Greetings from Day 4 of anti-convulsant meds.  Side effects of irritability and moodiness, in my case, are like a part of your brain being inhabited by your in-law with the nasty tongue and enough knowledge of the family cesspit to push all your buttons.  She’d be less annoying if she weren’t, at some level, right.   It’s not that the drug puts new thoughts in your head.  It takes your thoughts and sends them ten degrees south, tinged with what Anne Lamott called “Radio K-FKT”.   Last night it started playing in stereo.

Among the tracks on that playlist, inevitably, are songs about the risk of giving up loved things.   When I wrote at the end of my last message about having those wonderful wings, I was in part cribbing from a recent movie – Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie.  It’s a retelling of Snow White from the POV of the wicked witch, who in this version is an ageing, embittered fairy who once had such magnificent wings.   She is seduced by a man who puts her into a trance and brutally saws the wings off, to bring them back as a trophy to his king.  The best scene in an otherwise mediocre movie is when Maleficent awakens from the sleep, discovers her wings reduced to stumps, and cries out in anguish.  It’s by far the best performance I’ve ever seen Angelina give.  Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she drew on the grief of her recent double mastectomy, chosen as a prophylactic against her heightened risk of cancer.

In my case, the initial changes are easy, and some are even making themselves – I seem to have naturally lost my nightly taste for wine, and I live in a wonderfully walkable city  – but some changes, if they must come, will be hard.  This week’s side effects have sent me down the path of rumination on such possible “losses.”  For example, this whole business prevented Beret and me from vacationing at the Strong family cabin on the Truckee River, where my chief pleasure is swimming against the delicious current in the lee of a great granite boulder.  It’s just as well we’re not there, because river swimming would be “not indicated” in my current state.    So tonight I resorted to a trusted anti-depressant: I walked the dog under a changing Colorado evening sky.  As I admired the clouds and mountains, my Ipod randomly served up Tracey Thorn’s Swimming:

When the hurricane dies down
And everything lies on the ground
We will see no end in sight
We will be besieged by light
Right now we are just keeping afloat
But soon we’ll be swimming
Swimming
It’s all over so let’s go on
There’s nothing left so let’s keep on
We can’t keep on so let’s keep on

There is no reason so let’s
Make our own let’s
Make our own
Let’s —

When I’ve been in places like this before, that’s pretty much what I’ve done, and what I see people around me do every day, dealing with challenges bigger than mine.  Keep swimming, even if you’re not allowed to swim.