MOLLIE PLAYER

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

By the time I entered my thirties, my faith had faded to a pale hue that was almost unrecognizable from the bright colors it had once been. Looking back, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it took me three decades to figure out what to some children is readily apparent, namely: religion kinda sucks.

In my defense, when I was in my twenties I was basically still a child. “When I was a child, I thought like a child.” It’s scripture. Still, it took a speech class debate about evolution–evolution!–to convince me that science was, well, science. And that is legitimately humiliating.

When the instructor announced the topic of choice, I eagerly volunteered to argue in opposition to this well-established theory. The week of the debate, as my classmates and I practiced our arguments, it quickly became obvious that I was the only one who had done actual research. This was a community college, not a university, and speech class was supposed to be an easy A. I coached my peers on their presentations, feeding them talking points, assuming the pro-evolution side would give us a run for our money.

They didn’t. Overconfident and probably uninterested in the merits of a theory that had been all but proven a hundred years prior to our births, our opponents struggled through half-formed conclusions. With my tightly formed essay-style speech, I carried our side and the instructor gave us the win.

I didn’t win, though. Somewhere between internet scrolling and first draft, it dawned on me: evolution, not God, formed our planet’s species. It was the first tenet of my faith that I ever let go of.

I won the debate, but I lost a bit of my faith.

I still didn’t believe in the Big Bang, though. That just made no sense.

***

Predictably, college instructors continued to contribute to my worldview and my corruption continued. Half-remembered moments during various religion and philosophy classes helped lower my guard, and before I knew what was happening, I concluded that the Bible, though true, wasn’t literally so. This was more than a significant shift in perspective–it was a major turning point in my life.

For my History major, I was required to write a final thesis. Since I’d focused on the Greek and Roman period during my studies, I proposed a paper about the New Testament. My professor agreed and asked what specifically I was interested in. I told him I wanted to research several controversial passages written by Paul about women’s roles in church. You know: “Let the woman keep silence in the churches”–inspiring passages like that.

The instructor liked the idea, so I set off for the library. Almost immediately, I encountered some problems. In order to analyze the language of the passages, I’d need to read early translations, but as it turned out, there wasn’t just one of these–there were several. Some contained the passages in question and some omitted them. Were they added in by later writers? By the time I completed my thesis, I’d developed a more nuanced version of my faith–one with room for ambiguity, interpretation and–critically–doubt.

After graduation, I lived in China for half a year, teaching English to young children and experiencing a different way of life. Though I was glad to return home, when I went back to my church for the first time, something felt different. The simplistic advice I’d eagerly embraced before–”sin less, pray more,” springs to mind–didn’t resonate the way it had before. This time, it sounded a bit … ridiculous.

But why?

A few years later, I met David, who was and is an atheist. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel conflicted about this. Instead I felt … okay with it. How could this be? What if we had kids? But it was. And it was then the metaphorical clock started ticking. I couldn’t put this off any longer–I had to figure out what I really believed.

It was a race between my boyfriend and my faith, and–spoiler alert–my boyfriend won. Easily.

I decided to attend a Bible Study at a now-defunct church organization that later ended in scandal over misappropriation of funds and other sordid affairs [check on this]. During my second visit, I thought I’d spice up the conversation a bit by describing my inner conflict about the Hell-and-everlasting-damnation part of our theology. Before anyone could reply, the meeting leader, a man of the J. Crew persuasion, said something to the effect of “We’re going to switch gears now.”

Wow, I thought. He didn’t humor intellectual curiosity with even a brief lip-service response. This isn’t a real place. It’s just a set-up.

It was the last Christian service I ever attended in earnest.

“Religions fail,” I wrote about a year into my relationship with David. “Utopias fail. Ideas and ideologies fail. Even friendship fails. I will just try to live well. In fact, that is my new philosophy—my new purpose in life: to live well—no matter how different from other people that is. I don’t need a religion. I don’t need a theology. I don’t need to understand everything, or even to try to understand everything. And I definitely don’t need to be perfect. I just need to take care of myself and the people I love. And for me, for now, that is enough.”

It was a corny mission statement, but a practical one, too. It allowed me to put my faith on hold for a while while I figured things out. I didn’t have to renounce my faith completely; I just needed to put it on the shelf. The strategy worked well for me. Until it didn’t.

