For those who read this and feel worried about me, I am in a completely different place now than I was months ago when I started documenting my anxiety and depression through writing. Today I am healthy, safe, supported, and at peace. I share this story now for those who are struggling and for those who love them. I had put this writing away for awhile as I necessarily embraced more lightness and kept my eyes focused on what was working in my life. On top of the stories of lives lost to suicide in the national news, another suicide in my community recently touched close to home. We are losing so many people around us, and sharing this story feels like one thing I can do right now.
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Drowning doesn’t look like drowning. We expect drowning victims to flail their arms and cry for help. Instead, they quietly bob below the surface, unable to speak or draw attention to themselves. People ten feet away from them don’t even know they’re drowning.
If I knew I was drowning, I would scream. That’s what I tell myself. I would reach out to my husband next to me in bed and shake him awake. I wouldn’t drown. I would scream. I would scream for help, and everyone in my life would stop, see me, and help me swim to shore.
But depression is a liar. Drowning doesn’t always look like drowning, not even to you.
“If you are struggling, please reach out.”
“Reaching out” is offered like this promised land. It is a giant wall of ice you have to search out for miles. It’s a giant wall of ice you have to scale with frozen toes and bloody fingernails, but once you are on the other side, you will fall into the soft grass, and your fingers will fill with warmth again and fresh air will caress your face. Everyone you love will be there, and they will rub their hands on you, and you will slowly thaw and start to feel again.
But what if you reach out, you do the hard work of scaling that ice wall, and what you see when you look over the other side is a land of more ice? You’ve reached out, and you feel no one is there to catch you. Nothing has changed about the way you feel. That is even scarier than when “reaching out” felt like a possibility you were journeying towards.
I’m doing all the right things, and I still feel this way. Oh my God, how much longer can I feel this way?
Drowning doesn’t look like drowning.
The smiling face in the beautiful family portrait above was the face of someone suffering with anxiety and depression in pregnancy. I wasn’t suicidal. But I was depressed and desperate and feeling out of control of my emotions and thoughts. Who knows how thin the line was between what I was experiencing and thoughts of suicide. Who knows how quickly we can cross over that line. I realized how thin that line could be, and it scared me as I was living it.
It doesn’t mean I never smiled. It doesn’t mean I never felt moments of joy or satisfaction. You could be in my life and never know I was suffering. For weeks I didn’t know I was suffering either; I just knew I didn’t like the way I felt most of the time.
I forgot what it normally felt like to be me. I couldn’t remember when it began. I started to wonder if this was who I really was, someone who felt angry, numb, exhausted, hopeless, scared, controlling, out of control.
I didn’t trust my feelings. I didn’t trust the way I described my feelings aloud. I was the unreliable narrator of my own life. When I saw the words coming out of me as I typed, I thought, “Oh shit. Is that how I feel? That sounds really bad.”
How many times did I Google the symptoms for pregnancy anxiety and pregnancy depression to look for answers to how I was feeling? How many times were my Google searches flagged with a banner at the top with the number of the National Suicide Prevention hotline?
The depression and anxiety brought with it so much shame. I’m not supposed to be feeling this way. I’m supposed to be happy. I’m supposed to be glowing. I have one beautiful child and another one on the way. I am so lucky. I am the lucky one. What’s wrong with me?
The feelings presented as another deficiency of who I am, something I should be able to overcome.
I’m just not exercising enough. I’m not eating well enough. I’m not grateful enough that I’m a mother. I’m not in the moment. I’m self-centered and just need to get outside myself. I’m not trying hard enough.
It is so disorienting and confusing when this happens in pregnancy. Is it just hormones? Everyone knows pregnant women are just more emotional.
It is confusing when it happens amidst external stressors, too. Like a surprise pregnancy. Marital strain. Financial uncertainty. Loss of loved ones. Sickness and hospitalization. This is just difficult stuff happening to me. If I didn’t have this stuff happening to me, I would be fine. I just need to wait until my life settles down. Everything will return to normal then. No cause for alarm. I’m ok. Everyone faces bumps in the road. This is just a bump to get over.
