If there was ever a day I needed my polo family today might be it. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it is just a frustrating exercise in humility and patience. Others it just clicks to make a perfect couple hours. When the horses play well and are obedient. When the mallet actually finds the ball. Those are few. Thankfully the gods smiled on me today. When I pulled up I didn’t want to be there. I was lost in my head and so very sad. But I had forced myself to go. In the few times I have stayed home I regretted it and felt worse. In the first chukkar it ended up very mismatched and the guys handed us a very good beating. My mood wasn’t getting any better, if anything I felt worse. I found myself standing at the end of the aisle alone thinking about why I had come. I made a decision to just go with it. To shake the unsettled feeling and try to just be. To experience my day as it unfolded. Not to over think it, or force it. To just breath and let my body do what I have spent almost a lifetime trying to teach it. In the next chukkar I felt it click. My mind literally shifted its axis and I was suddenly experiencing life in real-time, not on the slowed delay as it had been all week. heck, most of the winter. I’ll admit I think I let it get away from me a bit. I let myself play in a far more reckless manner than I have been. I had taken the worrying out of it. Polo needs that. It is a sport of speed and power. There isn’t time for pauses. You pause and you get beat to the play. It was a fast brutal type of play which both of my horses happen to excel at. I walked away from my second chukkar thinking I could survive. Yeah, I know strange how polo can unleash a very different side of me. Maybe it is the sense of mastery when it works. Or the pushing of the limits of my athletic ability. It is an adrenaline rush akin to a hit of cocaine. that wash as it hits the back of your nose and your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. This is Living it throbs in your mind. Though, in reality, is it? Is it life? or is it just a chemical cascade richoceting off the synapses. If adrenaline is all the mind needs why not chase it more? I can shrug off the last of the polo jitters just an hour or so later. It isn’t the cure. If only it was. As my day wrapped up and I pulled out of the driveway to take the polo ponies home my mind started to slow with a shudder. I felt it. I knew it was coming. I went back in my mind grasping hard to the fresh memories of the plays of the day. Where it all went right. Holding tight and trying not to let go. As the farm grew closer and my polo day grew farther I struggled. I hung in there though. I didn’t let go so easily. I couldn’t. not yet. I wasn’t willing to drift off into that god forsaken landscape waiting for me in my head. I didn’t want to watch the crystal clear images of my veins laid open over a crimson landscape, or the needle in my arm. I didn’t want to go back. I had spent so many days with them. I had directed, produced, edited and acted in all of them. They were horrifying in their reality. It was not the neon sign beckoning for me to come play, no, these were just gritty cold hard truths. I spent my days immersed in them. In every detail. from start to finish. each and every one. There was no horror, no recoil. yet, not draw either. I felt no compulsion to act on any one of them. Yet there was a complete and utter belief that one would be my exit. I just had not found the right one. I found myself turning each around and around finding every flaw. Every pro and con. and so it went around and around. When I wasn’t lost in the images I was lost in the details left undone. The will to rewrite. The paperwork to finish. The letters to write. In the end it seemed just too damn much. I didn’t have the energy nor the willpower to accomplish all of it. In the shadow of that truth I watched my mind grind to a frozen tired place. That is where I found myself yesterday and this morning. I won’t commit to this because I don’t want to screw up again. sure that might be a pitiful reason to choose not to kill yourself, but I guess it is enough. good enough for now. I have walked all the way onto that ledge more than a few times before and I have gotten lost. I have forgotten pertinent details and have made mistakes. I will not go back again unless it is right. All of it. sure it sounds bad. I know that. I just know where I am right now. Is this just the detritus casting off a bipolar brain? possibly? or is this me? No illness just reality. Is my viewpoint skewed? is my judgment marred? I honestly don’t know anymore. I truly don’t. It feels so fucking real. so right. How can it be wrong? Haw can it just be some mood state? What the fuck is the matter with me? or is there nothing wrong with me beyond a hellish turn of events that have created a life too difficult to live? Is that my truth? Has my life and its stressors exceeded my mind’s ability to cope? or is this just another garden variety winter depression in all its brutal soul leaching abilities? Why can’t I even see the difference? Do I just blindly trust what Virgil or Beatrice has to say? Do I agree when she asks me to change meds? Because I know that will happen. What if this is just life? Just plain shit circumstances than no amount of medications in the world can alter. Do we just tick off the box that says “patient is experiencing suicidal ideation” and go from there. The knee jerk reaction is to fix it. I know that, but I don’t think this is fixable. This life is a disaster right now. That much I KNOW, no map needed. Is it going to get better? in the short run after chasing a white ball and beating the shit out of it, maybe. Is it fixable in the long run? My mind does not see that. This is not working. They will foreclose again. I will never again get saved by a man I both love and hate. I have committed to a life that is day by day breaking me down physically and emotionally. I chose it. I set this course. Is it so bad I want to get off this path? The simple answer is yes, because I cannot get off this path. It is at once home, a career, and so many other infinite moving pieces that jockey for my worries. They battle and clash by day and night never leaving the vacant space behind my eyes. Who in their right mind would stay? Who would subject themselves to torment both real and imagined in its shadow. I do. To be suicidal is no surprise is it? It isn’t sick. is it? Is it??? I am so fucking confused and lost. I will stop my rambling and hope tomorrow is okay though I have such little faith right now. I have stopped having the ability to truly see my reality, though I wonder if that is true. The lifelong patient in my yells I am just sick again and to let them take care of me. But I do not fully believe it. I can’t focus enough to figure out which it is, or is it something else entirely I haven’t noticed. I’m not sure I even have the ability to see the big picture at this point. just don’t know.