***

The day before Jane died, I sat in her room, holding her. My midwife, Aldrea, sat on a chair across from me, respectfully allowing a brief silence between us. I remembered a random yet clear thought that I’d had earlier that day: When you get a chance, ask Andrea about her spiritual beliefs. The thought came in the second person–who wanted me to do this? And why Aldrea of all people? But in my heightened emotional state, I took the intuition seriously and took that chance to ask Aldrea a question.

“Are you a spiritual person?”

“I am,” she said in her customarily gentle tone.

“A Christian?” I asked. Part of me expected her to say yes. That inner nudge–it was God using this tragic experience to bring me back to Him, wasn’t it? It must be.

But Aldrea she surprised me. “No,” she replied. “I believe in angels and God, but not in any particular religion.”

I paused. Took this in. This is my message? That I can get away with being spiritual but not religious?

Immediately, I felt a sense of peace. Relief.

And it was right then–then exactly–I was done.

***

In the months following Jane’s death, I read every spiritual book I could get my hands on. They surprised me with their profundity and depth. I absorbed it all, and experimented with all kinds of beliefs that I’d never allowed myself before. nd a book by Gary Zukav. I ate them up, went deep, took extensive notes. I experimented with new ideas. Reincarnation? Sure. Sounds strange, but it makes a certain sense. Channeling? Energy healing? Okay. Why not? If it’s out there, it’s available, right?

It was all so absorbing, so meaningful, so . . . important-feeling. If you’re a spiritual person, you’ll know what I mean. The woo-woo part of me, it seemed, had never really gone away. It had just been in remission. I needed to believe that there was a purpose to life, and to Jane’s life in particular. And belief in some kind of higher power still made sense to me.

But was I ready to renounce Christianity altogether? Out loud?

***

So, I get that tons of people will disagree with me on this. And I’m fine with it. Personal preferences, and all that. But when there’s a TV show that addresses the One Question—or at least one of the One Questions—namely, what happens when we die . . . well, that show should be pretty well-known. Like, more well-known than “Survivor.”

Well, as it turns out, there is such a show, and ironically, the name is similar. It’s “I Survived . . . Beyond and Back.” It recounts the experiences of near death experience (NDE) survivors, albeit in much less detail than one might prefer.

And it’s not really that popular. Go figure.

In any case. For me, discovering the show was a solid three-star experience. In other words, a pleasure less than a day at the beach and greater than a great meal. (Also a full star less than a single smile from a baby, but that’s not a fair comparison.) It was before I had kids, when I could take half a day off from adulthood pretty much whenever I wanted, so that is what I was doing. I turned on the TV, and got hooked by the premise. And from there it only got better.The show is made in that classic TV documentary style, complete with dramatic reenactments and black-backdropped narratives by the real-life participants.

Three stories mixed in together: First, a teenage SCUBA diver who gets decompression sickness after his suit malfunctions. Then a bedridden patient who dies due to a hospital error and finally, a bus driver who has a heart attack during her rounds. All three enchanting, and horrific, and consequential. But it was the second one that really got me.

The SCUBA diver–he looked like a nice guy. Could’ve been religious. When he dies he has a positive experience. Then the bus driver–a woman. She sees her ex-husband and is overcome by how pure he looks. She floats toward some bright lights, but is told it isn’t her time. She’s disappointed; she doesn’t want to come back.

Then there is Barbara, the bedridden patient.

She’s just had spinal surgery, which has gone well. Then she’s put on a respirator, which doesn’t. It malfunctions, and internal swelling stops her blood flow and her heart, and before the error can be corrected, she is gone.

Barbara moves over her body. At first, she feels at peace. Then suddenly, she becomes confused.

“But the next thing I knew,” she says, “I was in total darkness.”

Darkness.

That can’t be good.

Cut to commercial. The perfect time. Two happy TV endings, one hook.

Holy crap, I thought. I have got to finish this. No snack. No phone. Just wait.

When the show came back from commercial, the ending was appropriately predictable. The darkness again. Then, slowly, Barbara’s actress representative reappears, and she is happy–even radiant.

In the narrative overlay, Barbara says that for a moment, she wondered what was happening. Then she realized what it all meant. It was dark because her face . . . was buried in the bosom of her grandmother.

Yes, you heard that right.

It was a bosom.