Depression can be so sneaky. I would catch a big breath of air right when I was starting to feel so desperate that I had difficulty functioning. I would find something to hang onto to pull myself up to the surface for awhile, and I would cling to it with all my might. Yes, I’m ok. Yes, it is over. Yes, I will get through this. Yes, I can. But then another wave would pummel me from behind, and I would lose my grip on the stronghold and find myself underwater again.
…..
I lost a former student to suicide right around the time I got pregnant. I faced the great challenge and responsibility of addressing his family and classmates at his funeral. I delivered a message of hope and empathy that touched many lives. In the eulogy I told of my own struggle with mental health as an adolescent and the army of love that eventually helped me find my way out.
People wrote to me after the funeral about how much my words had meant to them, and the school asked me to come and deliver the message to the whole student body. I even heard from someone anonymously that I had saved a young life with my words. Fast forward a couple months, and I was the one suffering again. I could feel some of the words I had delivered echoing back to me.
You are incredible. You are magnificent and loved fully, through and through. You matter. You bring something to the world no one ever has before or ever can again. You are enough. If only you could feel how much you are loved and wanted in this world, precious child. You are enough. The light of your life is enough. Nothing you do will extinguish that love or that light in you.
Ask us for help. Your pain is real, and we will believe you. Sometimes pain looks like anger, feels like confusion, sits like sadness. Whatever the pain is, it is real, and we take it seriously. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, what grades you make, how talented people tell you you are, how much people like you. Your feelings are real, and your experiences are valid.
You are not alone, and we will work tirelessly to help you get what you need, to help you feel whole. You deserve to live, and the world needs you. You are important, you are special, you are irreplaceable. Nothing is more important than your one wild and precious life.
I could feel the words and wanted to claim them for myself. But they felt so naive now. I didn’t believe them. “Just ask for help?” I scoffed. “I’m getting help. I’m already in therapy. I’ve already told my doctor I’m having trouble, and she’s prescribed me medication. I’ve already told my inner circle of friends and family. And nothing has changed. Nothing. I’ve only gotten worse.”
Sometimes we issue subtle, soft calls for help that are true acts of courage but perhaps don’t convey the whole reality of the situation because we can’t even fully see it either. It may sound like: “I’m really struggling right now.” “I’m having a really hard time taking care of myself.” “Life feels like chaos.”
This is all we are able to articulate, and the people who love us don’t respond with the level of urgency and care we need. We receive the message that they can’t hear us or see us. They are too busy. I am too complicated, once again. I need to go it alone. I just need to try harder and get my act together. And we move deeper and deeper into isolation and hiding. We move deeper into our inner chaos.
“What do you need?” my husband would ask me, sometimes impatiently, when I reopened the conversation about the pain I was in. “Be as explicit as possible. Tell me what you need.” And I couldn’t tell him what I needed. I just got more and more frustrated with myself and with him each time he asked me. His well-intentioned questions felt like a demand, and I shut down. I was crumbling and slipping through his fingers.
Each time I felt more alone than before we talked.
No, no. You don’t understand. I can’t tell you what I need. I can’t give anything. I can’t think clearly enough to know what I need. I could only do the next thing, which was to tell you. That was the only thing I knew I needed to do. Why can’t you hear me?
It was like we were speaking different languages. The contrast between how alone I felt in these moments and how I used to feel when we talked made me feel more desperate. I stopped wanting to tell people how I felt because if I didn’t say it, I could still hope that telling them might make me feel better.
I wanted my army of love to come in and save me. I wanted people to rush to my side and hold me. Did I have to feel suicidal for them to do that? Did I have to feel suicidal to disturb their lives and ask them to change their plans for me? I didn’t want to overreact. I didn’t plan on hurting myself. But I also felt desperate and lost.
