I’m not sure what it’s like for other people. I can’t say what their dark place of mental residence is decorated with or smells like. I don’t know how it tastes or how much it weighs on their shoulders. I do know it’s a place other people go.
I’m not sure if I can, or should, explain my personal brand of Lavender Black. There isn’t a map to show how I surrender to such a place, or how I eventually find my way back. It simply, happens.
I can say that naming my dark is an act of conventional word defiance. It’s my personal perspective; the condition may be ordinary, but I can name it and decorate it any way I please. Lavender Black isn’t a desirable destination, but it is a place. My place. It’s quiet there and the deeper I wander in, the fact is, the less I participate in the world around me.
Typically, I can still write while meandering through such a space of individual seclusion. Some of my best writing has originated from time spent in my lavender realm, but sometimes, I move past the threshold of expression and the result is silence. It’s where I’ve been these last few weeks, beyond the green fields and purple flowers. In this version, I walked deep into the black parts of Lavender and disappeared for awhile.
Going to Lavender Black is easy enough, coming back proves difficult. There’s something sadly comfortable about suffocating in a zone meant only for single occupancy. It’s a self indulgent territory dripping with familiarity and knowing. If there’s one place that covets a thousand reasons for being dark and twisty, it’s the back room in my mind that collects life’s little black trinkets like a chemically imbalanced pack rat.
Surface maintenance. That’s how I handle day to day reality when I’ve gone off into my place of silence. When a body is in trouble, it has the ability to shut off functions to everything but the vitals. I’ve fined tuned that perspective when it comes to the dark side of my personality. Vitals=Family and that’s the scope of my selective interactions during Lavender Black spells.
Either people will understand this about me, or they won’t. It’s nothing personal. Never has been. I understand that it isn’t easy to accept or understand, not when people interact and depend on feedback/input from one another. My occasional shut downs go against the human nature rules of engagement and I realize I always run the risk of hurting the feelings of other people when I dissolve into myself. Regrettably, my only recourse is to try and pick up the pieces once I’ve came back.
I’m not sure it serves any purpose by writing about this, here, publicly, other then disclosure. But it is who I am. A part of me, one I find both interesting and challenging. Just as I observe the world around me, it’s important I spend time observing my interior workings, the beautiful, the black and the unexplainable…….
) the one that lets me get away with anything) I swear, I’ve never wrote anything to bring shame on the family ( I don’t think anyway) and have only wrote nice things about everyone once in awhile. There are long time readers that could even vouch for me on my innocence if needed~~ Just think, I could have sat you down and revealed to you that I was moving to France to become a nun, or that I had been secretely working as a stripper on weekends. Right??
I’ve noticed a measure of evolution within myself of late. I realize everyone experiences moments of improvement, or backward progression, which makes my shifts neither remarkable or extraordinary. However, paying attention to changes and at best claiming them from time to time feels like a sound notion.