Tag Archives: depression

Participating

29 Dec

“I don’t know if I will have the time to write any more letters because I might be too busy trying to participate” – Charlie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I saw this movie for the first time tonight. Most of it, anyway. Enough to understand the important parts.

And of course, I cried at the end. Not just because the end of the movie is meant to take your heart and jerk it in several different directions at once. But because the end, especially the end, that wasn’t just a movie for me. I tried to make light of it, throwing out comments like “that’s a damn nice psych ward room.”

But that’s because internally, I wasn’t seeing Charlie’s cozy room. Internally, I was seeing my psych ward rooms. The ones that I spent too many days in last year. Over a year ago now, actually. It’s strange, that those days, the most bruised ones I’ve garnered in life, are so far away now. It’s been a year. It’s over. I’m free.

But I remember the days when I wasn’t. I have notebooks, drawers of them, filled with pages and pages of those days when I was not participating but was just trying to survive – or, slowly letting go of the idea that I would. My life is there, on those wrinkled and worn and smudged notebook sheets. I couldn’t bear physicality, so I existed, put myself into letters.

Because I needed a way for my narrative to be important.

And so it’s there, years of myself, scribbled down in journal entries and poems and short stories. Years where I left marks of myself in metaphor and analogy. Years where I could only be a silent girl, inked into existence.

In the end, they were all letters. Some of them were addressed as letters to God. But in the end, they were all really letters to me.

I forgot to pack those notebooks with me for my trips this holiday. Well, not quite “forgot”… I didn’t even think about doing it in the first place.

Because I don’t live my life in those notebooks anymore.

Now, I am participating.

 

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Envy

21 Nov

I am envious, sometimes – most times – of those who get recognition. Evanna Lynch, who “beat anorexia” to become Luna Lovegood. She is praised and lauded, called determined and strong.

What of all of us still out here, who know that you don’t just “beat anorexia,” that you fight every fucking day just you can hope for a life where maybe you won’t have to think about this fucking disease, day in and day out, in fear that if you ever drop your vigilance, it will get past the years and years you had covered over it, and in the end it will kill you, by making you destroy yourself. What of all of us who are still fighting, who know that your own mind is not something that can ever truly be “beaten?” What of those of us who still fight? Why for us is there no acclaim, because we did not become the lucky one, the movie star?

Or there’s the friend I drove to my tattoo parlor, helped her pay so she could get her first tattoo. One simple word, “strong,” inked over the scar where months ago she’d carved “weak.” The tattoo artists called her brave. They congratulated her on having overcome. Her struggle was obvious, and so was her cure.

They didn’t say anything, the two times I’d been there before to get my own tattoos. Just images – one to remind who is really me, one to remind me that I have flown from those chains that I once let define me.

But to everybody else, they just look like a dolphin fluke and a butterfly.

The artist who’d tattooed my arm had said nothing about my scars.

Where, then, was my recognition?

I know I should not care. But I think that’s what this has really been about, all along. The need to know that on some fundamental level, I am important. I have spent a life trying every fucking day to prove to everyone – and after that, the trickier part, to prove to myself – that I am good enough. That yes, I am strong. That yes, I am capable. That yes, I am beautiful and so because I am beautiful I can be looked at and loved, instead of ignored or cast off. I wanted to be worth noticing. I had to know that I was worth noticing. And so I tried to become extraordinary enough that people would be able to just look at me, and know I had proved it.

And then there was the pain. I was clawing for a way out of myself, out of the web of distrust and lies and abuse that I was caught in, because I had to call it my family. I talked and I talked and I talked, but no one listened. I told people I was hurting, and it changed nothing. I was not heard. I was told, actually, to shut up.

And so I shut up. But that didn’t change the fact that I still needed a way to keep screaming.

Because the pain wasn’t over yet.

And so the scars came.

“Can’t you see that’s something’s fucking wrong?” they asked.

Or – “What’s wrong with you?” they would scream, at me.

“Somebody, anybody,” they said, “can’t you see I’m hurting.”

They’re all scars, now. Old and white, some smooth and some still raised above my skin. They are ghosts, now. Sure, all ghosts show a story – but I think I’m the only one who can see it.

Can’t you see that I have hurt? Can’t you see that I have fought? Can’t you see that I have fallen apart and sewn myself back together so many times you can’t even know where the stitch marks are anymore? Can’t you see all the fucking hard work I’ve done, all the tears I’ve cried, all the sacrifices I’ve made and injustices I’ve put up with, just so that I can finally get to a place where I, at least, can look in the mirror and think that I am beautiful, and that I am important, without killing myself for that in the process?