During the next commercial break, I muted the television.

Sometimes, it’s the little moments that change the course of your life. A chance comment. An accidental meeting. A TV show called “I Survived . . . Beyond and Back” on Lifetime.

This was one of those moments.

There is no hell, I realized. The idea was a sham from the start. And a lot of the rest of it was, too.

That day, I made it official: I was not a Christian anymore.

Later, on a similar show, a gay man struggling with his faith spoke of a profound religious experience. While praying about whether or not to come out of the closet, he heard God say to him, “I am not the way you think I am.”

I took those words and held them close. They were my new Bible.

***

In the end, I gave up my faith not only because it stopped making sense to me. I gave it up because, after doing things God’s way for more than thirty years, I was still depressed. Some religions are helpful, I’m sure; my version was not.

My version just didn’t work.

Religion hadn’t cured my depression. But this alternative spirituality I was learning about now seemed much more promising. Maybe this would be, if not a cure, an effective treatment.

I would soon find out.

***

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s … No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle.

***

It’s Zen, only more practical. Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

After a year of consistent harmony, and a long backpacking trip through South America, Benjamin and I decided to have a baby. We were ready. I was ready. All those years I spent alone putting my waitressing earnings toward my mortgage, I was saving up something else, too: my ability to give. While in hibernation, my desire to love someone had never gone away; instead, it had been stockpiled, like dollars in a safe. Now I opened the safe and discovered I was wealthy. For years, I had taken good care of myself. Now I could afford to take care of others.

Surely that would bring happiness, right?

I hadn’t always wanted children; while.married to Jake I visited a gynecologist and asked for a tubal ligation. Wise man: he gently refused.

My choice to have children came along with my choice in partners: Benjamin and babies were a package deal. It was during one of those early phone calls that he asked me if I wanted kids. When I told him no, he asked me why.

“I want to do other things with my life, I suppose,” I said.

“Like what?”

The moment that followed, though brief, was a long one. Within it, I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question. and though I didn’t tell Benjamin right away, it was also the moment I realized I might have kids.

Humble beginnings for a major life choice. And yet, this time, it felt right.

***
For the first three months of my first pregnancy, my nausea was constant. Other than that, though, everything seemed fine. Normal. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. We never found out what caused things to go wrong.

When Jane was born, she was long and fat. She had flawless skin and a pug nose and full lips and long, thick hair and fingernails well past the tips of her fingers. She looked healthy, but she wasn’t.

She wasn’t breathing. 

***

The night Jane died, Benjamin and I washed her whole body, one part at a time. Benjamin changed her diaper and we took turns combing her long dark hair. Then Benjamin went to the lobby to wait with some of our friends while I dressed the baby in a pink floral dress and a knitted cap.

Benjamin came back. “Are you ready?” he asked. 

“Yes,” I said. It was about nine-thirty. 

A nurse came, and I picked up Jane for the last time. Pushing the respirator, the nurse led us to a hospital balcony. We walked slowly and I saw tears in her eyes.

I sat in the chair on the balcony that faced the city. One of the nurses asked me if I was ready for them to take the oxygen tank away, and I said yes. She did so, then both of the nurses left, saying they would be right inside the door if I needed anything.

And then, for the last time, we were alone. 

Next to me there was a railing and on top of it there were the iodine tubes and a wet nap to wipe her face with. I picked up one of the tubes but I couldn’t make it work so I put it back down and began to pull the tape off Jane’s mouth without it. It came off easily and, in a way, I was relieved. Then I took the respirator out of her mouth. 

For the second time, I looked at Jane’s face without the respirator. 

It was beautiful. 

I opened the wet wipe and began to wash Jane’s face. Her lips were still pinched from the respirator and I wanted to smooth them out. I rubbed the cloth over them again and again, but it didn’t work; they wouldn’t go back to the way they were when she was born. 

Still, I kept wiping them. Then I wiped the rest of her face, over and over. At the time I didn’t know why I was doing it; it just felt right somehow. Later I realized the reason: it was something a mother would do. 

It made me feel like I was caring for my baby. 

As I wiped Jane’s face, the tears came, and I let them. I cried in wracking heaves without shame. After half an hour the nurse came out with a wet wash cloth, taking the wet nap I’d been using.  

I wiped her face some more.

