[I AM A WRITER, NOT A DOCTOR. CLICK TO READ MEDICAL DISCLAIMER]
Author’s Foreword: If it is written in this essay, it is something I needed to heal. Thanks in advance for allowing me to do so. -Tess
Table of Contents
Prologue
This essay is the culmination of a decade’s worth of diary pages—of incoherent scribbles in worn-out, long-forgotten journals—of scrawlings in the margins of many a favorite book—of insights dropped from the sky directly into my head and hastily recorded in the notes app of my phone—of at least fifty unfinished, abandoned word documents. This story (my story, to be clear) has existed in fragments and the periphery of my mind for thirteen years now, waiting for its chance to someday exist as a whole—and yet—I have never been able to fully bring it to fruition, feeling like maybe I lack the ability to do the broad scope of mental health that my story broaches any justice. But a force outside myself, larger and bossier than me, has been riding me, incessantly prodding me to finally write it all down. Even still, I’ve spent the last five years dragging my feet, hesitating, asking this force, “Wait—are you sure?”
And yet, there’s nothing like the lethal potential of a worldwide pandemic to make you reexamine all the words you’ve left unsaid. Early last year, I found the question plastered suddenly at the forefront of my worries was, “If I die tomorrow, what would I regret not telling my kids?” “Would I leave them to piece together my legacy through fifteen half-filled journals from my twenties??” Eventually, and at the cost of many sleepless nights spent weighing the consequences, the fear of not telling my story replaced the fear that I couldn’t do it justice, and alas, here we are.
At the heart of it, this essay retraces my personal journey after losing someone very significant to me to suicide. Although suicide happens for a vast variety of very personal reasons, the common ground all self-inflicted deaths share is their mutual preventability. As you will soon read, living with this truth has been one of the more unbearable realities I’ve ever had to withstand. I try to articulate what the aftermath of losing that person was like, not at all to assign blame, but instead to illustrate the often-overlooked scope of trauma a tragedy of that magnitude imposes on those of us who are left behind. I feel like here is as good a place as any to add, that any conclusions I draw or inferences I make are based on my experiences and reflect solely my opinions and mine only.
Because I’m not an expert on mental health by any professional means, I think for the purposes of fully understanding the intention of this essay, it is important to note the distinction between advice and insights. It is not my intention for conclusions drawn in this essay to be interpreted as advice, spurring any action from the reader, but instead to share insight and a singular human perspective on subject matter that is widely not talked about. As this is a firsthand account from a writer, not a doctor, it goes without saying that some conclusions I draw might inevitably be wrong. (Click to read my Medical Disclaimer.) But my need to join the dialogue and add my lived human experience into the mental health discussion overrides my need for this essay to be 100% correct. My intention, however, is not to assert myself as a spokesperson for mental health (as you will quickly notice a few pages in I am anything but a poster child for), nor for those reading this essay to interpret it as a blueprint for mental health. This essay shares the story of a very human, very imperfect journey and my intention in putting it forward is only to widen the scope of understanding surrounding such stigmatized topics.
The broadest trigger warning I can muster is this: I take you there—through the darkness— and I know all too well that’s hard to read or relive for those of us who are particularly susceptible to the lower-lows. While considering whether or not it was necessary to include some of the heavier details in this essay, I fatefully came across this quote from Elizabeth Lesser:
“Grief brings us closest to life’s paradoxes. To lose and yet to gain; to be helpless and therefore to be guided; to surrender to the unknown so as to know.” -Elizabeth Lesser
Like explaining what it means to be well fed is best defined by first describing hunger, her words remind me that to fully understand what it means to be hopeful, we must also understand the paradox of hopelessness. Likewise, to better comprehend what it means to be worthy, we also must be versed in what it’s like to feel worthless. So, while I have chosen to keep some of the more tragic details at the beginning of this essay, know they exist to inform their reciprocal later on.
What you may notice missing from this text is any mention of my immediate family. I strongly feel by including them in the intimate details where our stories inevitably overlap, I (however unintentionally) begin to tell their story for them—and I am fiercely protective of their right to tell their own story. So, although they are noticeably absent from these pages, know they were not at all absent from my life.
My hope for the future is that the topic of mental health becomes more approachable, that the stigmas bordering these subjects like walls eventually come down, and that we will begin to see mental health as a function of being human instead of the polarizing, shame-inducing subject matter it is today. By sharing our stories, we add the human element—a face and a voice—so that others can feel seen and spoken to through our experiences. The more we collectively tell our stories, the more we infuse the discussion with our humanity and, therefore, our understanding, and if this essay makes any small contribution to that effort, helps anyone feel less alone in their struggles, it will give meaning to all the trials therein.
I must warn, the content in the first half or more of this essay—included solely to be illustrative—is a particularly slippery slope for those of us who struggle with our mental health. Because the intention is not to bring anyone lower, I therefore ask (beg) that you please heed the trigger warnings below.
Part I
[TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE, GRIEF, HOPELESSNESS, DEPRESSION, ALCOHOLISM, SUICIDAL IDEATION, VIOLENT METAPHORS, SHAME, SELF-LOATHING, ETC.]
In May of 2008, I was eighteen years old, fresh off my first semester of college, smitten with a new boyfriend, and in the “beta” phase of adulthood—wherein I had the freedom to make adult decisions and yet could still defer consequences to my parents. College was a new frontier, a formative landscape where no one ever asked where you came from but instead where you were heading and what you were studying—even declaring yourself “undecided” felt promising, and you could write as much on paperwork and nevertheless feel a dawning sense of direction. I was little more than a blinking cursor on a blank page, but merely the idea that I could establish “my becoming” felt like a second chance, a swift departure from the circumspect and aimless high schooler I once had been.
The day was May 8th, and in celebration of the fact that I had just narrowly escaped having to repeat my first semester by barely passing my finals, my boyfriend and I decided to kick-off summer by “heading to the beach” because “his band had a gig.” (Not kidding). Coincidently, my parents had planned their own trip to the same coast the very next day but assured me our visits would only overlap at pre-approved times at pre-established places, lest my and my boyfriend’s spontaneous coastal “wanderlust” be infringed upon by parents.
That afternoon before leaving, I stopped at home to drop off the last of my boxes from my dorm. I was still unpacking when the doorbell rang—my signal that my boyfriend had arrived, and it was time to get on the road.
I said the kind of goodbye to my parents that you say when you will see somebody within the course of a day—an offhanded “see ya later!” to my mom, and a hug and a hand squeeze to my dad, who told me very directly that he loved me. I reciprocated the sentiment in the most standard teenage way, with a basic “I love you” and a loving wave tossed out the window of the truck as we sped away.
I’ve searched this moment repeatedly in my memory, begging for any detail to stand out against the rest, wishing I could recall the look on my dad’s face when I left, and grappling with the reality that he likely knew in that moment he would never see me again. The prosaic nature of our last goodbye will break my heart indefinitely.
…………..
My Dad was born in 1947 in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was an only child to his mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, a WWII veteran and farmer. His parents straddled the fine line between making ends meet and poverty, and my dad was raised traversing the cruel dichotomy between having money and therefore stability, and the vast inequities of being poor.
Vowing to make a steady life for his parents, he attended college and subsequently medical school, earning his M.D. in Internal Medicine.
By the time I was born in 1990, his practice in Kerrville, Texas, had been well established, and he was notorious around town for both his brilliance in the field and the generosity he showed his patients.
He fulfilled his promise to take care of his parents by building them a house on some acreage he bought just adjacent to our home. My sister and I frequently blazed the caleche road that connected the two houses, kicking up dust in our electric Barbie jeep in hot pursuit of the candy Grandma Polly always had waiting for us on her doorstep.
My dad was a quieter soul than most, but those who knew him knew better than to misattribute his reserved nature to shyness. He was simply always in deep thought, and with an IQ higher than most people can achieve jointly, his silence was revered and respected by all. When he did speak, he did so with such proficient knowledge and rapturous cogency, an entire room of people would fall dead silent just to be within earshot of his words. He had the last word on almost everything, not because he was the loudest person in the room nor the most charismatic, but simply because his words were punctuated with knowledge not graspable to just anyone, and hearing him left little doubt that his insights were derived from an elevated realm of comprehension.
But he was also my Daddy, and my most precious memories of him involve our family expeditions outdoors, exploring the Texas hill country, or hiking Big Bend National Park. He loved teaching us about nature, and although at a young age I couldn’t possibly retain or capacitate his in-depth explanations regarding the chemical processes and evolution of some rock formations, what mattered most to me was that I was worthy of his attention. I have numerous memories of him waking up my sister and me in the middle of the night because conditions were perfect to see: Haley’s Comet, or Saturn’s moon through the telescope, or a meteor shower, or a lunar eclipse, or even porcupine crossing the driveway. Nature was science’s way of exhibiting herself, and we were taught from a young age that her illustrations were meant to be marveled at and explored.
But even though my dad had one foot firmly planted in this world, his other stood on higher ground where few others had the aptitude to reach him. Indeed it must have been lonely to comprehend so much—maybe even too much—to the point where he couldn’t relate to the shallow politics and economics of the materialistic world around him. He was most comfortable in nature because the visible display of genius was infinite—ranging from the most minute of particles to the vast, skyward expanse of the universe itself—and some of the only common ground he found within the world in which he lived.
In accordance, the lesson he embodied that informed my values the most was the high regard to which he upheld all living things. Whether it was a bird with a broken wing, a stray cat looking for a meal, or just a turtle crossing the road, he invariably took the time to help in whatever capacity he could. The lesson inculcated through witnessing a brilliant man benevolently channel all of his brainpower to make a splint for a tiny bird’s broken wing is that all life—regardless of big or small—is equally important.
His altruistic approach towards life extended on a grander scale to his patients, who he treated with ardent and devoted diligence. I remember one patient, in particular, telling me a story about waking up in the ICU around 2 AM after having a heart attack to find my dad holding vigil in the corner of his room. My dad briefly informed this patient that he predicted a secondary attack sometime throughout the night and felt responsible to monitor him personally. Sure enough, when it did come, he was there, and the patient lived to later tell me the story.
However, the tradeoff to having a mind as beautiful and thoughts as elevated as his was the precipitous downfall into depression that can and did occur all too frequently. As a physician, he saw firsthand what is oftentimes veiled to those of us who don’t work in the healthcare industry—that the line between life and death is as tenuous as a thread, and although science and knowledge have helped humankind hinder our mortality, sometimes the ability to save a life is simply not within our reach. Knowledge is power in the medical field, yet having the sheer capacity to know as much as he did and still have to reckon with the reality that it was never enough to save everyone felt like grand futility within the system as a whole.
Furthermore, my dad understood from his upbringing that to be ultimately vulnerable in this world didn’t exclusively mean receiving a diagnosis of bad health, but moreover, to be diagnosed with bad health and find oneself powerless against it within the confines of poverty. Consequently, it never occurred to him to administer his medical and diagnostic expertise based on the mere circumstance of who had money and who didn’t. Helping only those who could afford it felt incongruent to his oath, to his morals, and (highest ranking in his realm) to his logic. The criterion for which he treated patients was solely based on necessity, a qualifier that meant he stood in the gap and attended to everyone who sought him out regardless of economic status, but also one that sometimes left him struggling to pay bills for his practice and provide for our family. His perceived inadequacy as a provider subtly permeated other areas of his life, corroding his receptibility for hope and joy. As a result, he went through his latter days, not fully recognizing what a gift he was to our family, the community, and humanity.
Even as an adolescent, I could recognize there was a whole “other side” to my dad that I would never know—the side that he hid within his quietness. Maybe I inherently understood that something so beautiful would invariably have a shadow, as though the necessary tax levied by this world on those who are gifted. But it still felt impossible to me that the shadow could ever eclipse the source—yet in the end, that’s exactly what it did.
…………..
May 9, 2008
I awoke the next day around midmorning. We had made it to the beach, and I was lying in bed next to my boyfriend, who was still sleeping peacefully. The sight of him quietly resting was a stark paradox to the turbulent fight we had the night before, a riotous uproar incited by something so consequential, I don’t remember to this day. I do recall the angsty feeling of almost breaking up and how, for a moment during the spat, I felt like losing our relationship would be the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I was in the bathroom getting ready for the day—straightening my hair, of all things—when my phone rang. My mom was calling, probably just to check on me, I thought. I let the call go to voicemail, feeling the vain urgency to finish my hair before my boyfriend woke up.
I was struck moments later by the guilty thought that maybe she and my dad were lost en route to the coast, so I clicked open my blue flip phone and dialed her number.
For as long as I live, I will never forget the immobilizing feeling when the line connected. Although the length of time between when the trilling stopped and her voice picked up spanned mere milliseconds, each fragment felt so long, it was as though time itself had stopped altogether. Within that suspended flash, molecules shifted, the air became lead, my lungs couldn’t breathe, and I knew by the weight of the energy around me that something utterly devastating had happened.
A high-pitched, piercing wail screamed through the receiver, “He’s dead! Dad is dead!!”
I instantly fell to the ground and incredulously screamed, “NO! Are you sure? He can’t be! HOW?”
I could almost hear the splintering of the framework, feel the tremors within the structure of my life right before everything gave way. I felt myself pushing against the last upright pillar, using all the strength of my denial to hold it up while debris fell around me. My mind was spinning. Did he have a heart attack? Did he fall? Was the ambulance on its way? Were they sure he was dead?!?
“HE CAN’T BE DEAD!”
