Feeling Melancholy
Last Sunday I spend a bit of the afternoon walking around Georgetown. I haven't really gone downtown all that much in the past month and a half. Been feeling lazy and at a creative low.
Something happened the other night that ended up in a disaster. I have a hard time saying no to any kind of invitation. I was taught to have the courtesy to show up when you get an invite. But everytime I go out to these things, I'm so completely out of place and end up returning home feeling mentally drained raped. I sleep and wake up with severe depression.
I should know my lesson by now since it happens literally every time. But my gut instinct to avoid and decline invitations is overridden with the hope that maybe this time it will be better. It's a new environment with a new group of people yet it always ends up the same result feeling like a fool.
After waking up from a terrible night, it's so easy to just stay at home and drown in your ocean of sadness. And I think that is what made me grab my camera and take the metro downtown.
Photography is where I feel like a fish in water. I'm not necessarily happy but I'm not sad anymore. This is my part in the societal food chain and have no ambition to move anywhere else in the heirarchy.
On a good sunny day, people like to sit down at the waterfront where the ducks and gulls hang out, boats are passing by, you can see the Kennedy Center to your left and Arlington, VA to your right and it's a favorite spot to enjoy the sunset. But due to the rain, there was no one there.
As I came to the edge of the water, a flock of ducks were hanging out at the edge. You can see large beads of water droplets on them. When I got closer to them, they all jumped into the water and moved further away from me.
There was one duck that still stood against the edge and thought he was going to plop into the water to follow the rest of the flock. But he just stood there staring out at the water. The rest of the ducks were getting farther away but it didn't phase him at all to catch up with them.
As I kept looking at this duck staring out into the water, with the dark gray drizzling sky it was almost an accurate depiction how I felt all last night and this morning.
I don't know why I felt better all of a sudden, seeing a meloncholy duck alone at the edge of the water with light rain pouring on a gray Sunday, but it did. Maybe because it was because I was able to find a photo that accurately depicted how I felt. The hardest part of being depressed is not having the right words or medium to reflect what's on your mind and when that outlet is blocked, the depression keeps rotting away inside you.
When I took this photo it felt like taking the sadness out of my head and putting it into a photo.