After a while, I pulled Jane close to my chest for the last time. Then I kissed her. My last words to her were, “Please don’t leave me.”

I said it many times. It was all I said. 

Another half hour passed. Finally, I decided I was ready, and shortly after that, as if in confirmation, it started to rain. I gathered Jane’s blanket around her head and mine around my shoulders and we went back inside the hospital. 

***

The day after Jane died, I woke up after a long sleep and cried, thinking, I should have held her more. I should have slept every night at the hospital.

“It was too short,” I told Benjamin, and yet, in the days to come I realized that along with the grief, there was something more. As I chose her urn at the funeral home, and wrote her eulogy and hosted her memorial service, I was a more vulnerable person than I’d ever been before. Sometimes during high school, I had lost the ability to cry except in the most rare of circumstances. Now, I cried, not just for Jane, but for the larger reality that this thing we call life is so utterly relentless. Jane made me a mother, and what that meant, I realized, was raw fear and pain. My four days with Jane felt much like most parents feel at least some of the time.

It felt like being a mother.

The grief I experienced was difficult, but it wasn’t long before I realized that it felt different from depression. Depression feels like being stuck in quicksand, while grief comes in waves, temporarily overwhelming you then washing away. Depression crying feels endless and wallowing, but grief crying feels cleansing.

And the difference between these tears was huge.

I had wanted to be there when Jane’s oxygen tubes were removed. Benjamin hadn’t, and we were both surprised by the other’s choice. Almost as soon as Jane was born grey with the cord wrapped around her neck, I knew that I would have to feel my feelings.

Buddhists like to say that one can feel pain without suffering: pain happens in the moment, but the stories we tell ourselves about the pain are what causes the suffering. Though through the months that followed Jane’s death I experienced a grief I’d never known before, I also experienced myself as someone who could handle it. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t suppress my difficult feelings. Instead, I allowed them to come, and noticed that I could handle them.

I learned that I was strong, that I could get through it.

Many years after having my first child, Jane, as I was working my way through the self-help canon, I discovered the book Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. Basically, the book teaches you how to feel your feelings without judgment in order to release them, but until I read it, that hadn’t been my habit.

Grief and depression are very different things. Suppressed grief can turn into depression, or it can be a healthy experience. After letting all that emotion out, some of which had been buried long before I gave birth to my baby, I actually felt less depressed than every. I was more sensitive but in a healthy way.

Who knew?

***

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.” Lao Tzu.

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.” Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.

***

It’s Zen, only more practical. Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

When I was in college, I had an unusual experience: a burglar broke into my apartment. 

It was summer and at the time I lived in a third-floor apartment in a hot-summer town with no A/C. My only relief from the heat came around midnight when the not-quite-hot air blew through my open windows and door.

One night, while I sat at my desktop computer playing some generic precursor to Candy Crush, I heard some strange sounds coming from the kitchen. Scratching sounds, almost. Then a sound like a thumb tack skidding across the linoleum floor.

What the fuck was that, I wondered. Later, it turned out that it was a thumb tack skidding across the linoleum floor.

Suspecting an intruder, I sat calmly, waiting. I wasn’t going to initiate the confrontation, and the kitchen was where the front door was. Soon, a man appeared, slightly built and dressed all in black. He held a white-painted lead pipe.

He saw me and stopped. I could’ve reached out and touched him. One of us had the upper hand here, and it wasn’t me. And yet. There was that hesitation. He looked at me. I looked at him. And suddenly, I knew what to do.

“Can you leave, please?” I said. The man stared at me. I said it again: “Can you leave, please?” The man took a step back, ducked his head once in a gesture of deference and simply said, “Yeah.” Then he quickly fled the kitchen and down the apartment stairs.

As I closed and locked my door, my body flooded with adrenaline. I didn’t call the cops or anyone else; instead, I inspected the kitchen. My purse was still on the table, and there was a thumb tack, taken from the cork board near the door, on the floor.

I picked it up, thanking God for the redeeming merits of drug use. Dysfunction was the hero of the story, not me. Still, I gave myself some credit. I’d always been irrationally afraid of home intruders, concocting unlikely scenarios involving meticulous and deftly carried out plans while trying to fall asleep. But when I finally encountered one, no plan had been needed. Much later in life, I read a book called The Gift of Fear by security specialist Gavin de Becker that explained the situation clearly. Anxiety isn’t fear, it told me. True fear is what you feel in the moment. And often, it allows a person to focus and distill all of the relevant information into a brief flash of insight we know as intuition. At the time, though, I attributed my successful home defense to my superior sense of calm and level-headedness.

