts 

by Helen Harrop

June 2012

Act One:
The woman waits,
The woman watches,
All glacial grace
As the world passes her by.
All vitriol and volcano
Beneath her micron thin skin.
She travels on
An arrested trajectory
With no peace or progress.
She is a dream dredger
Who is drowning on dry land.
Every day she fills her pockets
With stone-dead desires
And walks to “the bottom
Of a great ocean of air”.

The woman waits,
The woman watches
For permission to proceed.
All chaotic energy and wet steam,
All silent fury and invisible screams.
The vestiges of verbal violence
Still hang heavy overhead
Like storms over Thor’s anvil
Threatening her mind’s meniscus.
Her heart is a prismic prison,
All refracted hope,
All shattered light,
All white heat.
She is held together
Against her will.

The world waits but forgets to watch
And even the orbiting satellites
Avert their gaze
Until one day it slips her mind
To hold her molecules together.
And hairline cracks that race
Across her porcelain mask
Become fractured canyons.
And the whole universe glimpses
The glittering carbon centre
Of this daily doomed star
As she achieves escape velocity
And hurtles into the world’s waiting arms.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I can tell I'm awake

 

The latest donation to Saving the Only Life I Can is a particularly special one because it has been donated by my cousin, Peter Pollock. I found out that Peter suffers from depression after I told his sister about my depression. It was the same moment that I inadvertently broke the news to my Grandma (I'd naively assumed that she'd already know about it from my Mum). When I've finally mustered the courage to tell friends and family about my depression it's quite surprising how many times those people have responded by telling me that they, or someone close to them who I also know, also has depression. It made me realise how important it is that I carried on telling people - If I stayed silent about my depression then it meant that those around me would almost definitely stay silent about their depression. And a dark secret would be allowed to hide in the centre of my family and in the centre of my life.

As soon as I read Peter's poem on his blog I asked him if he'd be prepared to donate it to my project and he very kindly said yes without a second thought. Thank you cousin - for your poem and for walking alongside me in the darkness.

Crying

I’m awake.
I can tell I’m awake,
I never feel like crying in my sleep.
My eyes are closed.
I’m not holding back tears.
I never try to hold them back, they just never come.
What happened?
Why do I want to cry?
What terrible thing is affecting me this way?
Nothing.
No horrible event,
It’s all just my messed up brain chemistry.
I hate it.
It won’t go away.
…Tomorrow will be the same as every other day.
I’m awake.
I can tell I’m awake -
I never feel like crying in my sleep.

by Peter Pollock

I Am Trying to Break Your Hearts

When I first volunteered to do my first Bettakultcha talk back in February my main motivations for stepping up to the plate were a) so there would be at least one female speaker at the inaugaral York Bettakultcha and b) so I could attend free of charge, because I was having cash-flow, ahem, issues at the time. With very little thought on my behalf I suggested that my talk might a (relatively) light-hearted take on my experience of depression and suicidal impulses, and how worry was both threatening and saving my life. Little did I know at that point that I was about to spiral even deeper into the darkness and resurface back into the light again. A week before my talk I had been to the brink and back so it was a very different talk than the one I'd planned to do - Richard and Ivor were kind enough to let me go first and for the 5 minutes I was talking everything was a bit of a blur.

Anyhoo, enough rambling from me ... spend 5 minutes watching what I said and then take a closer look at the smiling friends and family that surround you - some of them may be silently enduring more pain than you can imagine possible. Find out who they are and then just bear witness to their pain - they don't need you to fix them, they just need you to listen and walk alongside them through the darkness until they can find their own way back home.



And here are my slides with accompanying notes.

BettaKultcha Talk, York, March 2012

View more documents from iamhelenharrop

Say something I'll remember the next day

Wilful Missing's 'bright white piano'

DIY by Wilful Missing

I really pleased to announce that the third track to be officially donated to my 'Saving the Only Life I Can' project is DIY by the absurdly humble and beautifully melancholic Wilful Missing. If you aren't as pedantic about punctuation as I am then you can sing along to the lyrics here:




For me this song encapsulates the maddening ambivalence and amnesia of chronic depression - it got to the point where every morning I felt like I awoke at the cliff's edge, peering into the void and I had to spend the rest of the day inching away from the edge, desperately trying to find something, or someone, to treasure, something to celebrate, something to hold onto - any small fragment that would give me hope and help me in my daily remembering of why life itself was worth  holding onto.

"Baby say something,
say something I'll remember
the next day,
but the shadows
conceal us
from hoping."

I'm hugely grateful to Wilful Missing for writing such beautiful music - You can hear more of their tracks on their Bandcamp page. I strongly advise you to go and see them play live if you get the chance ... it's an indescribably magical experience. If you live in York then you are in luck because they're playing at The Stereo on Gillygate next Thursday.