“There is blood everywhere! I’m at the office—I found him. The ambulance is here, but he’s dead!!! Oh my God, he’s dead.” I could hear what sounded like police in the background, drown out by the sound of my mom retching and vomiting.
Irrefutable.
I let the final pillar fall and my entire life as I knew it began to collapse.
I don’t remember hanging up the phone, but somehow, I did.
I don’t remember my boyfriend picking me up off the floor, but somehow, I got up.
I don’t remember getting in the truck, but somehow, we were driving. We were an excruciating three hours away from home.
I began to wildly recall if I had told my dad I loved him, my mind coming to a complete stop when I realized I would never tell him I loved him again. My world was suddenly distorted and discolored, as though someone had dumped a bucket of water over the canvas of my life, which was now seeping in a chaotic, indistinguishable mess off the page.
My mom had been too overcome by shock and emotion over the phone to convey what had happened. In a frenzy, I dialed my sister to see if she had any new information.
The trauma in her tone matched my own, and we traded anguished sobs of disbelief for a moment before I asked what had happened.
“You don’t know?!” she exclaimed, her horrified response yielding a sense of greater doom.
“Tess,” she said, “There’s a gun, there’s a letter… It was suicide.”
If my life had collapsed before, now the wreckage was on fire.
The only way to describe what I felt after hearing those words is to impart the utter entropy of my mental breakdown. It felt like the neural pathways in my brain that connected my memories to certainties—steadfastness, love, permanence, worthiness, hope—were all instantly severed, leaving behind a tangle of evicted sureties. My mind was searching for any sure fact to grip onto, but every assurance was untethered, slipping easily through my grasp. I was in a panicked freefall, and the ground was nowhere in sight.
My dad was dead. He killed himself—I couldn’t fathom a world where these statements could be true. He had devoted his life to the health of others; why would he choose to end his own!? It was as though my very own Atticus Finch had been abruptly ripped from the pages. With no foothold in the present, I swiveled my incredulity towards the future, slamming into the frantic awareness that he had chosen not to participate anymore in my life. Didn’t he want to walk me down the aisle? To see me graduate? To meet my children? Every milestone I had ever envisioned suddenly felt inauspicious and painfully empty; he vacated some of my most important memories before I even had a chance to make them. I felt like someone drove a rod through my heart and left me to bleed out everything I knew to be true in this world, while I watched in shock as it puddled around my feet—never to be a part of me again.
The pain permeated down to my last atom. I was writhing, convulsing with sobs of sheer agony—the questions, audibly spilling out of me as I demanded to know, “why, why, WHY?! What had I done?”
My boyfriend, who had been stoically driving up until this point, had to pull the truck over because he was all at once overcome and sobbing too hard to steer. I remember watching him through my own anguish, and in a fleeting glimpse, I recalled how devastating our fight from the night prior had felt, but how trivial it seemed against the backdrop of this catastrophe. From somewhere deep inside I knew, our silly argument would be my last memory filtered through the melodramatic innocence of a child. Every moment from this point forevermore would be processed as an adult.
The trip back home was the longest three hours of my life. Although our relationship didn’t last long, I am indebted to the man who drove me through hell as my life was burning to ash before us both.
*The events that transpired when I finally made it to the scene are tragic, personal, and out of respect for everyone involved, not a part of this story.
…………..
The sun was setting as we left his office. Two of my childhood friends had come to the scene, forging headfirst through any of the pretenses that this was a private time, upholding the unbreakable vows we took to each other as children—friends forever. They were there to make sure I was okay, or at the very least, still drawing consecutive breaths.
As the day came to a close, it became apparent how exhausted we all were, no doubt crashing and nauseous from the turbulent emotional velocity of a sudden, tragic loss. There was nothing left to do but leave the scene and reconvene in our collective devastation back at home. As we scanned the parking lot for our vehicles, it suddenly dawned on us that my dad’s jeep was still here, a solitary statue, sitting alone in the back parking lot. What an unimaginable truth to suddenly face: that he had driven his car here just hours ago but was no longer alive to drive it back.
My parents bought the Jeep two years before I was born, so at eighteen, it was somewhat of a family monument to me. My dad taught me to drive in this car. He had tinkered under the hood weekends on end, for as long as my memory dates back—but I never once considered it would outlast him.
The impossibility of driving it home felt petrifying, but the mere thought of anyone else tainting the sanctity of space where he had last been was unfathomable. I volunteered to take it back, not bothering to wonder about the keys—I knew without looking that they were still dangling from the ignition.
As I drove through the streets, retracing his last steps, I began to spiral, agonizing over what he possibly could have been thinking as he headed in the direction I was currently leaving behind. The distance between our house and the office is a short, familiar drive; still, with each passing mile, I understood the meaning of this road, these landmarks, even the high pitch of the engine sounds that I so closely associated with him, would forever be tarnished. It’s no wonder that our bodies go into shock as a survival mechanism; had I been more coherent, I probably would run the car clear off the road, but instead, I felt disembodied, hovering above myself and observing as I fulfilled this one reverent task which was impossible for anyone else to do other than me. Another friend called me while I was driving—not sure exactly what to say to me or what questions he was allowed to ask at a time like this—yet without knowing, his company silently carried me the entire distance home.
It was dusk by the time I pulled into our driveway. Although laden with the stagnant energy of tragedy, our house was filled with wide-eyed, extended family members, most of whom were bustling around preparing food or silently circled around my mother. They were intermittently patting and consoling her while she sorrowfully wept into her hands, excusing herself from the huddle every so often to run the bathroom and vomit.
My dad’s cat, Razz, was trolling desperately from room to room, throwing his head back and mournfully yowling– a terrible, unearthly sound I had never heard an animal make. He did not need the ability to speak, it seemed, to know my dad was gone.
I went directly to my mom and dad’s closet, drawn in by the instinctive need to be amongst his things.
Sitting in a solemn line on the counter, I saw his phone, his wallet, his watch, and the contents from his pockets—a monument that visibly stated he would not be back.
Once more, the pain began to break through the shock. I lifted his wallet off the counter, examining it for any evidence that he had intended to return to it. I found myself looking instead at the pictures of me, my siblings, and my mother, which he had neatly arranged to be the first thing your eye caught when you unfolded the worn, black leather. All at once, I was sick, overcome by the notion that he had left his last glimpses of us here on the counter—because where he was going, he would not allow us to follow.
I picked up his shirt from the floor—still radiating warmth from his recent presence this morning—put it to my face, and took a heavy breath. What I wouldn’t give to take back time. To at least say goodbye.
I sank to the floor, still clutching his shirt tightly, and from the depths of a heartbroken place that had never existed before today, I wept.
The world had lost a rare soul—a daughter, her father—and this life would forever be a less beautiful place without him.
…………..
The immediate aftermath of a death feels something like this: Briefly, when you wake up in the morning, your brain lingers between wakefulness and a dream-state, you temporarily forget the vast empty anguish you fell asleep holding, and if only for a moment, you’re free. This borrowed peace lasts until all at once you’re coherent and—BAM—you’re welcomed to full consciousness by a sucker punch of pain, a daily reckoning reminding you that every new dawn you find yourself alive is another day they’re gone. How much easier would it be to sleep forever than face the full force of reality every morning?
The expectancy is that the shock lessens over time, that at some point, the facts saturate, and you’re able to start the immediate work of grieving.
But reentry into life after trauma isn’t smooth, at least not in my case, and my recollection of events those first few days is not in focus and blurry at best. Life felt surreal, like an alternate existence where buying caskets, plotting graves, and picking out headstones were considered customary obligations. We were facing down questions like, “what flowers do we want to be displayed at the memorial?” holding them in the same mental space in which we were still asking ourselves, “why had our dad decided to kill himself three days ago?”
I wasn’t stoic and much as despondent; not brave as much as I was numb; not alive as much as I was just breathing.
I remember waiting in the church for the memorial to start. The family stood in the bridal room, of all places, tainting its hopefulness with our sorrow while we lingered together before taking our seats. I remember the blue floral dress I wore and the familiar faces I spotted in the congregation. I remember eyeing the usual place my dad stood in the choir, my gaze drifting to his newly relegated presence—a headshot on a bulletin—but I can’t for the life of me tell you what transpired during the service. I’ve even been told I got up and read a scripture, a memory of which I have no recollection.
I did not cry because it did not feel real—it could not possibly be real.
I vividly recall the sheer number of people who came to pay their respects after the service. Hundreds lined up to shake my hand and graciously relay their condolences. So many took the time to express their indebtedness to my dad with a sentiment I heard repeated over and over throughout the long line of attendees, “I would not be alive today if it weren’t for your dad.” I received all the sentiments with a smile and absorbed and affirmed the anecdotes as though hearing them didn’t break my heart hundreds of times over. The parade of love and adoration for him was an unintentionally cruel paradox to the conditions in which he left this world just a week prior—alone, isolated, and feeling like a failure. All the current recognition drove home the actual loss— not just that he was gone, but that he died not seeing his impact or knowing for himself how many lives he had touched and saved. The irony is almost too cruel to even type.
…………..
Untimely death leaves people confused and, more often than not, without the right words to say. I felt like I was clinging to driftwood in the middle of the vast open water, eyeing from a distance the ship I had been surviving on for the past eighteen years willingly sink to the bottom of the ocean. Platitudes from passersby’s like, “I’m sorry for your loss,” felt so diminishing, given the circumstances. Others like, “How are you holding up?” seemed so fucking obvious—and yet, I let them motor by in their fully intact vessels, waving with one hand as clung to my debris with the other, unsure whether I would drown or get spit out by the tide on a distant shore, but overall too numb to really care.
We were fortunate to have gleaned wisdom on this matter from a family friend and pastor, who had briefed us beforehand regarding the full gambit of sympathies we were likely to hear—some which would accurately reflect our loss and others that would feel infuriatingly tone-deaf. He advised us not to take the words at face value but instead at the intention from which they came. And so, we were armed with a handy formula to make it through the next few weeks of visitors:
‘All-the-crazy-bullshit-people-say-after-a-death’ = Love.
I was grateful to apply it; otherwise, it would have been easy to become offended—to unsparingly bring the sledgehammer of cold, hard facts down on an ignorant bystander who naively told me, “It was just his time.”
The only words that ever truly made a difference amid all the confusion were, “I love you, and I’m here for you.” They were essentially a buoy at a time when I could hardly be convinced to keep my head above water, conveying simply, “You are loved, and you are not alone.” Fewer words have ever made a bigger impact in the isolating waters of tragedy and so many friends and neighbors in our hometown enveloped us with this sense of solidarity and kindness.
I understood, however, that the stigma of suicide made some people nervous, but in the whole scheme of things, saying the wrong thing was so much better than saying nothing at all. I grew weariest from those who remained silent. From those who stared in the grocery store only to avert their eyes and sprint away. From those who would stop and talk to me but do a transparent, silly dance around the subject. From the hushed conversations that preceded any room I walked into.
Admittedly, I didn’t always know how to respond—how much information was appropriate to divulge whenever a stranger or casserole crusader would corner me and ask how I was doing; I was still in such shock for at least the first two months after he passed. The event and all the facts hung in the air, suspended ominously above my head so that while I could look and acknowledge they were there—had happened— I couldn’t yet feel their gravity. I became accustomed to answering only the questions asked of me. “How are you doing today?” elicited a, “I’m okay (never say numb, never say left behind), thanks so much for asking.” A surface-level question required only a surface-level answer, satisfying only pleasantries but accomplishing nothing; unsaid was the agreement that as long as I acted okay, no one had to be burdened by the fact that I wasn’t okay.
As time pressed on, it became apparent that this period of suspended acceptance wouldn’t last forever, and my nascent grief bullied its way past my shock and introduced itself with incoherent anger. I became enraged whenever someone else touched my dad’s stuff, seething when they suggested we pack up his office. His things weren’t just artifacts of his life but insights into his last precious moments. “GIVE THAT TO ME. IT HAS HIS HANDWRITING ON IT!!” “DON’T MOVE THAT; HE PUT THAT THERE!!!” “WHAT WAS SO-AND-SO DOING IN HIS OFFICE?! SHE HARDLY EVEN KNEW HIM!!” I threw things at walls, stormed out of rooms, and ragefully hung up on a few too many family members during that time.
Still, reality mandated that we physically moved on before we were ready. We couldn’t afford to keep his office, couldn’t afford to keep the house, and therefore, in a blink, his life was swallowed up by cardboard boxes and coldly swept away into storage. Stability had abandoned us at every conceivable turn, not the least of which was illustrated by religion, which went painfully cold, sidestepping the issue of suicide by wide margins. None of the prominent community Christians dared to take a formal position on the “enigma” of eternity post suicide, but speculate they did indeed, all without looking my family or me directly in the eye. (That’s not to say that there weren’t those in the church who stood by us because so many did, and I think of their fellowship often and warmly.) But the “unsaid” hung in the air, a contradiction to the Christian message that I felt was too vast to ignore, and the cowardice of religion in the face of a real tragedy, and the simple fact that it raised more questions than it had answers for, left me very lonely and bitter.
The summer was ending, so rather than stare down the barrel of grief in my hometown any longer, I opted instead to go back to school.
I anticipated returning to campus, assuming it would still hold the same bourgeoning sense of wonder as when I left, only finding out upon my return that the gleaming promises of my future had corroded, and in their place stood only doubt and cynicism. I felt like I had gone behind the life’s curtain, except instead of the magic design I was expecting, I found only a flawed, broken machine, ready to sputter to a bitter halt at any given moment.