I wasn’t one of those people who over-thought things. I was a doer.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t true. Robin Williams once said, “You’re only given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it. You’re an interesting person. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Just don’t interfere with yourself.”

In another interview he said, “If you just don’t interfere with yourself, you’re quite interesting.” This was, I think, the lesson of his life.

I tend to interfere.

That summer night that I stared into the blank staring eyes of a man holding a lead pipe, I learned that I didn’t always need to control everything; often, the moment would provide all needed information.

Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t stick.

***

Should I talk about it? I wondered one evening. Benjamin and I had just finished the Netflix DVD that had come in the mail earlier that afternoon. People pay a lot of money for therapy. They said it helps. Maybe I’ll give it a try.

To his everlasting credit, Benjamin isn’t a bad listener. He doesn’t offer unneeded advice or show pity or refocus the conversation onto himself. These things I appreciated, and yet, where was the catharsis I was told would come after you bared all to a trusted person? Having had few close friends in my life, I didn’t realize that it didn’t always work that way. That night, I learned that sometimes, after you exhaust an already-boring topic like depression, you go to bed feeling worse than before. In trying to relieve the loneliness, you end up feeling more alone than ever.Okay, I told myself as I waited for sleep to come.Next time, just distract yourself instead.

This was good advice. No longer would I wallow in sadness about sadness. The first layer of sadness was enough. I talked with Benjamin about incidents, about decisions, about problems. But the topic of depression was now off the table. When he asked how I felt, I usually said I was fine.

Because really, I told myself, I am fine.

It wasn’t till much later that I learned that while rumination is unhealthy, feeling your feelings is probably a good idea. The subtlety of this distinction wasn’t within my purview at the time, but that’s okay.

Emotional maturity doesn’t come overnight.

***

“Confine yourself to the present.” Marcus Aurelius.

“Perhaps I’m old and tired … but I always think that the chances of finding out what is really going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

***

It’s Zen, only more practical. Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

Growing up, one of the places I most loved to go was our local library. I checked out their thin, colorful first readers by the stack, going through them ten or twenty at a time. I read too quickly to appreciate the stories, reading just for the pleasure it gave me to make symbols into words in my mind. Just a few years into my elementary school career, I started writing stories and then I knew what I was. 

I was a writer. 

I was also a worker. This I suspected from a young age, not because I had a part-time job at the age of eleven (though I did, babysitting), but because I didn’t care much for dolls, and I could do without Lego, but man, did I love playing Post Office.

In this game, which absorbed my attention for hours on end, I’d write a stack of very brief letters to my sister or mom, then create homemade envelopes and stamps. I’d put each letter in the properly addressed envelopes and deliver them as fast as I could. My sister would do the same, replying to my missives in equal number and necessitating my replies and the continuation of the game. There was no time for anything but writing, cutting, stamping, mailing and delivering, and we didn’t want to do anything else. We were getting things done.

We were working.

***

Not long after my divorce, I decided to move to Seattle, a city across the state from my hometown. Just prior to leaving El Paso, while browsing an independent bookstore on a road trip to Albuquerque, I found another book that changed my life: The Well-fed Writer: Financial Self‑Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less by Peter Bowerman. It was exactly as salesy as it sounded and, with social media now getting off the ground, even more out-of-date. I didn’t care, though. On the plane ride to Washington, I read it cover to cover, taking notes.

The plan it suggested involved making hundreds of cold calls to ad agencies, graphic design firms, marketing departments and small businesses, asking if they needed a writer.

Can I do this? I asked myself. Something inside me said, yes. I knew I could write—well enough, anyway. And I knew, also, that I could work hard.

Already, I had a portfolio. After months of married boredom, I’d written a few sample commercials and sent a few enthusiastic emails asking for a job at various ad agencies around town. The email that got me my first real writing job opened with, “My name is Mollie, and I want to impress you.” The five-employee company that hired me was located in a renovated Victorian home with all-black interior. My boss was an excellent mentor. I had my own office. After the initial excitement waned, though, and I faced a forty-hour work week for the first time, my depression overwhelmed me. I realized that I might never be able to work a regular job.