Can’t you see any of that?

I envy those, whose struggle and triumph have donned them heroes. I envy those, who get the recognition.

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Nil

10 Oct

Hello, lovely readers. For some reason only beknownst to it, my depression has gotten rather uppity over the past few days. But rather than continuing to sit here in a grumbling match with my depression, I decided to pull out my keyboard and describe it instead. Spectres usually aren’t so hard to deal with once you’ve managed to pin them down.

So now I’ve got a poem to share with you all! Aren’t you lucky. But don’t any of you dare go thinking, “Man, more writing, this is great! If only she were depressed more often!”

Seriously. I will excommunicate you.

 

grey

Nil

Depression is the tired feeling of waking up too early on a grey morning,

cloudy and alone.

Depression is the too busy, too rushed, too late sprint to the next have-to

with the no-consolation of a half-peck on the lips from a lover while you don’t even stop

on your way out the door.

Depression is the uneven kilter of a storm-ridden brain when it’s sunny outside,

and you continue to stare at the light coming through your window even while you shrink from it,

because the bewildered confusion in your eyes is too rapt to look away.

Sometimes depression is pain. Sometimes depression is numbness.

But sometimes depression is none of these things;

it is not pain or numbness or fear or hardness or solitude or sadness.

Sometimes depression is nothing.

An odd non-existence to the mold of organic matter,

an emptiness where there once was something,

a void of anything at all that would indicate you are still alive.

A hollow deadness, too much of an absence to be either blank or black.

A hole into which everything is falling,

but in which there is nothing at all to be seen.

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Brains are weird.

19 Sep

brain art

Good morning lovely readers! I’m back from my sojourn to the US’s southern regions and have returned to the land of no humidity where I don’t wake up every morning with a dozen new mosquito bites. It’s the little things in life.

But, lovely readers, I have a bone to pick. Well, not so much a bone as a fairly squishy organ. Yup. The brain.

Brains are weird. And by “weird” what I really mean is “confusing asshole.” A lot of you may know that I am a depression recoveree. (Yes, I know the word is technically “recoverer,” but I like “recoveree” better and this is my blog, so there.) Most of the time I am some level of “fine.” No, this summer wasn’t the nastiest my depression has ever been, but it was fairly unfun. Whatever.

For the past three weeks – the period of time I spent traipsing around Florida and Georgia with my boyfriend and my best friend – I’d found a sort of respite. For three blessed damn weeks, it wasn’t a struggle to push myself out of bed in the morning (beyond my normal pre-coffee grogginess, that is). For three weeks, I didn’t have to walk around feeling like my heart was twisted into a coil and my soul was stuck crushed beneath an anchor. For three weeks, the shackles of anxiety and worry and loneliness I’ve grown so used to trudging around in that I don’t even think of them as “not normal” anymore – they just weren’t there. Sure, there was a maybe a moment or two of freak-out, but they were only that – a moment. I wasn’t left with an unrescinding haze hanging over me for days. I felt… free. Light. Even happy.

Then I come back to Los Angeles. Normally touching down at LAX fills me with relief (usually ’cause I’ve just returned from an obligatory trip to that emotional war zone known as my house in Missouri) – but this time, not so. I felt… lonely. But whatever. I shook it off as jet lag or something.

Then I entered my dorm room.

This is why I say brains are weird. (Ahem, confusing assholes.) Brains make connections between physical locations and emotional/physiological responses, right? Seriously – that’s why some drug addicts can overdose on what had been a usual amount of whatever substance for them if they do it somewhere out of the ordinary; their brain wasn’t given the environmental stimulus that told it “I’m going to do x amount of y here” and so it didn’t ramp up the necessary physiological response to cope with that x amount of y.

Anyhoo. Back to my dorm room. About that environmental stimulus… sure, I had just spent an incredible three weeks being happy, but guess what connection my brain had made between my being alone in my dorm room and what emotion I would be feeling?

Yup. Hey there, depression. How not nice to see you.

I keep trying to tell myself that the amount of sadness and loneliness that came crashing over me is understandable. Yeah, I had just spent the past three weeks surrounded almost 24/7 by the people I’m closest to – it’s understandable that there would be some kind of backlash, some kind of withdrawal to their suddenly not being there. I hope.

Yes, I had spent the entire summer forging a connection between the “dorm room” and “depressed” neurons in my brain, so of course there would be a noticeable shock when they fired together again after having laid dormant for three weeks. I think.