What do you want me to say? That I feel like jumping off a bridge, that I feel like driving off the road, that I feel like cutting myself? I don’t, but sometimes I feel like driving away into nothingness. I feel like disappearing. Is that the beginning of wanting to hurt yourself? I don’t feel like killing myself, but I need help. I need and deserve help NOW. No, I don’t know what that help looks like. I don’t know what it looks like because I’ve done everything else I know to do, and I still feel like my head is a hornet’s nest, and my heart is a cave. I still feel alone even as you are talking to me, even as we are talking about how alone I feel and as you tell me that I am not alone.
Depression is a liar. It tells you that you are alone, this is who you are, and you will always feel this way. I was exhausted from feeling so heavy all the time. I was a heavy wrecking ball careening through the air. When I was with other people, I wanted to try to live outside of that feeling, not draw more attention to it and painfully hash it out. I was desperate for life-affirming, joyous moments. I didn’t want to sit with people talking about dark feelings. I just wanted to live. I wanted a reason to believe in living, to believe that I could still access life.
I’ve reached out, and nothing has changed, I thought. Where’s my intervention team? Where’s my meal train? Who is checking on me every day? Now what? Things will never get better. You will always feel this way. You are alone. People say they care, but they don’t really. They say you are not alone, but you are. No one can help you. You’re the only one who can save yourself. Why can’t you save yourself?
There comes a day when you can’t try anymore. You don’t have the energy to try. All the trying you’ve done hasn’t gotten you anywhere; now you feel worse. When that day comes, you lose hope and find yourself so far down the rabbit hole that you live in a different world from the people around you, and they can’t hear you from where you are silently crying for help. It is like you have been muted.
That day comes, and then there is another day. And another one. And another one. The days keep coming.
Slowly the days changed. I can’t explain why or how, and I don’t think I can fully take credit for it either. Something began to shift in my heart and in my head, and I believe something shifted in those around me, too.
One night I was finally able to tell my husband what I needed. “Just hold me and be tender. Just sit here next to me. Don’t ask me what I need.” I found how to identify and vocalize more and more things that I needed.
I am on the other side of desperation now. I have been on the other side long enough to feel secure in this balance. I wish I could offer a ten-step plan to getting out of the darkness. I can’t. I just kept waiting, and I kept showing up as best as I could one day at a time.
Like so many others, I kept working really hard just to live, and I kept feeling discouraged by how much things felt the same.
Getting fresh air on my face. Walking with my family every evening. Having the difficult conversations over and over and hating how unchanged I felt after them. Scheduling last-minute meetings with my therapist when I felt really desperate. Setting a timeline for myself of when I would begin medication if my inner world didn’t change. I started meditating and using relaxation tracks to fall asleep. I took a self-hypnosis class for controlling my thoughts. I wrote down the scary things. I cut back on my commitments.
Slowly I found my way out. Not because I’m stronger or worked harder than those who don’t find their way out. There is a mystery to the way that things moved in me in those weeks and months.
Can I tell you that what I have found on the other side months later is one of the thinnest and most light-capped realms of my life? I am in a surreal place now, suspended between this world and another one. I feel that God–the Universe–the Life Force–Great Creator is inviting me into a place I have never experienced, breathing quiet truths and stillness over me that I can’t yet fully understand. Only something powerful outside of me could have lead me here. I keep following. I don’t know what is ahead, but I have hope.
If you are struggling:
Stay with us. Stay here. It takes time. Keep staying. Reaching out may not result in sudden changes. Reaching out may feel impossible and futile one day, but another day, it will not. Keep waking up. Stay in touch with something outside of yourself, even if it’s just noticing the sound of the birds outside your window. Keep your finger on the pulse of anything remotely beautiful. Let the people you love hold you. Night after night let them hold you. Stay here.
Something is moving within you, as quiet as the earthworms moving under your feet. There is a whole world continuing for you and waiting for you. It is the same world that rejoiced the day you were born, with spinning stars and songs of wonder. You are no less of a miracle today than you were on that day you took your first breath. Deep peace, waves of freedom, pools of joy, and anchors of meaning are waiting. They are already here, already part of you. You will touch all of it. You will swim with strength and confidence. The sea will know your name. The land will bless your feet. You are still the miracle.
Photo: Josh Hailey Studio
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