Freelance writing it would be.

After landing in Seattle, I got my hands on a hefty copy of the Yellow Pages–yes, really, the Yellow Pages–and highlighted the possibilities. I created a spreadsheet and pored over it for hours. I made thirty to fifty calls a day on my flip phone. And to my surprise, the method worked. Within a month, I had several clients.

It wasn’t enough, of course. My expenses were few but I needed a margin. Besides, I was never one to wait around when money could be made. Unable to get a job as a server in the competitive Seattle market, I volunteered at a retirement home until the inevitable day came when they hired me. I called Bingo and drove the short bus to the neighborhood shopping center then enjoyed a pretty decent lunch from the cafeteria. On my days off, and in the evenings, I lay in bed writing website copy. Soon after that, I started writing books, too–bad books, but books–and to my great satisfaction, the habit stuck.

Finally, my life was taking shape. I lived in a city I loved and was doing my dream job.

I even had a boyfriend.

***

Before arriving in Seattle, I met Benjamin on an early desktop-only version of OK Cupid. We started talking by phone, and our final call before I moved to Seattle took place on a moonless night. I walked down the country road my mother lived on and we spoke for over three hours. The comfort I felt with him was a good sign. The evening of the first day I spent in the Seattle area, we went on our first date, and a week later, we were on a cruise ship bound for Alaska.

If my life was a game of pool, my twenties were my warm-up. I pocketed a few balls–got my degree, purchased my first house–but I missed many more shots than I made. Almost as soon as I turned thirty, though, I started picking off the balls one by one. My first real career. My first big city. My first healthy relationship. Finally, my life had begun. Soon there would be another house, three kids and disposable income.

I ran the table.

And yet, one night early in our relationship as I sat next to Benjamin in his living room, I realized something: depression didn’t care that I had everything.

***

It happened at night, as these things so often do. I don’t remember how the conversation started. I just remember crying on Benjamin’s shoulder for no discernable reason as he attempted to comfort me in that new-boyfriend way. His attempts were not successful; if anything, I felt worse. I also felt embarrassed. After a time, I put on my shoes and walked to the fountain near the entrance of his apartment building and found a place to sit down. A few minutes passed. Then Benjamin found me and asked me, mystified, what was going on.

“Nothing is going on,” I said. “That’s the problem. I have depression, and I’ve had it my whole life, and now it’s not just me that has to deal with it. You do, too.”

Naive of me, maybe, to believe that people in Real Adult Relationships don’t have problems. Or that by being with Benjamin, I was inconveniencing him terribly. But my sadness that night wasn’t just about how my mental health problems might affect my romantic relationship. Mostly, it was about the inverse problem: that my relationship with Benjamin hadn’t affected my mental health problems.

You can be in love and be depressed. You can accomplish major personal goals and be depressed. You can genuinely like yourself, and have a sense of belonging, and climb Maslow’s Hierarchy to the very top and still be depressed.

It would take more than a change of circumstance to heal my well-worn loneliness neural pathways. It would take years of supportive partnership, close friendships and family.

And even then, it would linger.

Being in love and being depressed at the same time is a weird feeling, a strange sensation. I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. But the thick layer of sadness was always there, underneath the thin layer of joy, so that I experienced both simultaneously.

This will never go away fully, I realized. If I’m like this now, I’ll be like this for the rest of my life.

I’d say that it came as a shock, but it didn’t.

There by the fountain, Benjamin held me a while. Then he took my hand and brought me back inside. We watched one of the Netflix movies that had arrived in the mail earlier that week. Then we went to bed.

Getting everything I wanted wasn’t a cure for depression.

But it was a step in the right direction.

***

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”

The Serenity Prayer, of course.

***

Inner peace is hard. Reading about it isn’t. Get The Power of Acceptance: One Year of Mindfulness and Meditation at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

The first time I went to a doctor to discuss my ongoing mental lassitude, I felt awkward, even a bit scared. Was I depressed enough for medication? How bad does it have to be to qualify? And even if I did qualify, how would the doctor know I wasn’t faking it? His questions made me feel vulnerable, and I teared up in his office. I got Wellbutrin.