Given my disillusionment, I couldn’t understand how everyone was walking around so full of hope. Didn’t they know this was all a con? That the proverbial fucking rug could get yanked from beneath them at any time? It was like watching cars happily speed down a highway I already knew led nowhere. The future was discouraging; everything about my present circumstances—especially the cruel, hard fact that life could end so sadly and suddenly without any justification whatsoever— seemed to belie hope. Life had duped me on a grand scale, and I knew it would be easier, from this point forward, to brace myself for the utter devastation that was certainly lurking around the next corner. Blindside me once, shame on you. Blindside me twice…
All of these revelations were compounded by the physical effects I was experiencing at the time. I lived in utter fear of being alone while the sun was setting—completely losing my shit whenever the afternoon began to fade into evening. I would find myself clenched tightly within the steel grip of panic, my breath would get short, I would break out in a cold sweat, and I would be wholly overcome with tears and despair (my body betraying any conscious demand to return itself to a functional state) until the stars came out assuring me it was night. To this day, I don’t know if it was merely a reaction to the drastic transformation from day to night, post-traumatic stress stemming from driving the jeep home during sunset, or possibly just the sky’s acknowledgment that one more day had come and gone without my dad, but to cope, I spent all sunsets inside avoiding the spectacle at all costs. Once when I was driving alone and began to feel the impending doom of dusk, I yanked the wheel, pulled over, darted into the nearest store (a Dollar General), and wandered the aisles with my back turned towards the door until I was sure by the time on my watch that it was entirely night.
I had no idea what to make of my body’s reaction. I guess, though, it seemed pretty on par, given the turmoil going on inside. Grief dictated everything, from my general outlook to the massive reformulation of what my life meant. His absence only became more obvious the more I tried to resume a normal routine. Anytime I had a question I knew only he could answer, found something unexplainable outside, or had car trouble, my mind would default reflexively to, “Just ask Dad” for one hopeful, ignorant beat. Then came the dawning realization, the sickening plummet from anticipation to reality, that in the place where his broad, steadfast presence I so heavily relied on once stood, there was now only a gaping hole of memories.
Grief, for me, is best described as an underground fight club, an inescapable dungeon where emotions drag you to kick the shit out of your heart. Sometimes, I found myself angry, screaming furiously, banging the steering wheel, and throwing things in a useless attempt to fight back. Sometimes, I would cower in the corner, too depleted, too ravaged, too hopeless to do anything but surrender in submission and let grief have its way with me. Sometimes, I’d try to outrun it, desperate to quench my need for normalcy by immersing myself into my boyfriend’s perfectly upright life. Sometimes, I’d numb it away, drinking myself stupid enough to pretend it didn’t exist.
But goddammit, if it didn’t always get the best of me, landing that one-two punch that felt so visceral, so tangibly real, it made me double over in pain and gasp for breath, wrapping my arms tightly around my abdomen as I tried to physically hold together what I so obviously couldn’t secure inside. Hot tears and gasping sobs were the only useful outlet, however temporary, to expel the immensity of anguish trapped inside.
If someone had pushed me off a cliff, it would have made more sense and hurt less than that first year of grief.
I had wanted so badly in high school to emancipate myself from our struggling household. I was so determined to forge my own path independent from my family that I hastily decided my junior year to graduate early. I rushed to leave, not caring who I left to hold up the platform I had just launched off of. I intended only to peer in on my family to give status reports of how well I was doing on my own, but it never occurred to me that my family—my safety net, my foundation—would never be a firm unit again. The home I only now wanted so desperately to return to was gone; there was nothing left of my foundation but broken pieces and unanswered questions.
I stared hard at my tarnished memories, feeling conned by the happiness they used to elicit. Had I been too distracted in innocence that I couldn’t see beyond the pursuit of my own satisfaction to my dad’s suffering? I became utterly obsessed with the “what-if’s,” furiously ruminating over the forensics from the days, weeks, and months leading up to his death. I helplessly raked every happy memory for signs that I had been ignorant to prior, destroying any vestige of nostalgia in my wake before grief had the chance to use it against me. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of factors to consider, and I tormented myself going over every one of them despite logically knowing that I would never run out of variables to fixate on nor arrive at a definitive answer. His death was not just unresolved but unresolvable, and the ensuing torture therein was enough to consume me forever.
Tragedy had left me distrustful of my aspirations, fearing they too would lure me to a back-alley of disappointment and pain, so I dropped all of my classes before the semester was even over. Deciding I needed a fresh start in a place where death didn’t feel so consuming, I chose to transfer to TTU in Lubbock, Texas.
…………..
Lubbock is located in West Texas, about six hours away from the hill country, which felt like a sufficient chunk of geography to distance myself from the painful landmarks of home. I immediately liked Lubbock, like Chris Cornell sings, “Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything,”[i] which is a welcome feeling when running away from any notion of the familiar. I felt uplifted by the idea that maybe here, I could be anonymous and temporarily free from the heavy expectations of grief back home. I traded the rolling Texas hills and access to the river for a region notoriously known for its red dirt and arid plateaus. Still, there’s an understated beauty to West Texas only those who have seen it in person can recognize. The flat landscape makes for vast horizons, which in turn make for the most amazing sunrises this hill country girl could ever have imagined.
I paid my rent by working part-time as a receptionist at a local insurance agency. I was quick-witted but pretty terrible at filing and answering the phones. I’m sure my employer and the other agents only let me keep my job more out of concern for my circumstances than for my punctuality or secretarial skills. Looking back, I recognize how transitional that period was for me, and I can’t overstate how far their tolerance and kindness carried me.
But you can’t be a shitty employee and expect to keep your job forever. When my welcome was finally worn out, I went in search of a job more suited for my capabilities (or lack thereof) which is how I became a server and eventually a bartender at a local “pub” call Fox and Hound.
The beauty of the West Texas region is that, while your accomplishments might save you a seat at the table, they won’t save you any seats at the bar—if you don’t have a breakdown by your third double whiskey, you better give up your seat for someone who’s got a fucking story to tell. Showing up to The Fox with baggage was considered business as usual, a stipulation that overqualified me as a bartender (AKA “Paid Comiserator”), by a lot. The West Texas crowd is grittier than the red dirt that permanently clouds the windswept air, but I was quick with a joke and to light up a smoke, and there was truly no place I would rather be.[ii]
I became fast friends with the other bartenders, who were all girls my age navigating the same surface issues that I was—making rent, passing classes, and trying not to spend all our tips getting wasted.
Mainstream, however, has trivialized and perpetuated the stereotype that losing a parent to suicide makes you the “Phoebe” in any social circle. Quirky, damaged, but “the one” with a perennial punch line in your back pocket. In reality, I was scrubbed raw. Any social gathering I attended, I had to pretend I wasn’t gaping open and bleeding with the caveat, “Daddy Issues,” tattooed on my forehead. Alcohol made this possible and provided a personality buffer to laugh and make jokes but not have to reveal the depths of my misery.
Working at a bar with a staff of all women, you learn early on how to leverage your sexuality for tips, to provide an ear that listens, to stand in the gaps of loneliness for a few hours a night, and to be the barmaid who serves relief by the pint. At the very least, you show up with a good memory, able to point out those customers who had stiffed you before, those who had a black card (oil money), and the new faces— business drifters who were likely to be convinced to blow their entire per diem on the tip line.
Constantly ongoing were the jokes that ricocheted off the walls like racquetballs, and with as many as eight bartenders behind the bar on a busy night (alongside The Fox itself which never failed to produce worthy material) we rarely missed an opportunity to make each other laugh. Collectively we had been through domestic abuse, suicide, pregnancy, miscarriage, adultery, and a hold-up—and that’s just scratching the surface. We were destined to be sisters in the way that hunkering in a bunker to survive binds you together for life. Destined to be friends forever in the way that finding humor despite it all carries you through anything.
Fortunately, working at a bar had its perks, foremost of which was the vast availability of alcohol always at our fingertips alongside the profuse West Texas drinking culture that accompanied it. I drank every shift to compensate for my social deficits and dull the sharp edges of my grief, but so did everyone else—bartenders and patrons alike. It was like we were doing this dysfunctional dance with life, drinking more than was necessary in an attempt to blackout the past or future, but only ever successfully blacking out the present. It might have looked like a shit show to anyone else, but for us, it felt like survival.
My dating life, on the other hand, was an actual shit show. I had fallen in love with a boy while experiencing the loss of my dad and subsequently had fallen flat on my face when he told me that love was unrequited. In the end, my grief had demanded all the attention, and he dumped me for being too emotional, too needy, and too “me,” using his parting words to explain that, “I was the kind of girl he could see himself marrying at thirty.” I only later understood what he was saying without saying—that my stock had plummeted, and given the circumstances of my misery, he didn’t see it coming back up for another eleven years or so, at which time he’d circle back around to see if things had turned green again[iii]. From that point on, I vowed to myself to keep the liability of my grief out of all my future relationships—which disqualified the actual me from showing up at all. Instead, I projected back to my boyfriends what I thought they wanted to see. I was excited, ambitious, and casual—not the personification of a slowly sinking Titanic. That didn’t mean I didn’t talk about my grief or let myself be comforted, but I minimized what had happened, as though it was just a small part of my past, something in the backfile, not a dominating force with jurisdiction over my entire emotional base.
Mindy Kaling says: “You can’t say I love you before you can say I.,” —which accurately describes everything that was wrong with my relationships at the time.
It is amazing how the truths about yourself that you’ve worked your entire lifetime to construct take a singular event and mere seconds to collapse. The only constants about me were pain, sadness, and distrust for anything claiming to be permanent. I had therefore given up trying to nail down who “I” was after the tragedy of losing my dad; feigning stability felt like a much safer bet than trusting my identity to the transient tides of grief. So, when I echoed the phrase “I love you” in a relationship, I had the best of intentions, but the “I” speaking was a vacant proxy, a hologram incapable of such grandiose declarations. “Love” was a campaign promise—something I pledged up front but never made good on. And the “you” part, well, that’s what everything else came crashing down on.
Whenever a boyfriend began to catch on— impugn my creditability and call into question my drinking habits or apparent ambivalence towards life—I deflected by blaming stress or burnout from my hectic schedule, a cunning distraction so the accuser wouldn’t notice the bottle in my hand and my foot already one step out the door. To make matters worse, I had a reckless habit of hedging a failing relationship by overlapping it with a new one, that way, I never had to deal with a lapse of affection. I did this repeatedly with little to no regard for the person I had offloaded, which I don’t admit with pride at all as it is one of the ways I’ve hurt people the worst in my life. Ironically, the only time my boyfriends ever experienced the real me was when they met the icy backdraft of my apathy upon realizing they had been replaced. Consequently, I was not only drinking to compensate for my inability to show up in the world for who I was—grief-stricken and therefore less lovable—but also to stifle the looming guilt I felt for the coldly disposing of those I had duped into loving me.
The more time went on, the more I drank, the sloppier I became. Whenever I would blackout from drinking, my grief would bubble over and spill out, unloading itself onto a fellow bartender. The next morning after regaining consciousness, I would have flashes of myself: distraughtly sobbing about my dad, my shocked friend trying to tame and console me, and I would be mortified. Feeling exposed, I would quickly scramble to regather what details I had recklessly spilled and shove them back inside, pushing them one by one further and further away from the surface as though I was reloading bullets into a clip. I was afraid in these moments of vulnerability, where alcohol left me little memory and even less control over what came out of my mouth, that I had let some of my darkness slip, and that my friends, having fleetingly seen me maskless, would surely catch on that my inner world was painted black[iv] and my heart was growing weary of thumping in desolation—not at all like the girl I wanted them to see, or think of me as. Not at all the girl I wanted to be.
Fortunately, we all silently carried our own burdens, as women do, supporting each other when we needed it and abiding by the unsaid agreement that made our friendships and bartending jobs possible: don’t judge anybody who is in pain.
Around that time, my drinking began to really spiral out of control, but I explained it away as part of “college culture” because everyone around me seemed to blackout on the weekends also. I sold myself on this excuse, insisting I too was drinking to have a “good time,” not numb myself and all my emotions to the world. Didn’t everyone else get wasted at work and take a bottle of Jameson into the shower with them?
There were many highs and lows during that period so it’s hard in retrospect to form a clear timeline of events, the only discernable difference being that every new low I hit would inevitably be lower than the last.
On one occasion, in particular, I had gone out partying for a friend’s birthday. The night ran long, as our nights usually did, and we ended up drinking after hours on the roof of a bar, atop which you could see all of downtown Lubbock. The rooftop was only accessible by climbing up the bar’s balcony railing and illegally shimmying and hoisting yourself upwards. I don’t even remember making the climb in my blacked-out state, and the only moments not obscured from my memory stem from the adrenaline surges I got hopping from rooftop to rooftop of all the nearby buildings. I have a fleeting memory of scaling the face of one of the buildings, hooking my fingers under a ledge, and throwing my head back so far back that I could see the entire Texas Tech campus upside down. The next memory I have, I remember perilously hanging by my fingertips, almost a story and a half above the sidewalk. The rest is blurry, up until my final memory—feeling a very vivid flash of pain shoot all the way up my right leg after I hit the concrete— shattering my ankle into pieces.
…………..
