April 27th | Tend to the Flickering Light

Eight years ago today, my dad picked me up at 6am, drove us to O’Hare, and sat next to me on a plane to ensure I would be safely deposited in the foothills of the Catalinas for a month at inpatient rehabilitation for major depressive disorder. He never left the Tucson airport. I did.

I am honoring that experience and its part of my story by sharing what I wrote on the fourth + sixth anniversaries of 04.27.18.

Takeoff was smooth. My insides were a tangled mess. My dad calmly sipped his Starbucks and read the Wall Street Journal in the seat beside me. I stared out the window into the abyss. Numbness had descended upon ascent.

A kind, white-haired man who resembled a warm grandfather met me at baggage claim and drove the two of us forty-five minutes through muted landscape; varying shades of earth and dust, spotted with green cacti, enveloped by bright blue sky. Every mile we passed brought me closer to what felt like my prison.

By the time I arrived in AZ, I had become a shell of a human. My outwardly social persona was entirely dismantled. I became a mute. My broken brain told me I was too dumb to articulate thoughts that mattered. It cycled through a familiar refrain, relentlessly.

You are stupid. You are unworthy. You are unloved. You are a failure.

This is what severe depression does. It is not sadness. It is a disease that takes control of your mind and distorts every single shred of reality, of perception, of clarity. It tricks you into thinking the very worst possible thing about yourself. It steals strength, cognitive functioning, decision-making. It steals life. It takes what makes us who we are and deceives us into believing the absolute opposite.

I had wanted to die for years before that flight.

I remember so many nights searching under the bathroom counter for the colorful toiletry bag that held around twenty pill bottles. Years of prescriptions: SSRIs, anti-anxiety medications, anti-psychotics — taken day after day, that never provided the relief they advertised. I would stare at those bottles and wonder if I had enough. The fear that stopped me wasn’t hope. It was the fear of failing. Of surviving and having people know how desperate I had become.

My red, swollen eyes would look back at me in the mirror. Greasy, tangled hair from days of not showering. Pale skin. And then I would lay back down in my second bedroom, on the tiny, itchy office sofa my dad had given me, let the noise of television fill the background, and will myself to fight for one more hour.

And then one more.

And then one more.

I know the depths of finding yourself swimming under the current, constantly attempting one second above water, feeling like your feet have the heaviest possible weights strapped to them.

One breath. Come up for air. Gulp in one breath. Back underwater.

I came home more broken than I went. I had naively believed that twenty-eight days in the desert was my cure after two debilitating years of losing my mind to depression. It was not the cure.

What followed was another year of not leaving the house. Of alternative treatment methods. Of survival mode. Of trying my best to come up for air and being pulled back under.

The majority of my thirties was spent in one form of illness or another; because prolonged mental illness does not stay neatly contained to the mind. Heightened nervous system activation over years creates a cascade: chronic pain, fertility issues, the body keeping an honest record of everything the mind endured.

Healing is not linear. It is not a triumphant montage. The right supports eventually rallied around me, and no stone was left unturned in finding additional treatment options. I am also aware of how privileged I am to have had both the support system and the resources to do that. Not everyone does. That truth sits heavily with me.

There were tiny moments of lightness, even amongst the darkest days.

In equine therapy, I was expected to hold a horse’s reins and have him follow me around the field. The horse felt no obligation to comply if he sensed fear, and the fear was palpable in my body. What this taught me, unexpectedly, was the importance of faking it until you make it. Of needing to convince your own mind, even slightly, that you are capable. The horse might be deceived. And sometimes, so can you.

There was also a drum circle. Something about the rhythmic reverberation, using both hands to create sound, felt innately healing in a way I couldn’t explain then and can only partly explain now. Bilateral movement regulates the nervous system. But more than that, it pulled me out of my own head for a few minutes. Those few minutes mattered.

And every night, the people in my lodge came together before lights out at 10pm, to recite the Serenity Prayer. At the time, it pissed me off. Now, I understand it completely.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Four years after that flight, I wrote about this day for the first time. I wrote:

“The fight to live, even in the torture chambers of your mind in the throes of mental illness - the fight to live is always worth it. The light that faintly flickers at the end of the tunnel; chase that light. It may dim, but it will strengthen again.”

I meant it then. I mean it more now.

That pain became my purpose.

The lost years of my early thirties; spent in the echo chambers of deep despair and hopelessness, are never far from me. They are not a source of shame. They are the fibers of who I am. They are what I return to when the work feels hard, because the work is always hard and always worth it.

Eight years out, I am grounded and content. I am strong. I am exceptionally resilient. I am present in a way I did not know was possible when I was staring through swollen eyes at those pill bottles.

Now, I am also more aware and honest with myself. The treatments didn’t work because depression was never the root cause. It was trauma. I carry that knowledge with me not as a weight but as a reason to stay vigilant, to stay connected, to keep doing the work.

I am sharing this today because somewhere, someone is fighting for one more hour.

I want them to know that the hour is worth fighting for. And the one after that. And the one after that.

The flickering light is real. Tend to it.