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Musings from The Strangest Year on Earth

Confronting

2019 into 2020 was arguably the hardest year of my life in perhaps the most unspectacular of ways. There was no defining incident, no dramatic high point, just a lot of glowing embers waiting patiently for the wind to catch so they could burn my house to ash.

I am what one could call a chronic avoider. A runner, a hider and often (it felt), someone who lacked the ability to endure. The problem here, as you can imagine is that no matter how far you run, there is no getting away & the further I ran, the harder it was to turn around and confront the thing I was trying to outrun. I ran out of energy towards the end of the year, and when it finally caught up with me, I felt like I was out of options. I couldn’t run anymore, and I lacked the fortitude to fight. Lenka has a song called Trouble is A Friend. In it she sings, “I won’t let him in, but I’m a sucker for his charm”. The truth is, while I do not enjoy being depressed, there is something safe in knowing what to expect. So, I let it pick me up and hold me close to its cheek; large and looming, but strangely comforting in its familiarity. I had been here before, and all I had to do was wait it out until it put me down, and let me walk beside it, holding my hand until I inevitably started to get the itch to run again.

Seeing Colors

Depression is an old friend, but I had never seen it like this. For the first time, I started seeing colors in my mind’s eye; a way to give tangibility to the intangible. When it first caught up with me, I saw things through a grey fog. It was like I could see my life, but everything was grey and hazy. This I was used to. I was anticipating the slow return of color to the edges that would work its way towards the middle, and when it didn’t come, what was once an old, familiar place suddenly felt foreign and very empty. The loneliness I felt here was unparalleled. Not only had I spent the past year physically isolating from relationships I had held near & dear, now the one thing I thought I could count on was changing before my eyes. I started waking up and seeing the same scene in my head every day. A dark, angry orange sky over a cracked, dusty ground with no sign of life anywhere: dead trees and a stifling sort of silence. It was in this sky that I lost the ability to recognize my face in the mirror. When I looked at myself, it was the first time in my life that I saw a very sad stranger looking back at me. I removed pictures of myself from messaging apps, social media. I couldn’t stand to look at myself, so unrecognizable, so much like a ghost. Under this sky, I felt myself giving up.

Endurance

I say the following as a fact — not a cause for alarm. I have thought about dying a lot. It’s a thought that has come to me unbidden, even at the strangest times. One of the most frightening experiences was driving home after a wonderful two day vacation with people who I love and care for dearly, having spent the whole weekend feeling like I was trapped in a glass box. I could see things, hear things, but inside was quiet and airless. On the drive home, I remember thinking how much easier it would be to just open the car door on the highway and roll right out. I don’t doubt for a minute that I would never actually follow through, because the desire to no longer exist felt separate and removed from the desire to actually kill myself– I was just so tired. But I let it pass. At the very worst of it this year, it was no longer a given that I could just wait it out and land on my feet. Increasingly, the fear was growing that this would be the one I wouldn’t come back from. Right as I had started what felt like the final descent, my long time therapist reached out to me to say I’d been on her mind. And, at the end of my rope, I began what has turned into my longest, most consistent therapy work to date. I also went to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with moderate to severe depression — and put me on anti- depressants which was terrifying, to say the least. I have never been great with consistency in medication, and again, the uncertainty of how long I would need them for was almost too much to wrap my head around. But what else did I have to do? Whether I took the meds or not, the time would pass anyhow. I surprised myself with how consistent I became with the medication, and today I am unsure how I would have fared had I not started. While it would be great to see an immediate shift in mood and circumstance, the truth is, what it did was lift the fog just a little bit at a time to give me a chance to catch my breath, to orient myself towards the way out. And before I realized it, 3 months had passed, and I was still standing — albeit exhausted and worn down but standing I was.

The Truth about Therapy

Endurance is one thing — we survive, swinging one day to the next until our feet touch some sort of solid ground, but what comes after? It’s like longing for a million dollars and then being unsure what to do with it when it lands in your lap. We rarely think about the in between that takes you from the depths to a relatively safer ground. Therapy is not just talking about your feelings for an hour. I find it neither comfortable, nor easy. If I have been to 20 sessions over the last 5 months, I have left 15 of them feeling worse than when I arrived. As a rule, I usually attend therapy until I am over the hump and then “get too busy” or decide it’s too much money and then fall off. It’s an avoidance technique, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was avoiding until I pushed through the first month.

Being in therapy has been painful and exposing — which is frightening to one such as myself who fears hurt and detests uncontrolled vulnerability. Strange as it may seem given the existence of these utterings, but here, I control the narrative. I can erase, delete and do anything I want with this piece. Real time vulnerability is a lot different. A working (and still not quite fully comprehensible) diagnosis for me is Social Anxiety Disorder with a little bit of OCD & Body Dysmorphic Disorder thrown in for some razzle dazzle. The SAD was easy enough to relate to, because the hallmarks of that disorder have run my life for as long as I can remember. The OCD was a little harder to accept and understand, because up until then, the only thing I knew about OCD was the familiar tropes you see in movies or books — hyper organization, rituals etc. The diagnoses aren’t really the point though. What I finally understood was: the behaviors & patterns that I have mulishly clung to for YEARS as a way to “protect” myself, are rooted in these disorders, and though they may be common, they are not all together normal.

Imagine then, being forced to look at your life and realize that you have years and years of learned behavior to undo. It is exhausting, and frankly, quite difficult. Habits are habits for a reason — they are second nature, even the bad ones. Especially the ones that you’ve convinced yourself are there to protect you and keep you safe. My thoughts operate in extremes — I am either immediately 100% successful at something and anything less is a failure. Though neither practical, nor possible, it makes the very concept of therapy difficult, because who’s ever undone a lifetime worth of warped beliefs in one session? The constant need for perfection & the subsequent failure to achieve the impossible is the albatross around my neck that makes it hard to celebrate even the small wins, because for me, it is all or nothing. It can be discouraging to go week after week, to spend thousands of dollars feeling like absolutely no progress is being made. Recently, I have found myself dragging to go, partially because I am terrified to see the things that still lie beneath, and partially because I feel like I am failing at therapy and therefore failing at life.

But I continue to go, because more important than enduring the storm with cracks in my hull is repairing them so I’m not springing leaks at every turn. The cracks are plentiful — some are beyond comprehension, some are heartbreaking, some are logic defying, & many days I am confronted with how these cracks rear their ugly heads at the most inconvenient times. I continue to go because I see the ways in which my unchecked mental illness has disrupted my life, and taken a toll on my relationships. I continue to go because though painful and some days heart-wrenching, it is the first time in years that I have felt the possibility of not walking around like a ticking time bomb, always one second from total destruction.

The Truth about Myself

So, what does this mean for me? It means that however dramatic it may seem, I have fought for my life, and continue to do so every single day. Some days are better than others — some weeks feel like a total regression and it’s hard to fight the impulse to engage in old habits. Sometimes I catch myself after the fact. The things I battle with are neither novel nor exciting, but still, they are mine. & while pride in myself is not something I am particularly familiar with, there is at least some satisfaction in knowing that the power to endure lies within me, even when I am certain I have nothing left to give.

Fear has run my life for as long as I can remember, and it would be an outright lie to say it no longer does, because I don’t do well with uncertainty, and fear has given me the illusion of keeping safe from the risks that come with being human and living vs. merely existing. Though I am still very much afraid of a lot of things, I have caught a glimpse of how having the upper hand over fear can pay off, even though I persist in my wrongness 9 times out of 10. Even though some days, I let my head get the best of me.

Yet still, I endure.