Emergency orthopedic surgery, a plate, eight screws, and hospital bills out the ass would, to anyone else, probably seem like a giant red flag (or many). To me, it was a hindrance, an inconvenient reminder that life could indeed get worse. My general apathy for living meant that I didn’t condemn myself for being reckless nor count myself lucky to be alive. Had I landed on anything other than my feet, I could have crippled myself for life or died, but I felt indifferent. What I feared the most was that my cover had been blown, and I could no longer convince people around me that I was functional. The façade had failed, and real me—the hopeless me— began to seep through. It became impossible, even with alcohol, to hold the door to my double life closed, and the depression that had always lingered in the background began to play a more prominent role in my life.
As a result, I withdrew from my future, not caring whether I was late, did homework, or paid my bills. If it’s true that you create the energy around you, then I was essentially abiding in a black hole of my own making. Hygiene became such an exertion that I only showered when life absolutely mandated I do so. Far gone was any pride about my appearance; it hardly seemed worth the trouble anymore. Whenever I did convince myself to shower, I would lie under the stream of scalding water and let the hot torrent jet into my abdomen for as long as the water heater permitted, only surrendering and washing when motivated by the icy rain from the showerhead.
Grief had become less sad, less wistful, and manifested into a physical emptiness—depletedness— I’m to this day, still lacking words to describe. Pain consumed me. There was no childhood memory I could draw on that didn’t make me debate my dad’s willingness to be there, no past experience that didn’t call into question what I had said, how I had behaved, and how in the grander scheme of things, my choices might have incited his death. Did I have any culpability, bear any blame,or have any part of my hand on that trigger with his?
I started to ruminate over life’s incongruencies. Is the world so cruel, so unjust, that it could cause something so beautiful to burn out without so much as a goodbye? Why do bad things happen to good people? What is prosperity if everything is futile? What even is happiness if it can be so easily disproven by life itself? What is the point of loving people if that love can just be lost? Will everyone I know go away in the end?[v]
If life is a mountain, and our purpose here is to climb it, then I had essentially let go and slid all the way down the slope until I landed in a heap at the base. I stopped focusing on climbing back up at all and began to wonder if the mountain itself was even worth it.
When the futility felt too burdensome, I would lie on the floor of my kitchen, cheek to grout, and stay in that position for hours. Sometimes I cried, but I didn’t weep or sob—those emotional releases were beyond my grasp by now—just let tears leak from my eyes, like pain seeping through a weary threshold. I felt vacant, empty, worthless.
I first experienced depression as a freshman in high school. I would flop on my mom’s bed nightly, in a tangle of limbs and emotions, and lament to her all about my body image, my shy nature, and the low ranks I inhabited within the social hierarchy of rich, pretty girls. “They tell jokes that aren’t funny, and everyone laughs but me. Why can’t I laugh, too?” I felt as though somebody had traced all the other girls with the same, perfect stencil, but like I somehow had been drawn freehand. My self-esteem especially plummeted when a group of junior boys made a bet to see how “far” one of them could get with me within a two-week span. I found out about the bet midway through, and the dawning realization that I was worth more to gamble with than as an actual, breathing person confirmed within me what I had suspected all along: Who I was, was not enough. Eventually, I stopped coming to my mom’s bed. Stopped eating. Stopped turning in assignments. Stopped playing soccer. I just made a solemn agreement with myself not to bother trying anymore.
One night there was a knock on my door, but instead of my mom—who usually headed up the angsty-teenage-issue department—, I saw my dad standing in the doorway. He came and sat next to me on the bed, put an arm around my shoulder, and told me about depression. “It’s the mentality that inhibits us from seeing that every cloud has a silver lining. Instead, we notice that every silver lining has a cloud.” I exhaled because, for the first time, someone had seen me. Then he used words like chemical imbalance and serotonin and not my fault and biological. He explained how Prozac was broken down and worked chemically within the body, and I just nodded and agreed to try it. “I know what this feels like,” he said, “because I have depression too.” And another, different kind of agreement arose. A tacit agreement between father and daughter that said, “You are not alone in this. You are like me. Just follow my lead.”
I was alone now—my prototype to combat depression had tragically succumbed to it. The despair I felt wasn’t at all like the fear-based, franticness that had inhabited my body when my dad first died, but instead like a bleak feeling of reckoning, grounded in the acceptance that the only way to stop the pain from beating down my door every day was to strip it of its future. I wanted to, as Chanel Miller so poignantly described, “slip out the back door.” Wash away with the tide. Fade away. Resign. My hopelessness felt like a never-ending night, and I had lost any faith I could ever outlast it.
I began to wonder realistically how to die. I want to point out that during this time, I was still working, still dating, still going through the surface motions to perpetuate the diversion that even if I wasn’t great, I was “okay,” lest anyone pick up on the fact that I felt worthless and suicidal. A person’s functionality should never be an indication of the extent of their depression. The only hope I felt from everyday life was the idea that soon, I would no longer have to endure the pain of it.
But what makes my story unique is the fact that I have narrowly walked both lines of suicide.
On the one side, I have embodied the rock bottom, depths of depression where not living feels like an escape hatch from the hopelessness of this world and the only reprieve from the pain and the burden of breathing.
On the other side, however, I am a witness to the aftermath— a survivor of the suicide of a loved one who empirically learned that self-inflicted death never spares the survivors from the burden that we assume it will but instead bequeaths a heavier burden of grief, pain, and the helpless agony of how it could have been prevented—the infinite torment from which I will personally never outrun. Those you leave behind are never, ever better off or less burdened without you. A star is never born. Survivors must take a least 1,000 steps backward before one tentative step forward is even possible.
Survivor suffering is all too often romanticized, overly so especially by Hollywood, but let attempt to subvert the narrative by saying that a suicide never provides a succinct list of reasons why—it is personal, and the factors involved are innumerable, no matter how clearly it is spelled out. I can assure you from my own experience, the legacy of a premeditated suicide is not an impactful lesson we are meant to derive hidden meaning from. We cannot as collectively say as a society, “That life was well sacrificed so that we can learn these valuable lessons.” One life lost is one too many. Moreover, a life lost to suicide should not pale in comparison to the lessons we learn in the aftermath—having lost one of the most important people in my life to suicide, I can tell you firsthand, the lessons learned drastically pale in comparison to the life lost.
However inadvertent, the real legacy of suicide (not of the person, to be clear) is a tragic misunderstanding. The legacy is agonizing pain. The legacy is hopelessness. The legacy is insurmountable grief. The legacy is never saying goodbye. The legacy is crippling trauma and regret. The legacy is the weight of an entire soul on our hearts for as long as we live.
The turning point for me came from this realization: Anytime I considered ending my life, I inevitably heard my mother’s voice from that phone call that stopped time itself on the day she found my dad. I could still hear the terrorized, other-worldly screams that came from the line, and I knew I could never intentionally cause her that much pain again. The woman who could have so easily fallen and would have had every conceivable right never to get back up. Who stitched my childhood together so that my dad could always be my hero and I would never have to associate him with his mental struggles. Who got on her hands and knees every day after he died and scrubbed his precious blood out of the pavement—I knew she wouldn’t survive it twice. I knew to leave her this way would be to sentence her. More broadly, I knew deep down I could not perpetuate the pain I was trying desperately to escape. I would not leave the same mark on other lives that had, however unintentionally, been left on mine.
…………..
Part II
Entertaining death and ultimately backing down meant that, by default, I intended to live. I say intended because wanted is too strong a word. I had made the decision to persevere, but for what was still unknown. Life became, if at all possible, even bleaker.
The aftermath of the destructive and reckless way I had lived and the lies I had used as diversions (assuming I would be dead before I had to endure the consequences) proved itself a very uphill road to navigate. I had a mountain of neglected responsibilities made most obvious by the massive accumulation of bills on my kitchen table. At one point, the power to my duplex was shut off, and I had no financial means to turn it back on for weeks. Fortunately, the Texas weather during that season abided my sleeping by an open window, so I showered in the dark, ate from sacks, and soaked in the AC at work or in coffee shops all day.
My relationship at the time was out of state, the distant proximity of which allowed me to be dwell in the rock bottom state I was in and simultaneously propagate the notion that I was marriage material. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to tell my boyfriend that the person on the other end of our phone calls was not who he thought she was or who she said she was—that she laid daily on the floor for hours at a time and only showered once a week. No clue how to disentangle myself from my fallacious projections of stability so we could start over, no inkling how to stop deflecting about my mental state and ask for help. He knew that I was sliding downward but just assumed I had a penchant for pessimism; he could not see me spiraling. I was hiding in plain sight, the way I suppose my dad had hidden from me, and I didn’t know how to be seen. I dwelled in an invisible world.
But if not from him, it was apparent to me from the moment that I had decided to live that I would need help doing so. There’s the kind of relief that only comes when you think the pain will soon be gone, like a mental shelf where I could temporarily rest my depression, and now that I had picked it back up, the immensity of the burden was much heavier than I remembered. I was desperate for someone to show me where to put it, to help me carry a little of it so that I could make it just one more day. Deep down, I knew I didn’t have the strength to hold it much longer, and for the first time, I realized my depression had the force to engulf and overshadow me. It was a darkness which I knew I could not fight. (x) If I set it down again, I might never pick it back up, and I became aware that my chances of survival were narrowing by the day. It’s like I could feel the steering wheel slipping from my grip and I knew if I wanted to live, seeking help was my only option.
I am defensive about the fact that depression didn’t make me irrational, although I understand how my suicidal ideation can make it seem so. But I was not deluded, crazy, emotional, or out of touch with reality per se*. In fact, I would argue the opposite to be the case. I felt stuck in a hyper-state of reality where I saw the world and its inner workings as they really were, but could not connect emotionally with the input—kind of like listening to music but only hearing the individual notes, not the tune. Or noticing different shades of color but not seeing the rainbow. Or watching a movie without the musical score. Or seeing the sun’s rays hit your skin but not understanding the warmth. Reality, sans the rose-colored glasses of emotion, is a very bleak grind, indeed. The broad net of the term “mental illness” makes you think that there should be something noticeably wrong with you, namely a definable and discernable illness**. However, what felt “wrong” was the hyper state of black and white reality I was embedded in, the heaviness of the grief and pain I was carrying, and how in turn, that realistically made me feel—hopeless and futile against it. (*Please note, there are plenty of comorbidities from which I did not suffer, like psychosis, for example, that can make the experience very different) (**Also note that Depression IS an illness, but it doesn’t always feel definable.)
It would be true to say, though, that I didn’t feel like myself, seeing as there was nothing left to ground me to my life that hadn’t already been destroyed; trauma and the daily inundation of grief had left me without any reference point for who I was. Already a stranger to myself, it wasn’t noticeable to me when I slipped deeper and deeper into depression, only finding my footing once I landed at rock bottom.
Antidepressants had worked for me in high school—had chemically transported me into a fresh new perspective and allowed my personality to flourish—could they work for me again? My current mindset couldn’t fathom it, but past experience with medication told me that it was my best option. My money situation, however, was dismal. I didn’t have insurance or a PCP as my dad was the only doctor I ever needed my whole life. Without any viable options available, I didn’t have a clue where to turn for a prescription. Why our society puts such a high price and red tape on mental health will always be beyond my capacity to understand. If it was hard, as an educated, white, but economically disadvantaged female, to find help, I cannot imagine how stymied the resources are for people of color to be treated in a system designed to keep them at an arm’s length. Or veterans, trained by the government for combat but discarded for their PTSD afterward, proving that the highest ranks view them not as people but as cogs in the war machine— weapons with a heartbeat. Mental Health should not be considered an elitist privilege in this world. It should be a fundamental (emphasis on the mental) human right.
I spent weeks unable to solve this problem, inches from the edge, until one afternoon I just broke down and googled, “need medical help/ no money/ Lubbock, Texas.” Combining those keywords invoked some algorithm of pure fate because the Lubbock Community Health Center popped up on my screen.
The health center clinic I went to was relegated to an ancient building in downtown Lubbock. The halls and waiting room were dimly lit, and I could smell the accumulation of mildew within the dripping walls. I sat in a waiting room of recycled chairs amongst fifty other people, waiting for a single receptionist to call my name. I was skinny, dirty, and reeked of cigarettes, but I didn’t stand out among the rest of the crowd.
The exam room was antiquated but clean, well-lit, and busting with brochures and overtly informational anatomical posters. The nurse practitioner was a competent, middle-aged woman. She didn’t wear a smidge of makeup, most likely for lack of practicality, and her bare lips formed a thin line when I told her that I had come seeking antidepressants. She listened intently and did not flinch when the tears came to my eyes and slid down my cheeks for no apparent reason, nor when my face burned hot, and my eyes darted around the room whenever she asked about my family history. When I, in turn, earnestly asked her if she thought the need to self-destruct was hereditary, she softened only slightly, un-pursed her lips, and shook her head in an honest no.
She was not unsympathetic to my circumstances—just data-driven—which I appreciated, given the burning shame I felt from even uttering the words “I’m depressed” to another soul in the first place. She prescribed an antidepressant and mandated I see a therapist in the community counseling branch. Before I could even muster a refusal, she held a hand up, cutting me off, and repeated in an uncompromising tone, “Therapy is mandatory. It will not cost you anything. I will make the appointment for you.”
Looking back, I’m curious, what if she hadn’t heeded my desperate plea for help but instead shook her finger and told me sternly to pull myself up by my bootstraps? What bootstraps? I know without a shadow of a doubt I would have never sought help again, and wonder if I would even be alive today. I’m curious if she was aware just how many lives she had likely saved, working in the turnstile type of medical environment, scaping patients up from rock bottom, propping us up, and pointing us in the direction of help, one after the next, day after day? The respect she showed by hearing me out was the most I had been seen or heard in a very long time, and I know I have her to thank for showing me my first foothold back up the fearsome mountain.
