My name is Melinda. This is me, knitting in the park:
I live with an ever-fluctuating group of plants in a studio apartment on the side of a hill overlooking the valley in which I have spent all of my life (minus five months in Guadalajara). I am in my late 20s and have had one grand love affair in my life…. which may or may not have been the grandest mistake of said life. I am a fundamentalist Christian who has questioned just about everything I can question and hasn’t quite come to a conclusive decision, I have a degree in Spanish but work as an accounts payable clerk in a lumberyard, I’m an erstwhile idealist who is beginning to wonder if there really is any hope for America. I love the idea of sustainable agriculture and locally-supported farming, I knit and own a spinning wheel (which needs repaired before I can use it again), and I have three large bookcases full of books. Oh yeah, and no television.
At this point in my life I’ve reached a sort of crossroads and I’m not sure which path I’m going to take, which makes me think very much of the John Mayer song that talks about a “quarter-life crisis.” I’ve minors in Latin American Studies and in music, both of which fascinate me and which I wouldn’t mind studying further in graduate school, but I’m still nicely in debt from my previous eight years of college (I really like school, okay?!). My search for meaning and purpose in my life is leading and has led into some interesting avenues and it is an attempt to sort these avenues out that has prompted this blog. Well, that and the desperate desire to have a blog on which I’m allowed to express any and all of my opinions without the fear that my friends will begin wondering about my mental health (um, argh?!!!? One bout of melancholy does not a severe depression make.) or that I’ll get sucked into a ridiculous political or pseudo-moral argument with friends (beautiful people, but thank heavens they lived nine hours away for that one argument!). I’m interested in a variety of subjects and hope to use this page as a springboard for topics anywhere from knitting (woot!) to international politics to (sorry) outbursts of personal frustration or whatever catches my fancy at the moment. I have slight magpie tendencies.
In early October of 2008 I was diagnosed as having soft bipolar disorder (also known to some friends as george disorder), not a complete shock considering my maternal family history, but still not something that most people would say I had. I was seeing a psychiatrist because of (what I found out was) severe clinical depression brought on by a series of events including graduating, getting mono, having my grand romance end and a crap job with a psycho boss. My “kind” of bipolar disorder is typified by depression punctuated by bouts of feeling normal, which are my hypomanic phases. I have never taken medication for my moods before this, but after losing two-and-a-half years of my life to bipolar disorder, not to mention my self-esteem and sense of well-being, I started taking the mood stabilizer Abilify.
My blog name is from the story of Ruth in the Bible. Ruth’s mother-in-law had lost her husband and both sons and was returning to her homeland when her two daughters-in-law expressed the desire to go with her. In the course of the conversation Naomi says “…Call me not Naomi [Pleasant], call me Mara [Bitter]: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.” The play on words was the punchline of a joke between my dear friend Marie and her then-estranged husband and the phrase stuck with me. I chose it not because I’m necessarily bitter (well, not most days), but because this moment marked a transition in Naomi’s life between a huge loss and a going forward. At the risk of emo angst, this last year marked the end of most of my romanticism and idealism (yeah, okay, maybe Mara does apply quite a bit. Stupid Joel.) and I’m ready to look ahead… sans two daughters-in-law, obviously.
