There’s a thought — or series of thoughts, really — that’s been trying to claw its way out of my brain and into the open air for a while now, but they are also the kinds of thoughts that are painful to share. Hurts to keep them in, hurts to let them out.
I haven’t been able to get the words just right. I haven’t been able to find a way to capture the whole of an all-consuming feeling in just a few words. I haven’t been able to come to terms with the fact that I don’t get to decide how you will ultimately receive this — or who you even are.
I thought I would vlog about it, because then I could just talk and maybe I wouldn’t edit it. I would just talk. But I can’t do that without talking myself in circles.
So I’m here. Trying to pin it all down in whatever words make sense for now. Knowing some things will be left out. We’ll try again another day.
***
When I was 19 and just slowly coming out of a very bad place mental health-wise, I tried to explain what I was going through to my mother. I remember crying as I told her that I was afraid that I was going to spend the rest of my life like this.
“Like this” wasn’t the bad place itself, so much as the constant cycle in and out of it. When I describe my own experience of my mental health to a new therapist I describe it kind of like a wave that you can graph. Which would be nice if true because then it could be quantified and measured and thus, perhaps, understood.
When I describe it to myself in journals, I generally use the analogy of falling into a deep pit, because this offers seemingly endless rhetorical opportunities to describe all the parts of getting into and out of the pit: sometimes I fall into it abruptly, others I feel myself sliding; the tricks I’ve learned from two decades of living like this are all the handholds that I’ve left in the walls of the pit. And so on and so forth. I can map that wave onto places in and out of the pit.
At 19 I still clung to the hope that maybe all of this was actually just the product of adolescence. I saw my first therapist when I was 11, and it felt entirely possible to me that this was something I might just grow out of. My great fear was that I was wrong.
And I was. I know now, at 30, that one of the things I feared most in this world a decade ago was, in fact, true. I suppose there’s a kind of triumph in knowing that — in seeing a great fear realized and finding yourself still standing.
The truth is (and has always been) that the upswings are not me walking away from the pit, leaving it behind forever; it’s walking in circles that will eventually lead me back to it. In better times I walk in wider circles, sure, but circles all the same.
I’ve been thinking about it particularly as it relates to various high profile suicides. This is something I wanted to say last year around this time but I couldn’t find the words. And now, here we are again with this most tragically evergreen of topics.
There is something uniquely crushing about the suicide deaths of people who are older and seemingly more together than I am because it is this stark reminder that this fight might actually be forever after all.
There is this thing inside my own brain that wages war against itself, and no amount of reassurance that I am loved will change that. I have been thinking about the best way to have told that 19 year old girl that she might be right and so the real trick for her is to figure out what the fuck to do when things get bad.
I think there is some power in acknowledging that – for me, at least. I will likely be fighting this indefinitely, and some days I am winning and other days I am not, but it’s real, it’s real, it’s real.
When I am at my worst, I lose my words. I have been an active chronicler of my feelings for many years and there is this public record — one that maybe only I know how to spot — of the times where I went quiet.
The wave you can graph, the pit — these are tools I constructed for myself during my mid and late twenties in part because I still couldn’t even articulate what was happening to me.
There were times in my early twenties when things got bad and I remember feeling like I couldn’t move. I remember lying on the floor of my room, thinking to myself that all I needed to do was get up, do something, anything, but I just couldn’t. And to make it worse, I couldn’t even say why, really.
It’s important to keep all of that in mind when we talk about people requesting the help they need. When I’m in that place that I don’t really have words for, when I am powerless, the idea of reaching out becomes this extremely tricky equation that I cannot solve.
My complicated relationship with therapy is a separate conversation for another day, but it’s worth stating plainly that the help of mental health professionals is an important component of this. If any of this is familiar to you, reach out to someone as soon as you are able. Be prepared for the possibility that you’ll need to try a few people before you find a good fit. Just get that resource into your back pocket in a better time so that you’re ready for the worst.
That’s how I view all of this: I am assembling an emergency kit, of sorts. And this, right here, just talking about it openly is an immensely valuable part of that kit.
Knowing that the worst of it coincides with losing my words means that it is very legitimately important for my own survival that I use my words when I have them. And so naming the thing, this ongoing battle with depression and suicidal ideation, is part of it.
I also know that in previous dark times, hearing different people talk about their experiences helped, too. It helped to hear people articulate things in ways I hadn’t previously considered — that helped me get my words back. Here is a metaphor or an idea or something that I can cling to that makes my experience feel real, and which I can thus use to pull myself back to the world.
The thing that I really take away from these moments where the conversation gets high profile again is that we’re all in this shit together. Sometimes that can make it harder because you’re fighting your own internal war while your friend is fighting theirs and you want so badly to help, but how can you when you’re still so deep in it yourself?
But even then I remind myself that the very act of staying is one thing I can do for my friend, and that is not nothing. So I also want to pause to say thank you so much for staying, whoever you are. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, thank you, thank you.
The piece of this that is hopeful for me is that each of these crushing reminders that this will never go away is also a reminder of the value and impact of my own life. I’m not saying it’s always going to be the thing that gets me through the days where I’m losing, but the fact that I can be so affected by someone I’ve never met is an important reminder that my actions matter, that if I can do nothing else, maybe I can at least rest up and try to fight again tomorrow. It doesn’t make it all better, but it’ll do for today.
A decade later, I have finally come to accept that I am living with a mental illness and likely always will be. But I have these times of wellness, and in them I do what I can to get systems in place for my future care. One piece of that has been finding better ways to talk about it, so thank you for listening. I still have so much work left to do, but — hopefully — I still have so much time left to do it.