That afternoon, I took the first pill. I told Josh I already felt better. “That’s placebo,” he said. “It won’t kick in fully for a few weeks.” He was right. But I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

At the two-week mark when I knew the medication had reached its stable level in my system, the improvement was … underwhelming. Is there even a difference? I asked myself. But how could I tell? Between the divorce, and quitting my job, and the upcoming move, and dating, [it was hard to know if the prescription had made any difference]–make this funnier.

Still, I kept taking them. People said it would help, and I was ready to try something new. For almost three decades, I’d done it God’s way. And though I’d one a few minor battles against depression, my generals were under-equipped and … I was clearly losing the war. [say in funnier way–“my generals were underfunded and …”]. God might be really good at forming mountains and placing stars and such, but he didn’t seem like much of an expert on mental health.

And so, when gradually I realized that the medication wasn’t a total cure for my condition, I was disappointed but not disillusioned. Medication wasn’t the whole answer to my depression, I knew. But it seemed like a step in the right direction.

Besides, there was a lot to look forward to, now that I was allowing myself to really live my life. There was the big move to Seattle, and my search for a husband replacement.

Surely when I found my true love, my depression would lift.

***

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

***

Inner peace is hard. Reading about it isn’t. Get The Power of Acceptance: One Year of Mindfulness and Meditation at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

My hibernation was nice while it lasted, and it lasted for several years. Then, it ended. Abruptly. I got a call from Jake, on leave from his tour of duty in Iraq, asking to come visit for a few days. He [invaded my home] and asked me to marry him, and for reasons other closeted Christian lesbians would understand, I said yes.

We hadn’t seen each other for over a year and hadn’t kept in touch. I have no memory of the proposal that came that weekend; later he sarcastically told our former history professor it was “post-coital”.

I was twenty-eight. Just after I turned twenty-nine, I was married.

***

The best part of our last-minute Las Vegas wedding were the photos of me at the prettiest I’d ever been and would ever be. Afterwards, I sat in the large jacuzzi bath and plucked a hundred bobby pins out of my hair, delaying. The next day I gorged myself on leftover sandwiches from the reception we held in our room. 

We moved near Fort Bliss in El Paso, and at first, everything was as it should have been. We lived in an overpriced apartment on the suburban West side near a mall. There, I cooked and cleaned and thought, I guess this is my life now. I still felt lonely and depressed–Jake spent most of his evenings playing video games–but I enjoyed our simple companionship … until I didn’t. Three months into the marriage, Jake’s indifference began to show. While I worked through The Joy of Cooking, he played video games. No doubt Jake had his own [complaints about] me as a wife, but I never found out what they were. He never told me. One lonely evening, I wrote a letter to him and placed it next to the bathroom sink. The next day, I asked him if he’d read it. He said he hadn’t. I rested my back against the kitchen wall and slunk down it, crying silently, till clarity came. Without planning it, I blurted out, “I’m moving out.” Jake acknowledged me then returned to his video game. The next day he told his C/O [boss?] he was getting a divorce.

***

Nine months. Plus three months for paperwork. That’s how long that union lasted. But short experiences often bring fast change; it’s all time they have to work with. By the time I settled in on the opposite side of town, the side with bodegas and mercados and ants in the shower, I was indelibly different.

I had been married.

In Victorian novels, the single woman works to maintain her innocence and purity, putting only her most delicate foot forward. This makes walking difficult. Once she becomes a widow, though, she is suddenly able to take long, confident strides. She might own land in her name. She might write a book or start a business. She might even take a lover or two.

Now I was that widow. I was unleashed.

My marriage was a mistake, but a very good one. (Not the best one, though–my second marriage was that.) I realized that after longtime loneliness, I had enjoyed the comfortable partnership of marriage. When considering what my post-divorce life would be like, I knew I wouldn’t return to my house and hometown and to the lonely hibernation I’d known. I wanted to try something new. Preferably with a partner.

What if I chose the wrong city, the wrong job, the wrong person to share it with? It didn’t matter, I realized. I was allowed to mess up. To me, this was a revelation. I could fail miserably? The thought had never occurred to me before. For over a decade, I had waited for The One, just as everyone had advised me to. “When you’re not looking, you’ll find him,” they said. 

They were wrong.

I had waited for God to reveal his plan for me, and all he’d done was watch me flounder. God wasn’t in charge of my life. He was never even trying to be.

I was on my own. 