It’s just… odd, feeling these feelings again after having been happy for what feels like so long. It’s like I’m walking through a familiar landscape, but suddenly all the angles are odd and the walls jut out in weird places. While yes, this loneliness and the sadness born from it are familiar dressings, suddenly the skin just doesn’t fit right. I have found another shape, and the part of my consciousness that knows that is disgruntled at being forced back into old containers.

With diseases like depression, they say you can’t run away from it, because wherever you go, there you are. But what if it isn’t me? What if it is where I am? The place where so many events and tears have stained the carpet and the walls with memories and expectations? What if I can go somewhere else where there aren’t those constant visual triggers? What if it is not that I can’t run away from it – but that I can at least not walk right in?

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On Silencing

8 Sep

face in hands

Hello lovely readers. Today, September 8, is the start of National Suicide Prevention Week.

So, let’s do some talking.

I’ll likely write a slew of articles this week. Book reviews, rants and ravings, maybe a poem or two. But to start it all off, I thought I’d start with a more personal article.

Because for me, suicide is a highly personal topic.

I cannot point to a single day, a single moment, and say “that’s when I first became suicidal.” I cannot even say when I first learned of suicide. It’s one of those things – and perhaps that is sad – that I have just always seemed to know about. I can remember being six or eight or maybe even as old as ten (though I think that is less likely), sitting on the couch of my house’s “play room,” surrounded by the trappings of a middle class American childhood, and wondering about running a knife from the silverware drawer downstairs across my throat. I don’t remember what in particular I was wondering – perhaps how much it would hurt, or what it would feel like, or how long it would take to bleed out – but I do remember hastily shoving the thought back to some dark corner of my mind and thinking no, that’s not a good thought. Jesus wouldn’t like it, because suicide (according to what I’d been taught somewhere along the line by my Catholicism) was a sin. And because suicide was a sin, it was out of the question. Period.

Again, I don’t know why I was thinking about suicide at the age of six or eight or less-likely-ten. Perhaps my father had gone into an alcoholic rage at my mother again. Perhaps there had been yelling. Perhaps there had been crying. I’m not really sure. You see, at that young age of six or eight or just-maybe-ten, the thought that something might be “wrong” with my household hadn’t really registered in my consciousness yet. Things like parents’ having separate bedrooms and the sound of yelling echoing upstairs after bedtime – that was just the way things were. That, for me, was normal.

For years, all I had was the occasional twinge of a particularly painful cramp in my soul that made me wonder if the constant vague sense of unhappiness that colored my life was, perhaps, something out of the ordinary.

Why do I go into so much backstory? To make the point, perhaps, that when over my junior and senior year of high school I progressed from “vaguely unhappy” to “clinically depressed” to “self-injuring and suicidal,” it was so much a progression of the natural order of things for me that there really are no milestones to remark at. One year I’m unhappy but still counting on that future tense. The next I’m going home every day after school wondering if it will finally be the day I kill myself. Try to rewind or fast-forward or pause somewhere between those two, and it’s all just a blur.

I suppose I mention all of this to give grounding to my opinions when it comes to suicide. No, I cannot speak for everyone on this point. But hey, I’ve had a fair amount of first-hand experience (not to mention second-hand experience in the way of mental health counselor training and acting as a peer mentor), so I do know a thing or two.

If you really want to know more about the nitty gritty of what my experience has been like, I suggest you look into my memoir, Drop Dead Gorgeous (more info here). But I suppose that what I want to say in this particular thought stream is that if I were limited to making only one statement about suicide, it would be this:

We need to talk about it.

Suicide should NOT be lauded, but neither should the dead be scorned. I know it’s scary as hell to say “I want to kill myself” and scary as hell to hear, but the taboo that so pervades most society and leads people to die silently so they don’t have to face the disapproval and disgust that appears all too often in other’s eyes – THAT is unacceptable.

I know suicide and depression are excruciatingly tricky to tackle effectively. I’ll write more on that later. But hey, practice makes progress, right? Parents and friends and doctors and teachers and police and janitors are never going to develop muscles capable of supporting someone if they never try to use them.

So first off, let’s ditch this condemnation of people with mental health struggles as “weak” or “weird” or “incompetent” or “lazy” or “untrustworthy” or “to be avoided.” I know that suicide is horrible and awful. But that doesn’t mean that people thinking about it are, or that talking about it is.

So let’s talk, people. What do you have to say?

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