Seeking help is by far the hardest, bravest thing I have ever done. Not dying is a close second. But please, let my journey be a lamppost to defiantly say, while sometimes an uphill battle, both are possible.
…………..
There’s a chase scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens where Rey and Fin are being pursued on foot by Imperials through the sandy dunes of Jakku. In an attempt to outrun the incoming fire, they seek shelter in a half-buried, abandoned spaceship and frantically begin to flip dormant switches and pull dusty knobs on the control panel in hopes it will turn on. The lights flash as the dashboard activates, and the ship begins to levitate and surge to life. It lurches forward, knocking over buildings and other aircraft while Rey tries desperately to gain control of the steering, until finally, in a beautiful moment, it’s airborne. It’s only then that you notice, the spacecraft that Rey had minutes before referred to as “garbage” is, in fact, the Millennium Falcon.
This is kind of what coming out of depression feels like.
My medication was not immediate, as in hours, but within days I felt like my dusty control panel began to reactive. Parts of my brain that had been buried in the sand for four years surged to life again. There was no instant gratification, no magic spell, but I noticed that life went from futile, to dismal, to tolerable within a matter of weeks.
I don’t necessarily believe that antidepressants help us by altering or distancing us from our reality. Instead, when I took medication, chemically speaking, my brain was no longer a biological vessel for depression. I had the ability to draw on all of my faculties, some that I had forgotten even existed. Like that saying, “firing on all cylinders” implies, I felt as though my last cylinder had finally ignited, allowing me to fully function at last.
From the other side of depression, I could see that while my reality remained intact, the void depression had imposed wasn’t solely a lack of emotion but instead a perpetual shortage of hope. We tend to think of “hope” as the corresponding feeling to wishes and dreams, but I personally think there’s so much more to it than that. I see hope now, not as blind optimism, but as a life force and an energy field. Hope is the instigator for every decision we make as humans—the undercurrent carrying us from one choice to the next. When we wake up and take our first sips of coffee in the morning, we are hopeful that the day will produce good things, hopeful that our work will be prosperous, hopeful that those who loved us the day before will continue to love us today, hopeful that our minor occurrences and thoughts throughout the day will feel as good if not better than the day before. Hope allows us to work hard, to learn, to strive, to love, to have faith of any kind, to endure, to sacrifice, and ultimately to keep living. Hope is what allows us to put one foot in front of another, day after day.
If we put hope on a spectrum, I think depression would fall at the lower end, in the range of hopelessness. I don’t believe we are equipped as humans to live without it—when we lose hope, our brains chemically shut down (or vice-versa). Just like how J.K. Rowling’s dementor sucked the hope out of its prey until there was nothing left of the person, so too do I feel like dwelling in an emotionless vacuum of bleak reality without hope is ultimately how depression insidiously kills us.
While there is no pill for hope, medication offered me a rope ladder from the base of the mountain to a higher vantage point from which to view reality. It would be a stretch to say I was happy, but I began to realize that the machine I was attempting to unbury and reactivate had the capacity not just to power up but also fly to galaxies far, far away. For the first time in years, I saw that I had more potential than to be a receptacle for pain and grief for the rest of my life, and I was hopeful. Maybe that’s the real force that awakens to drive out depression: Hope. However we ultimately summon it is up to us but within nonetheless.
…………..
A common misconception is that antidepressants are “happy pills” and that taking them produces a sense of artificial euphoria. I had my doubts before taking medicine because I desperately didn’t want to feel a falsely manufactured sense of happiness— I knew my brain would immediately call bullshit, forcing me to start the entire process over. Fortunately, this has never been my experience with antidepressants. Happiness, true joy, is a product of something much greater. Although medicine had reintroduced the ability to be hopeful again, my grief and the circumstances of my life were still unchanged; therefore, my overall “happiness” was still out of my reach, leaving my work far from over.
Even still, I went into my first therapy appointment with a chip on my shoulder. My hatred for unsolicited advice ranks right up there next to my loathsome fear of being misunderstood, and therapy seemed like an unnecessary way to combine the two. In an effort to cut things short, I had prepared to deflect anytime I heard a word from the bank consisting of trauma, fear of abandonment, addiction, self-destructive behaviors, grief cycle, self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, fear of intimacy, etc. I did not want to sit through an entire session where someone called out in rapid-fire succession what was wrong with me—life itself had versed me well enough to know what those things were already.
Admittedly though, the therapist’s office was not at all like I envisioned. It was a dim, windowless room tucked in the corner of a basement. Its humble second-hand décor didn’t scream, “I like the sound of my own voice, especially when you pay me for it,” but instead, the warm lamps and subtle hues innocuously conveyed, “You are safe here.”
I sat on an overstuffed sofa across from the therapist’s cluttered desk. She was old enough to have just achieved a degree but young enough that I understood she was here to gain experience.
In general, the formulaic nature that most therapy sessions abide by—where the patient divulges details and the therapist, in turn, offers professional insights or places crafty breadcrumbs covertly leading us to our own conclusions—did not seem to apply to our sessions, at least not at first. We were able to find relatable ground where we could level with one another about life. We laughed and cursed and talked about books we had both read and became comfortable enough with each other until I, in turn, felt comfortable enough divulging the details of my past.
Little by little, I brought the pain forward into the light, placing it between us so that we could evaluate it together. She was observant but kind, indirectly acknowledging my intense vulnerability by staying objective.
Once I finished my story and laid out every last detail before us, I braced myself to hear the advice I assumed would confirm what I already knew: I had abandonment issues. Self-esteem issues. Depression issues. All the textbook “trauma response” issues that surround a tragedy. I was hopeful maybe she could professionally loop all her conclusions back around and somehow connect the dots enough to fix my relationships—but even if that didn’t happen, I still felt a sense of satisfaction and relief from having told another person my story, as though I finally had set something very heavy down. I figured if that’s all therapy did for me then I could walk away at least feeling lighter.
What she did say caught me completely off guard.
“Do you know what shame is?” she asked me.
My defenses immediately went up. I wanted to run to the table, peel her judgment off the details of my life I had just laid out, and split from her office as quickly as possible.
Instead, I stood my ground, and I answered belligerently, “I am NOT ASHAMED of how my dad died!”
I was mad at her for using all her therapy powers to draw the wrong conclusion. Hadn’t she heard my story at all?
“No—I’m asking if you know what the word shame means?” she repeated.
Was she dense? “No, I don’t feel any shame for How. He. Died. That has never mattered to me.” I was enunciating slowly, hoping my words would sink in this time.
Instead, she opened a disheveled, significantly earmarked blue book perched on her desk and slowly read the definition out loud.
“Shame is an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” [vi]
I took this in, tensely unsure yet what she wanted me to do with it.
Then she asked me, “Is there a part of you that believes if you were somehow different, more worthy, that he would still be here?”
I felt my knees weaken at the sound of the word worthy.
My mind had passed over this possibly plenty of times, but I had framed the question differently. I asked myself, “If I acted or behaved otherwise, would he still be here?” Her question hit harder where it was noticeably different. She wasn’t asking about my behavior per se, but instead, if I believed my flaws had played in role in his death.
My head was defending him, telling me logically that couldn’t be it—there were so many other factors outside of me involved. But sometimes, there’s a difference between what our heads rationally and intellectually know and what our hearts inherently believe.
At the heart of it, this belief ran so deep that it had surpassed the need to be defined by logic. Every molecule inside of me was overcome by a sense of unworthiness, or perhaps by whatever this “shame” was the therapist had suggested.
I think they call this the break in therapy, the aha, the moment the hidden truth becomes apparent.
In a glimpse, I could see myself at eighteen, painfully young and equally as impressionable, tentatively asking the world, “Who am I? Am I enough?”
His suicide had inadvertently answered, “You are not enough to keep me here.”
So when the therapist then asked me at twenty-two, “Do you believe you are worthy of being loved?” my heart didn’t check with my head before I heard myself answer through tears, “No. I am not even worth living for.”
…………..
My therapist rounded out our conversation by giving me the book that she read the shame definition from. It was called “I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t)” by Dr. Brené Brown, who had just as recently as a year before I sat in my therapist’s office, given the viral TED talk about vulnerability and ignited the global conversation about shame. As of this writing in 2021, her name now is ubiquitous with courage, vulnerability, and shame-resilience.
At the time, I didn’t know who she was. She was just the co-conspirator to the most hurtful, most damning conclusion I had ever drawn about myself—that this deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy was neither grief nor depression—it was something else entirely. However untrue, the story my “shame” had told me was that my dad had died in part because I was not worthy enough—not good enough—for him to stay. While not substantiated by logic or fact, that painful belief (that I was flawed and therefore unworthy) is, by definition, shame.
Looking back over the last few years, it began to dawn on me the overarching ways shame had influenced my life…
My relationships had been doomed to fail from the start because at the heart of it, I assumed the real me was too damaged, too sad, too depressed, and too unworthy to be loved. So instead, I created a false narrative of an ambitious, carefree person—I thought she would be worthy of love, so I projected her out into the world. But she wasn’t real, and therefore any love she received I could not authentically feel at heart. This only perpetuated my belief that, because I couldn’t feel loved, I was unworthy of it. And I cycled through relationships, fueled by a ravenous need for connection, but discarding anyone who I felt loved me imperfectly, not realizing the whole time I was the problem.
Alcohol had been my enabler, had been the magic potion that had allowed me not to have to be me anymore. I didn’t feel able to show up socially, without alcohol, for fear that the authentic me would be rejected for not being enough. It permitted me to misrepresent myself and simultaneously numbed the guilt away.
I had resigned from my ambitions and turned my attention away from the future because it is hard to strive for good things when you can’t even look them in the eye—when your head is bowed so low with shame, you feel like, at your core, you don’t deserve them. As a result, I had isolated myself, cut off hopes for the future and, therefore any chance of failure. It was easier to live in a constant state of disappointment than have the world acknowledge it for me. Ambition would almost certainly reaffirm what I already knew—that I didn’t have the credentials needed for a bright and shiny future. I was flawed.
Try uttering the words, “I am worthy,” while looking in the mirror when deep down, you don’t actually believe it. The outcome will look something like a red wine bottle, raised overhead and smashed against the glass—shattering your broken image in pieces all over the floor where they rightfully belong—because now that you have uncovered shame, shown a light on it, and called it by its name, the recognition is painful.
Self-loathing is a difficult concept for me to articulate because like anger, it’s a headspace that’s not always reasonable or logical. It is like creating a list of all the reasons you feel you’re not worthy, and then assuming that list describes you—and, regardless of its truth, it hurts. Even the simplest affirmations meant to elevate me would instead cause tears to sting my eyes and my face to burn with rageful hatred. I couldn’t even sit in the same room as a compliment—I felt like I was living, breathing, walking evidence to the contrary. I hated myself for who I was. Hated myself for not being “normal”. Hated myself for being always being at the mercy of grief’s daily dictates. Hated myself for overthinking everything. Hated myself for being me. Hated myself for how low I had fallen. Worthy was just about the last thing I felt qualified to call myself.
I had absolutely no pretenses or facades to hide behind anymore—I could not reject, project, or deflect shame away once the curtain had been drawn back and I had come face to face with its origins. In truth, this was more than just a petty self-esteem issue; my perceived inadequacy had infiltrated my identity so profoundly, that at my core, I believed I was unworthy of love. And this realization absolutely leveled me—transported me straight back down to the rock bottom I had just recently climbed out of. I could still see the etchings on the wall, tally marks from the last time I had ended up here, fighting for my life in a completely different way.
But rock bottom is an interesting place because you only ever land there to reckon with existential, metaphysical problems. Superficial issues and noise cannot follow you to rock bottom because they have zero relevancy beneath the surface. Universal truths like hope, grace, worthiness, love—just to name a few—are always what brings you here, and likewise, a reckoning with them is your only way out.
The last time I was here, I had all all-out reckoning with hope. This time, it was for worthiness.
I knew I had let my sense of unworthiness severely influence who I was, from my relationships to my ambitions, all the way down to my identity. I could name for you one thousand different reasons why I felt unworthy of life, love, and good things, with my dad’s death serving as the damning evidence. But despite all the reasons I felt unqualified, I had still made a choice not to take my own life. I had chosen to live. By doing so, I invited in the tiniest glimmer of hope that perhaps deep down, I chose life because I felt I was worthy of living.
But why? Where does worthiness come from? What factor or factors ultimately make us decide, “yes, I’m worthy” or, “no, I’m not?” Why, when I could not see my worth in other places, did I assume I was worthy of life?
There is a simple formula for receiving revelations and answering questions when dwelling in rock bottom:
Be.
Be still.
Be still, and know.
When I looked deep inside myself, beneath the noise of the world, this is what I learned:
Life had been given to me, without my asking for it, without my merit, without proof that I was deserving of it. The universe had configured atoms in such a miraculous way so that I was here, breathing and growing and learning and loving. Life is an irrefutable phenomenon, that much is certain—and I don’t think there’s a scientist or religion that would dare to tell you otherwise. Life had been bestowed upon me since my inception, without any original dispute over whether I was worthy enough to receive it.
This raises the question, if the Universe or The Creator or God created humans, why would They do so, if only to hold our humanity against us?
Could it be that worthiness is not defined outwardly? Or humanly? That while decisions might affect our circumstances on earth, they do not have any bearing on our soul’s worth because our worth here is as inherent as being alive?
If love can exist within an imperfect world—can’t worth exist within an imperfect person? So therefore, if worth is not correlative with our perfection, does that mean worth is not earned—it is bestowed, like life itself?
Furthermore, if our actions did not give us worth to begin with, how then could our actions take it away? Meaning worth, therefore, is unconditional?
So conclusively, when you say “I am worthy because…” the only possible ending to the statement is, “I am.”
I am worthy because I am. Because worth, like life itself, was bestowed upon me. By design, there can be no other way.
This realization might seem reductive, but fundamental truths are always the simplest. It took me being on my knees and at my stillest to fully recognize a simple truth (I am worthy) that otherwise would have been convoluted beyond comprehension on the surface. (In fact, when you find a Universal Truth, like love, for example, heavily regulated to be opportunistic to some but to exclude others, you will know its meaning has been tampered with by humankind.) Universal Truths have been encoded deep in the core of each and every human—which is why we cannot define, control, or steal each other’s love, hope, or worth—although humanity has a very long history of trying and an even longer history of failing at it.
The beauty of recognizing inwardly that our worthiness is unconditional and inherent is that, when turned outwardly, you begin to realize everyone else is worthy too.
Therefore things like wealth, beauty, education, skin color, credentials, geography, gender, successes, failures, and status are just adjectives used to describe circumstance, not worth.
So here are some things I know, now, for sure:
No one person is any more or less worthy of life, love, and good things than another, no matter the circumstance. All the reasons we assume qualify or disqualify us from “being worthy” actually have no bearing.
No one person’s life is worth more or less than another. There is no such thing as a hierarchy when it comes to life itself, which can be confusing when the world and society we live in allows us to measure each other based on our circumstances. However, there is no such thing as an “important” life and an “unimportant” life. Every life is equally as important and as worthy as the next.
We are all enough. We did not show up here incomplete. Worth is universal.
…………..
A monumental, seismic shift inside happens when you first realize your worth. Shameful, hateful self-talk that had previously made sense before— that had shaken and scared me so bad that I felt I had to hide who I was—no longer had any power over me. For the first time, my past did not disqualify me from my worth, and shame could no longer use my Dad’s death as leverage for me to believe otherwise.
Rock bottom had allowed me a new starting point, a foundation upon which I could begin building the framework for “who I was” without shame…
Which is daunting, like any “blank page,” “starting line,” or “new beginning” is. But I knew if worth wasn’t the cornerstone to rebuilding my life—the center from which everything else blossomed — I would fall victim to the same, reflexive, societal trap of measuring my worth on a sliding scale from failure to merit.
For instance, if you build a life contingent upon success, accolades, power, beauty, wealth, and good behavior, then place your worth on top of conditional circumstances such as those, any degree to which they change will cause your worth to spike or plummet accordingly. Ultimately, you let circumstances dictate “who you are” at your core. And you judge others based on the same criteria.
Alternatively, suppose you base who you are as the worst thing you’ve ever done or has been done to you. In that case, you will inevitably put a cap on your worth so that nothing and no one but shame can ever dictate how you see yourself. To learn and grow, you must separate all failures from your worth. The touchstone of empathy is this nascent self-forgiveness, the acceptance that wrongdoing can be temporary and not a contingency to our worth. To abide in a conditional world, where we do not evolve ourselves to heal or understand, is to live at the mercy of our past, forever. And we are all worthy of a future.
Worth cannot be earned or achieved. Worth does not have to be justified. Worth doesn’t have to be reinforced or acknowledged by the world to exist. Worth is locked-in from the get-go.
As a person who used her worldview, her past, and her failures as a metric of her worth to the extent to where I allowed shame to almost snuff me out, I can tell you from experience, the only time I have ever known true freedom was when I threw all of the shame’s faulty standards to the wind. To acknowledge our unconditional worth is to cut shame off at the source.
Although at ground zero of my rebuilding phase, I didn’t have quite so many words to describe my worth, the overall feeling was revelatory.
I knew “I am worthy” would have to be the first line of code I put into the system from which everything else was programmed. Not “I am worthy because…” Not “I am worthy except for…” Simply, “I am worthy.”
In turn, things in my life became much simpler. I could finally distinguish some of the red flags that my shame had previously disguised as normal.
I could more clearly identify who around me detracted from my worth, and who reinforced it.
Who judged and controlled me based on my circumstances, and who treated me according to who I was at my core.
Which advertisers sought to diminish my worth, so they could then “rebuild” me with their products.
Which churches reinforced shame, and which ones uplifted me into belonging.
What political campaigns perpetuated division for power, and what rhetoric spoke to our worth as a universal whole.
The list goes on and on, but merely knowing my worth helped me discern what still fit in my life and what was extraneous. There was no longer any need to contort myself into different versions just to appease the popular opinion. While the need to feel accepted is human nature, I feel like there’s a difference between surrounding yourself with people and things that make you feel authentic, versus laying your self-worth at the feet of others, hoping in turn for acceptance. I had mistakenly hinged my life on this worldly approval, assuming worth would just be a lucky byproduct. Come to find out my worth was intact all along.
I had been afraid for so long to openly show those around me how deeply affected I was by my dad’s suicide. Fearful that I would be accused of soliciting sympathy. Ashamed of the fact that, while others my age were forging their life paths, I was stalled, reckoning daily with grief and depression. But why had I turned healing into such a shameful vocation? Why did I assume grieving and progressing were mutually exclusive? Aren’t they, in the rawest sense, the same thing? Also, when had depression and mental health become an indictment? Wasn’t I doing society, or at least corporate America and my future therapists, a favor by not backstroking in the denial that I was fine? (Or was that a prerequisite?)
At the heart of it, being “different” or “not normal” means being “unexplainable by typical standards.” It occurred to me, after a long time of trying to reconcile my experiences through the mainstream filter of normal and coming up short time after time, that my existence here, albeit anomalous, did not actually require an explanation. That any details I choose to offer about myself to this world should only be uttered as a way to connect with another person, but never as a defense for who I am. I do not require an explanation. I do not have to be held accountable for who I am according to society or someone else’s standard of normal. If I am not relatable enough simply for being human, it is not my job to bridge the gap. I will never again trip over myself to provide this world with proof that I deserve respect—gone are the lengthy soliloquies, the shame-fueled speeches where I trade explanations of “why I am the way that I am” in a desperate attempt for shallow acceptance. If you cannot see me foremost for my humanity, then you cannot see me at all. I do not require an explanation.
Upon further, deeper examination, I found that even if my journey didn’t measure up with the rest of the world’s, in truth, I had come out of the process as a better person. I have a literacy for grief, pain, loss, worth, and mental health that would have been incomprehensible to me before these four years of tragedy and struggle. I now understood that the dynamics that I used to assume instigated growth—success and achievements—have little to do with it. It is difficulty over time that generates strength. Perseverance that generates wisdom. Trials that generate understanding. Self-forgiveness that generates empathy. And all of the above that generate healing. Who was I to be ashamed of my journey when my experiences had been the catalyst connecting me to my worth?
It was around this time, while I was still standing on the shaky legs of my newfound worth, when I met the love of my life, the beautiful West Texas man who would later become my husband. He was a combat veteran, a former Marine who intimately knew trauma, grief, and all the ridiculous ways we as humans try to divert pain. We didn’t have to compare the symmetry of our pasts. We didn’t have to justify ourselves or dwell in the details because there was simply no need to explain what was already implicit; he had eyes that could see me, the real me—not despite my wear and tear, but as a whole composition—and I had eyes that could see him as well. No explanations were needed because the connection between us was real, and our relationship budded from the security of that freedom.
I felt happiest when we were together. Most honest. Most carefree. My laughter was genuine and came from a real place. For the first time, I could feel that my joy was not feigned but a derivative of something much greater—love. I finally understood that to wholeheartedly give and feel love had little to do with how unsullied I was and everything to do with showing up and connecting with another soul authentically. It was new territory, for my worth not to be on the line for this love, to grow or shrink in tandem with the turbulence of our relationship. My worth was intact, set, and the source that allowed me to give and feel love freely, without asking for it also to validate me. The day you realize you are whole and not missing anything is the day you stop trying to fill the void. The day I stopped trying is the day I found real, lasting connection.
Armed with this knowledge, I felt like suddenly, something inside began to solidify. Like molten iron that has been forged into steel, so too had my identity been reinforced by the confidence I found in my worth. I had brushed up against my inner strength, bringing forth a sense of stability I didn’t know I was capable of producing. Like how Rumi says, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”[vii] If only I had known, the freedom I was seeking had been inside myself this whole time, hidden behind years and years of misunderstanding. The door to life, love and good things had always been open.
Knowing my worth is what revealed it all.
…………..
2014
One year later, I found myself staring down at the two notorious little pink lines, knowing at the sight of them that my life would never be the same. But I was excited, with a man I truly loved, and because I had been dealt a hand of uncertainty for the last six years, I was grateful that this new adventure was at least somewhat straightforward.
But nothing prepares you for motherhood, except motherhood, and I found my newly established sense of self submerged beneath a tidal wave of dedication and service to a newborn. The struggle itself isn’t just the lack of autonomy, but moreover, that every waking hour is dedicated to keeping your new baby alive, fed, and rested. The gaps left in between are just wide enough to survive. Days, weeks, and months pass, and you begin to wonder, “Will I ever feel like myself again?” More months pass, and you begin to question, “who was I again?”
In hindsight, I realize that there isn’t a more parochial, over-simplified term out there than the phrase “baby blues.” Even the more commonly used “postpartum depression” is a misnomer and doesn’t come close to encompassing the overwhelming range of moods, emotions, and anxieties outside of depression that a mother can face after giving birth. Understandably, these terms have come about as a way to normalize the inevitable hormonal turmoil the majority of mothers feel after having a baby. Still, I must admit, having experienced both clinical and postpartum depression firsthand, it does mothers a disservice to loosely define or sugarcoat terms meant to broadly describe the entire scope of our postpartum mental health.
From my standpoint, postpartum depression combines the biological uncertainty (i.e., you’ve had a hormone-producing organ ripped out of your body causing you to suffer from a condition the medical community has relegated to “the baby blues” but would be better described as “hormonal psychosis” due to the inevitable chemical turmoil your body is immediately subjected to upon birth) with environmental uncertainty (in the form of a completely dependent newborn who deprives you of sleep and renders you unable to care for even your most basic needs). Both these worlds of uncertainties collide, and the most frustrating part is that self-regulating is out of our hands and most of our wallets. It blows my mind that hospitals just cross their fingers and knowingly send mothers home without any mental health resources. The hospital called me regarding my breastmilk on multiple occasions, but never once to ask about my post-partum mental health, both of which are ironically interdependent issues. I’m sure the inability to ask about mental wellness has less to do with the nursing staff’s or OBGYN’s lack of concern and much more to do with hospital’s stipulations on such subjects, but the simple fact that the ability to ask each other how we are doing mentally has been buried under layer upon layer of protocol perpetuates the stigma that our mental health is something we “just deal with” by suffering silently, versus the legitimate health issue it is.
Sure, mothers have been having babies for centuries, but we were a tribal species historically. The phrase “it takes a village” used to apply to us, as there would be one woman to the left-hut and another to the right-hut to care for us and offer guidance. While our new, modern age of Western Civilization has afforded us many luxuries, it still has its drawbacks. This contemporary age of solitary independence means women who are isolated from helpful hands might need more thorough care, or at least a more comprehensive look at hormone levels and an option for counseling after we leave the hospital (anything short, in my opinion, is malpractice). And for those mothers who have miscarried and also experience postpartum depression? My God, what absolute warriors. I could never look into the eyes of a mother who lost the precious life of her baby in-utero and try to tell her she might experience “baby blues.” Has there ever been a phrase that more largely distorted the truth?
…………..
And so, the sudden onset of new motherhood mandated yet again that I redefine who I was. I was deep in survival mode, preserving what little of my sanity taking care of a newborn had left me. My mental health seemed like a distant issue given the daily demands on my time. I could feel the ominous tidal wave of postpartum looming overhead, so I brought with me only the things that would fit in the lifeboat—my case of emergency truths—and began rowing, praying I would stay afloat. With me, I had my worthiness and my hope. Everything ancillary about me, like my personality, would have to wait out the storm.
Days after coming home from the hospital, I remember feeling helpless to control the emotions that would swoop in and overtake me. The mercurial nature is not unlike the helplessness of grief in that regard. I would sit in the rocking chair, nursing my baby, while tears uncontrollably rolled down my face, splatting in big fat droplets on the side of my son’s head.
“What’s wrong?!” my fiancé would ask, trying his best to hide the worry and astonishment from his expression.
“I don’t know,” I would admit, defeatedly, “I don’t remember how to stop crying.”
I hated being left alone, hated when my fiancé had to work or leave the house, which was uncommon ground for me, having spent the last five years purposefully isolating myself emotionally from the rest of the world. When had I become so dependent? What was this vice-grip around my chest every time I was left alone with the baby? By the time he made it home every evening, I would burst into tears, shaking with relief he had so much as crossed the threshold.
Who was I anymore? Would I ever be entitled to an identity outside of motherhood ever again? Was I destined to be an overly emotional, sutured, servant forever? Was I selfish for even thinking so?
I reconciled what I had brought with me: worthiness and hope.
I am worthy enough to ask for help. This too, shall pass.
And pass, it did. With time. And meds. Many women who experience postpartum aren’t so lucky, a statement I’m not willing to glaze over for the sake of comfortability. I was not as isolated as some mothers are, and yet I still deem that first wave of postpartum as some of my most challenging days—and I’ve stumbled around some pretty deep depths in my day. Hell is no place for a wandering face[viii], that’s for sure. As a society, we need to do better about separating new mothers from the stigma that asking for help somehow also makes them bad caregivers, perhaps by providing a more thorough mental health education, accessible counseling, and available resources during such a vulnerable time, especially to those of us who are more susceptible to the hormonally induced “lows.” We shouldn’t have to sacrifice our mental health for childbirth in the 21st century. Period.
But the one change we can all enact immediately (if not sooner) is that when a mother says she needs help, believe her.
…………..
Motherhood, however, has many facets. Depression had demanded that I relinquish all of my joy, and for the last eight years I had willingly handed it over. It wasn’t until our son was born that I began, piece by piece and moment by moment, to take it back.
Eventually, as the fear, depression, and anxiety began to fade into the background, I, in turn, began to embrace the pure joy of becoming a mom. To hold your newborn in your arms is to be in the presence of inexplicable miraculous love, and I remember looking into my gorgeous son’s smiling face, thinking in tandem just how inept I felt, experience-wise to be raising a baby, and in the same breath, acknowledging that there was no one on earth with my unique collection of experiences who could raise my son to be the human that I could, arming him to take on a world I had been so vastly underprepared for with wide-open arms. I was grateful the lessons that had recently shaped me would now shape him through me—what a beautiful way to wrap a gift, Universe.
When I cradled him in my arms, he gazed affectionately at me, never questioning for a single moment whether I was worthy of his love. I in turn gazed lovingly back at him, knowing with all my heart that there was nothing he could do or not do, for as long as he lived, to make me doubt his worth.
My heart began to fill, no longer with an existential fear that I would be swallowed up by motherhood, but with a brand-new identity, unexpectedly brought on by the two new presences in my life. While I still had my mom and my siblings, of course, each of us went about healing in our own, very separate ways, and thus our family structure had been somewhat dismantled by tragedy. Within the blink of an eye, I had inadvertently created one of my very own, which fit itself seamlessly into the family-shaped hole I still carried inside my heart.
When my husband and I married, I linked arms with both of my brothers, who walked me down the aisle. We each laid a single rose on the seat of an empty chair set apart from the crowd to symbolize my dad’s presence. While he might not have been there physically, his influence was alive in me, my siblings, our children, and all the lives we had touched since, and between all of us, it was impossible not to feel his overwhelming love present. If I had one more day to give to him, I’d give to him a day just like that day.[ix]
When I looked into my husband’s eyes and said, “I do,” I knew exactly who the “I” was who promised her life and commitment to another. I did not promise to love perfectly, but I did promise to love wholeheartedly. I had Up until that day, I was well versed in what it felt like to lose love and had subsequently navigated the depths of that loss for eight years—but it wasn’t until our wedding day, when he and I committed to love each other for a lifetime, that I became aware of it felt like to expand in love. To feel so full, so blissfully happy, that I momentarily thought my heart would explode from joy. To have a love so hopeful, I began to re-believe in a world where good things happen. To have a partner so well-matched, it was impossible not to look upward and acknowledge he had been handpicked.
I now know my worth is no longer a commodity I transact, distorting it and laying it at the feet of my partner in exchange for love. Instead, it is both the center and the foundation from which my love grows, allowing me to give love in direct proportion to what I feel I’m worth receiving, and that, I’m happy to announce, is boundless.
…………..
Part III
2021 – Who I Am
As of this writing, it is now five years since our wedding, and this May 9th will bring thirteen whole years since I lost my dad. That makes me thirty-one now, an age I’d gladly deny if the lines on my forehead and the two children who follow me around and call me “mom” didn’t immediately give me away.
My thirties have brought about a new sense of calm, an acknowledgment and understanding that rebuilding after trauma takes time and patience. How anxious was I in my twenties to answer every single question life threw at me, and how irrelevant having to label everything seems from the proximity of my thirties? To ask “who I am” is like asking me to describe a moment in time. I am a fleeting compilation of ever-changing factors—a living, breathing, evolving composition of my experiences and what I have learned. My identity is a confluence of everything and regenerates from day to day.
Forever I felt I had to exhaust and deplete myself rowing to stay ahead of life’s current. When I finally surrendered, stopped frantically paddling towards who I thought I should be, and let the flow just take me, I realized it carried me to exactly where I’m meant to be. If I could trust the current to bring me here, to these peaceful, hopeful waters, I can trust that it will not forsake me in the future.
So if you were to ask me, “who I am at this very moment,” I might tell you, I am a mother and wife, I am temporarily peaceful, I am a hopeful writer, and I am still searching for what my impact in this world will be. If you ask me what is fundamental about me, regardless of the everchanging backdrop of circumstances, I’ll tell you that I love and am loved. I am worthy, and I am hopeful.
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Grief
I was right when I thought I could never outlast grief, but nowadays, it is not the emotionally inundating atmosphere that it once was. Over the years, I’ve learned that pain is not one of those things you can conquer either, but instead (and only through the grace of time and distance) achieve a deeper understanding of. It is like how winter transitions to spring and then into summer. One day, you’re walking around, and it’s warm outside, but you can’t quite distinguish in retrospect which day was the last cold day. Every now and then, a cold wind will blow that’ll turn your head around[xi], however, the weather for the most part remains constant. And warm. And the coldness of winter remains in only in your knowing.
Grief for me today is best illustrated by that Pink Floyd lyric, “So you think you can tell, blue skies from pain?”[xii]—some of my happiness and sadness are interwoven on one plane now— like when I catch a glimpse of my son’s face and fleetingly see a resemblance to my dad, and my heart is simultaneously jolted with both immense joy and heavy heartache. Harder still is the realization that every year I age puts more distance between the daughter I was with him and the life I have embraced without him, and that growth brings me equal parts pride and devastation.
So many milestones have come and gone now without him, but I never fail to be ensnared by the grief of missing him when a momentous occasion occurs—my wedding day, when our children were born, or just recently, when I turned thirty. It turns out you’re never too old to need your dad or to endlessly wish he was still by your side. And so, grief today is the double-edged sword, the rite of passage, or the price I pay for growing up, for my memory fading, and for moving on.
After years of feeling tormented and domineered by grief, it took me a long time to understand what grief really is at its core. I used to think of it like an obstacle or a storm—an emotional force I was helplessly at the mercy of, but one that I could potentially outlast if I just had enough fortitude.
But it wasn’t until I reread a quote my precious sister-in-law had printed underneath my dad’s picture at his memorial that I began to understand:
“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” -Kahlil Gibran.
The profundity of that quote grows every year I read it. We grieve for what we love, isn’t that what he’s saying? So it’s impossible then for grief to be coined as the antithetical to love, right? That is reserved for hate and indifference, and my God, grief is anything but indifferent.
And wouldn’t it be too simple to say, even though I’ve heard it described this way over and over, that grief is lost love? Reasonably then, wouldn’t it cease to exist the second love disappeared?
So then, is grief just an emotional way to cope with love?
Or is grief a way for us to love? Another facet of love, perhaps?
Meaning that grief, at its core, is just love?
It makes sense, then, how I knew in the deepest caverns of rock bottom that I could never outlast grief. I will never stop loving my dad for as long as I draw breath, and therefore grief will always exist as the present form of that love. When I feel overtaken by the insurmountable nature of grief, I try to look deeper and understand how powerful my love is, how many forms it can exist as, and like Khalil says, “that in truth I am weeping for that which was my delight.”
It doesn’t always make it easier. In fact, it rarely does—nothing short of turning the clock backward could do that—but knowing grief is just love by a different name, like a venerable old friend that still comes around from time to time, brings me peace where there once only stood hopelessness to withstand the perennial process.
“For people and things that went before; I know I’ll often stop and think about them…
In my life I love you more.” – The Beatles, “In My Life”
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Mental Health: Shame/Depression
Talking about mental health is always a vulnerable conversation to have, especially regarding depression and motherhood (as though discussing our mental health should take an automatic backseat once we begin having babies). I don’t open up frequently about my struggles with my mental health for fear that any talk of “depression,” “suicide,” or “shame” is grounds for others to label me as unstable—a descriptor no woman needs added to the long list of stereotypes our culture has already awarded us.
Because I don’t feel unstable at all, at least not by society’s standards. Having dealt with depression for a good part of two decades now and shame for the latter, I feel well versed with my highs, lows, and the one-thousand levels in between. It’s granted me the ability to take an accurate reading from all the gauges on my mental health “dashboard,” if you will. If my anxiety meter is reading high, I know better than to grab for that beer (most of the time). If an alarm goes off because something has triggered my unworthiness, I know it’s time to return to my center and acknowledge my worth. If my mood barometer begins to undulate, my apathy levels start to rise, and my navigation starts steering me away from my friends and family, I know depression is creeping back in. And when my anger spikes, my body temperature elevates, and I lash out or withdraw for no reason, I know shame is lurking somewhere nearby.
I believe knowing myself to this degree makes me more “stable” than half the people out there (you can trust me on that estimate—I was a bartender…I’ve done the legwork.) Because “stability” doesn’t imply “mastery” and doesn’t mean that my mental health never falters. It means, when it does, I am resilient. I have consecrated my mental health to the utmost ranks of my priority list because my self-work is never done. In fact, supervising my mental health has become an ongoing, daily evaluation. I assiduously evaluate my thoughts, my behaviors, my mistakes, my moods. I attempt to understand my mistakes versus internalizing my failures. I acknowledge all the time that I can do better. But I don’t keep failures, missteps, or dark thoughts in a file in the back somewhere. I’m able to reconcile the lessons, reinforce my worth, and reasonably strive to be better. In that regard, being mentally “healthy” for me has much less to do with stamina and fortitude and much more to do with understanding and adaptability.
But it certainly doesn’t mean I’m not ever defeated, just as being well versed in something doesn’t always mean you’re impervious to it. Like a tornado warning and prior knowledge of a tornado doesn’t always mean you know what it feels like to have your home ravaged by one.
For example, I’m aware “triggers” exist in mental health. Dates, in particular, trigger me. May 9th is always a big one I feel coming. My dad’s birthday is another, but they come and go predictably with time. Similarly, I heed other triggers like those in the news, respecting my boundaries if I think the subject matter is beyond my capacity to handle at that given moment. Likewise, shame triggers, especially from social media, like tugging at the loose ends of my self-worth. Still, I can somewhat overcome those, too, by taking space to reset, deleting my apps, or just not posting for a given amount of time.
Thus, for the most part, I thought I had a handle on my triggers, picturing them like landmines that immediately explode when I accidentally stumble upon one. I had no idea some could take weeks to subsequently detonate.
Case in point, while writing Part I of this essay, I had to draw on and relive a lot of the emotions I felt from ten years ago in order to accurately describe some of the lower-lows. Sometimes I’d come away from writing feeling better, but mostly I’d step away feeling emotionally heavy. I thought writing would be a good thing, like opening a valve to release the pressure on my pent-up feelings from so long ago. Still, even though I knew the words were better written than cooped up inside, I couldn’t shake the atmospheric melancholy that seemed to encase everything, even my thoughts, in a dismal gloom.
Weeks went by as I plugged away at the piece, writing bits here and there when I could squeeze it in, all the while becoming more and more laden with the dysphoric energy I had set out to vanquish. At the time, we had just transitioned our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter from her crib to her “big girl bed,” and negotiating with her to stay in her bed at night proved to be tactically more advanced than I was qualified to handle.
We were about a month into the all-night, every night trenches of the bedtime routine. Defeated around eleven o’clock one night from laying her down for the one-thousandth time, I slumped in the rocking chair, watching her from a distance to make sure her eyes were closed. Just as I was getting up to leave, I saw her little head poke up and her foot slip down over the edge of the covers. I shook my finger and yelled in desperation, “STAY. IN. BED!” She began to soulfully cry, repeating in her two-year-old jargon, “I scared of my bed!”. I buried my head in my hands, admonishing myself, wondering for the life of me why I had just screamed at my baby daughter. Shame engulfed me, I began to cry, and within that split second, I thought, “I am the worst mother ever. I wish I had died ten years ago so I wouldn’t be here to screw up anyone else’s lives.” I wept harder, feeling betrayed by my thoughts—and even more shocked that I had meant them.
I ended up rocking my daughter to sleep, finally laying her in bed where she slept the rest of the night, peacefully. I, on the other hand, laid wide awake, unable to shake the feeling that I had been transported right back to the mental headspace of my twenties. I’ve never plummeted from a slightly melancholic mood to suicidal thoughts that quickly before. I thought I had taken such long strides over the past decade, enough to greatly distance myself from the darkness of my twenties—or had I only thought I had been distancing myself but actually made one big lap to come full circle with all my problems?
By morning I had sleeplessly reached the conclusion that I had been triggered. I had assumed that writing about my past would be cathartic, not realizing what I was subjecting my brain and body to by reliving my trauma. I became aware the moment that I answered the door and let shame in, my trigger saw an opening and slipped sinisterly inside behind it. Shame took an emotional reaction from an overtired mom and made it personal, convincing me that my outburst made me not just a bad mother but the worst, most undeserving mother ever. My trigger, seeing my vulnerability as an opportunity, supercharged my shame, confiding in it I had recently remembered the place I was most frightened to go—back to the kitchen floor of hopelessness—and that to really take me down, all shame had to do was bring up my darkest thoughts of suicide.
Shame, that insidious little bastard, nearly had me fooled. Ten years ago, a thought with that caliber of hopelessness would have made me feel despairing and self-loathing, likely causing me to spiral. Today, while not at all immune to scraping bottom again, however briefly, I could take a deep breath, inventory myself and account for my worth, and somewhat cautiously carry on in a very holy-shit-that-was-close kind-of-way.
I share this anecdote to illustrate that having good mental health doesn’t exclusively mean the absence of unhealthy thoughts or tendencies. Our mental health is certainly not something we can conquer, either—only use our education and experiences to understand and build resilience. These days, good mental health means allowing my worth to act as the gatekeeper to staunchly and devotedly oversee what thoughts and whose opinions I allow myself to internalize. It is the identity, the firm voice that drowns out all the others and says, “If it negates my worth, it has no place inside.”
And if/when maintaining it falls outside of our capacity to accomplish (as is inevitable sometimes), we must not be ashamed to ask for help. And we must listen to that voice, deep down, that reminds us we are worthy of it.
I became my own mental health advocate the day I sought help for my depression. Because to be depressed is to light a fuse. And yes, while some of our fuses are longer than others, we will eventually all meet the same outcome if we do not intervene on our own behalf. We must become our own knight, the Brienne to our Sansa, and fiercely advocate for our mental wellness over anything else because we are worthy of it and because depression doesn’t have to be an indictment or futility beyond our abilities to solve.
And unfortunately, we must not expect our culture to clear the path for us—the second mainstream starts promoting mental health is the day they also have to stop promoting anything bad for our mental health—and as any person who has participated in the machine that is mainstream America knows, what does not profit the system, does not matter. In that regard, it is important to acknowledge that striving for mental wellness can sometimes feel like we are going against the tide, trudging against the cultural perpetuation that everyone has it all figured out except us. But what would happen if we quit silently suffering behind the disguise of being “fine”, and began asking for help when we needed it? Quit pushing ourselves past our breaking point and began setting boundaries? Quit letting the world use our worth as a punching bag for every tiny infraction?
Hopefully, someday, endeavoring to do the inner work will be as highly regarded and respected by society as the outer work. Until that day, we must remember that our mental health is worth the uphill battle, worth every tiny decision we make every day on our own behalf. Therefore seeking help and striving to get better beyond the destructive dialogue our culture and our hopelessness is feeding us is not a sign of weakness; on the contrary, it is the strongest, bravest thing we can do for ourselves.
For some, that means medication, sobriety, exercise, meditation, and/or spiritual practice. For others, that means talking to a professional or joining a support group. For more emergent cases, hotlines are a vast resource. And for those who feel it is safe to confide your struggles in others, I offer only a cautionary warning, to not let your recovery hinge on their response. People are well-intentioned but imperfect, and therefore their responses might also be well-intentioned, imperfect, and not always solution-oriented.
The best thing a friend could have said to me if I had chosen to confide in anyone would have been, “This will not last forever. I love you, and I will be here for you every step of this journey until I know for sure you are getting the help that you need.”
What a difference those words would have made back then.
I’m lucky to have a hand-selected team of people now, who I know are strong advocates I can confide in. My husband, my family, and the lifelong friends I made at The Fox, are all people I know who can see me, regardless of my circumstances.
Meanwhile, we must not forget, to have depression or suffer a tragedy, and to dwell in the void, is to know ourselves intimately. The depths to which depression and tragedy hollowed me out are now the same depths from which I can reach and draw my empathy from. My past struggles give dimension to everything and everyone I meet, providing me with a new angle of comprehension into humanity. Like how the shading in a sketch provides depth, rendering a 2-D portrait into a 3-D portrait, so too do our past and our flaws give us contour; we forget sometimes our shadows make us more realistic, allowing others to see us as a composite of both the light and dark that makes us fully human. I’m acutely aware now that we are complex, our struggles are universal, our victories are hard-fought, and that humanity is a work of art.
…………..
Worth
I have come a long way with my worth since my reckoning at rock bottom.
While shame and the subsequent self-loathing nearly cost me my life, I’m grateful in retrospect to have been leveled down to my lowest, where the most basic, most fundamental truths were the only things that could satiate me.
Everyone needs a great flood at some point in their lives to wash away all the bullshit and faulty framework of our unauthentic selves. Since that time, I’ve been able to focus on rebuilding my house on “rock, not sand” if I may be so bold as to borrow a metaphor, so when the floods come again, as is inevitable in life, “who I am” will continue to stand.
And I have founded my house firmly upon my worth.
While I’m still largely susceptible to feelings of unworthiness because I am a human and a woman living in the social media age, I have not yet encountered a question able to dethrone my worthiness.
Am I pretty enough to matter? Am I smart enough to be here? Am I important enough to speak up? Do I deserve respect? Am I AM I ENOUGH?
I am worthy enough to matter. I am worthy enough to be here. I am worthy enough to speak up. I am worthy of respect. I AM WORTHY.
And that goes for every single one of us.
Although for those who think that leaning in and embracing our worthiness is just an officious license to exert ourselves over others, please note the beautifully simplistic checks and balances system within the design. No one (regardless of their ability to drive in traffic) is our superior or inferior—our souls are all of equal worth and value. Therefore, I cannot consider my worth more valuable than someone else’s or exalt my worth over theirs if our worth is all equal—it defeats the entire purpose. Behaviorally speaking, I think the true balance we seek to find in this life is how to treat others according to their worth while not conceding ours in the process.
I understand this is a difficult concept to justify, especially if we have been at the receiving end of grave wrongdoing or have been hurt badly by others. But I’m a firm believer that the more someone wrongs, takes advantage, mistreats, or brings pain to other people without regret, the more they distance themselves from ever genuinely knowing joy. And while that is a far cry from the justice some of us deserve, it’s hard to imagine a full, well-lived life without knowing what the warmth of true happiness feels like.
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Purpose
The ancient Zen wisdom tells us, “We cannot see our reflection in running water, it is only in still water that we can see.”
It is only from the stillness of my thirties, once the clouds of depression, grief, and trauma parted, and the waves of inevitable life-change stopped crashing overhead, that I have been able to take a good, hard, look at the raw material of who I am, and begin to make use of it.
Forever my insular qualities of quietness, solitude, and ability to dwell and ruminate over the tiniest details have been my biggest personal liabilities, causing my mental health to be a wide-open target for struggle.
But upon further exploration, I’ve discovered these characteristics also lend a mighty hand to creativity, and knowing so has helped me begin to see myself differently. Maybe, these traits that constitute such a large, unshakeable part of who I am, are not disadvantages at all. Maybe, they are my superpower. And maybe, this long journey was about helping me to see that.
I think we are all born into this world as a unique assembly of raw material. It is how we cultivate that raw material and utilize it to meet the moment that makes us who we are, and I firmly believe each and every one of us has the gifts and the little spark of madness[xiii] we need in order to fulfill our purpose. It is our job to keep the embers of our purpose alive at all costs, so when the mighty winds of opportunity blow, there will be nothing short of an act of God to stop our fire from burning.
In so many ways, this world can prove to us that we are not enough, and in fact, showing up fully aware of our worth in a place that will go to any lengths to refute us might be one of the bravest, most vulnerable stances we can take in our lifetime. But our job is to let our worth be the resilient force that allows us to seek and fulfill our purpose.
I think our life here is a journey to help us better understand and express the Universal Truths that transcend this world. Are we not all here to love and be loved? To spread hope and to be hopeful? To try to see ourselves and others as clearly as possible? I think you would be hard-pressed to find true happiness is a byproduct of anything else.
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Part IV: Conclusion
Writing this essay has been hugely important for me to gain closure and put a definitive period at the end of this chapter in my life. As I prepare to permanently swivel my attention forward instead of back, I feel the need to pause, summon all the gratitude I can gather, and fully give thanks for where I am today.
If you were to graph the course of my life from the last five years up to now, it would probably resemble a strong, steady line, registering only a few slight spikes and dips, but not unlike what I imagine the flight path of an airplane would look like once it’s reached a cruising altitude. I’m curious if outwardly it might seem like I’m stalled, like perhaps I lack the motivation to move upwards, or downwards, or anywhere at all. Peace is like that, isn’t it? Unassuming until your continued inaction is interpreted as complacency?
So, to the beholder, it may look like I’ve flatlined—but to me, this calm sense of predictable stability is my personal summit—the highest point I could’ve ever dreamed of reaching after a tragedy. To have, hold, and delight in my family is an achievement that will never be lost on me again. As I spend this summer watching joy broadcasted through the eyes of my six- and three-year-old while they discover all the shimmering possibility this season has to offer them, I am grateful to be able to hold such precious moments in the present, fully blinded by delight, and bask and tend to the gleaming peace produced therein.
Time, however, dependably marches on, alongside its faithful travel partner, change. The completion of this essay and articulation of my journey marks the tail end of this peaceful season for me, one final reckoning with all the details of my past before I release the hold they’ve had on me for a decade. As my gaze drifts hopefully ahead once more, I sense the energy of an impending transition on the horizon, like the tangible shifting between seasons, and I realize that my sense of calm satisfaction is transforming for the first time in forever, into desire. I recognize this feeling from my first semester of college, this nascent, hopeful yearning, where curiosity doesn’t feel so punishable by forces outside of my control, but where the possibility of life feels infinite.
Hoping (as always) to define and therefore prepare for the next stage of my life, I have asked myself what potential progress in this coming phase might look like for me. What uncharted territory do I still have to explore? The immediate word that springs to mind is “thrive.” Going back to the function paradoxes play in helping us understand their respective extremes, my twenties have taught me (relative to my experience) all too well what it means to do the opposite. To merely “survive.” To suffer in the famine of uncertainty. To perpetually brace myself for the invisible anvil in the sky. To never again lock my knees when I take tentative steps towards the future. To frisk each moment of happiness for documentation that it’s allowed to exist. To suspiciously eye every shred of ambition for ulterior motives. To fear, the higher I climb up the mountain, the further down I have to fall. To detach myself from fulfillment before life beats me to the punch. To find more comfort in the shadows than I do in the light.
But I have done well over the last half-decade to shake off some of these reflexive “survival mode” tendencies that still lay around like tripwires in my habits. I can use them, at least to help me define a more expansive definition of what it will mean to me to “thrive.” So far, I have come up with: to not settle for good-enough, but to strive for all-the-way. To measure moments by what I have to gain instead of lose. To squeeze every ounce of vitality out of my daily decisions. To no longer sabotage my success. To learn the function of self-deprecating humor is not (always) an appropriate response to compliments. To let my life, my decisions, and my heart reflect my hope, not my doubt. To not dwell in my deficits, but fully align with my worth. To never turn a blind eye to mental health, but to step out of the shadows once and for all and into the light. To watch life’s possibility gracefully unfold before me and to let it.
And finally, to never again be overcome by the diminishing futility of my life, but instead to live in accordance with its utility, or in other words, to utilize my life for something greater. Because, if once upon a time futility made me feel so hopeless that I wanted to die, what might life be like, if I let the hopefulness of utility illuminate the path forward?
So here, at the threshold of a new phase of my life, I am letting utility lay the groundwork for how my life might best be used to help others. I think back to my own defining moment from the kitchen floor where I decided to live, solely to keep the pain from rippling outward and tearing down those I loved. Even then, with that one decision, I began to utilize my life for a greater purpose.
This is why if someone were to ask me which of my footsteps I’d want others to follow in, or which step I took that defined me the most, I wouldn’t show them my last, most recent steps—I would show them my first– where I put one foot forward in the hope that my life was worthy and mattered for something greater than I could see.
And my journey thus far is all a product of that hope. So if sharing it inspires someone else to take that first step rather than not, then it will mean that my life indeed matters beyond myself, utilized for someone or something greater, and I can think of no better way to thrive.
Until tomorrow,
-Tess
[i] “Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything
The things that I’ve loved the things that I’ve lost
The things I’ve held sacred that I’ve dropped
I won’t lie nor more than you can bet
I don’t want to learn what I’ll need to forget” – Audioslave, “Doesn’t Remind Me”
[ii] “Quick with a joke, and to light up a smoke, but there always someplace he’d rather be” -Billy Joel, “Piano Man”.
[iii] “Maybe when things turn green again, it will be good to say you know me.” -John Mayer, “In Repair”
[iv] “I look inside myself and see my heart is black. I see my red door I must have it painted black.” – The Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”
[v] “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” – Michael Trent Reznor, “Hurt”
[vi] “Shame is an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW, [I Thought It Was Just Me, But It Isn’t]
[vii] “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. The entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.” -Rumi
[viii] “Hell’s no place for a wandering face…” —Roadkill Ghost Choir, “Beggar’s Guild”
[ix] “If I had a day that I could give to you, I’d give to you a day just like today” – John Denver, “Sunshine on My Shoulders”
[x] “In this darkness which you know you cannot fight…” – Andrew Lloyd Webber, “Music Of The Night”
[xi] “Lord knows when the cold wind blows it will turn your head around.” – James Taylor, “Fire and Rain”
[xii] “So you think you can tell, heaven from hell? Blue skies from pain?” – Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”
[xiii] “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” – Robin Williams
- I Don’t Know About You, But Am I Really 32?
- Today I Asked Myself My Story
- My First Run Back
- Today I Asked Myself About My Worth
- Today I Asked Myself About Rebuilding With Worth
- Today I Asked Myself About Discovering Shame & Finding My Worth