Soon after moving out, before the divorce was completed, I started dating again. 

***

At that time, online dating was just hitting its stride, and I dove in with great enthusiasm. For me, the format offered a buffet of manhood the likes of which I’d never encountered before. Christian? Non-Christian? Similar to me? Totally different? Maybe I’d try a bit of everything.

I cut my hair short. I quit my job at the ad agency I’d worked at for a few months after my separation–a job I’d practically begged for–and planned a move to Seattle, a city I’d only been to once. I stopped asking God for permission and started asking people for advice. It turned out that they were much better sources of information. I told a nice guy I’d met online about my lifelong depression, and he urged me to try medication. I agreed, and saw a psychiatrist for the first time.

I was thirty years old.

***

In the 1980s, when I was growing up, my mother used to regularly gather her three children into the living room and read us an inspiring passage from the Bible. One day, as she was reading, I experienced a revelation–the kind that my mother used to call “prophetic”. I don’t remember the exact passage she was reading that day, but I do remember glancing up over her shoulder as she spoke toward the television, which in our house was on constantly, at the Nike commercial as its timeless slogan blinked briefly on the screen.

“Just do it.”

This spoke to me. Immediately, I jumped up off the couch, grabbed my mom’s Bible from her hands and slammed it closed.

“Hallelujah,” I shouted. “The truth has been revealed.”

Well, okay, it might not have happened quite like that. But the first time I saw that Nike commercial, one of the first of the minimalist philosophical type, some part of me knew I’d heard the gospel truth.

As a fundamentalist Christian, I had never before been encouraged to do things. Not by my Catholic teachers. Not by my parents or fellow churchgoers. The message our family got was always, don’t do things.

Don’t sin. Don’t complain. Don’t stand out. Don’t take a risk. It took me a long time to unlearn these things.

But Nike was right. It’s good to do things. And finally, in my thirtieth year of life, I began to learn how.

***

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” Seneca.

“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.” Buddha.

***

Inner peace is hard. Reading about it isn’t. Get The Power of Acceptance: One Year of Mindfulness and Meditation at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

At what turned out to be one of the last churches I attended, we started what turned out to be one of the last young adult groups I attended as well. The leaders of the group, Mark and Julie Doting, were the darlings of our scene. Successful and thirtysomething–the decade of peak coolness–they seemed so together. So normal. Unlike most of the rest of our small congregation, made up mostly of the very young and very old, they weren’t poor, and didn’t seem to come from poverty, either. They lived on the good side of town, and our first meeting was held in their cheerfully decorated living room.

The problems began almost immediately. Before the attendees had even fully arranged ourselves on the miscellaneous seating options, Julie muttered to Mark, “That’s not the way to do it.” Her tone was insistent–almost offended. Her husband had arranged the guitar music on a stool instead of a music stand, and Julie wanted no part of it. Mark took the bait and a short but intense negotiation followed. Then Mark took a deep breath and opened the meeting. He prayed. Then someone else prayed. Then he suggested we all “go around the circle and introduce ourselves,” as they have in every similar meeting I’ve ever attended. But before we could do so, Julie interrupted.

“We all know each other,” she said. Was this the same Julie? Smiley Julie? Professional school administrator Julie? Did she talk to the principal that way, nagging him about the new special assembly planning procedure? I imagined it and quickly made the mental adjustment. Hmmm … Maybe that’s why she’s a school administrator.

Others in the group weren’t as quick to catch on. Most of them looked a bit confused. The meeting continued in much the same fashion till it came to a blessed end and we adjourned to the kitchen for refreshments, Julie asking Mark why he bought plastic cups.

“We always get paper.”

Pastor Pat was there that evening. Watching him, I wondered, did he suspect something like this might happen? Is that why he’d showed up? I side-glanced back to the living room and noticed the couple following him to an adjoining room for a “quick debrief.” The absence was noticed but not remarked upon. I took my muffin and plastic cup of juice back to the living room. And that’s when one of those seemingly insignificant significant thoughts came. If this is what marriage is like, I mused, I want no part of it. There was no sadness in this realization, only relief. A child of divorced parents whose friends’ parents were mostly divorced or unhappily paired, I had no firsthand data to refute my hasty conclusion. Is this what I’ve been hoping for all my life? Embarrassing public spats over insignificant matters? Is that the prize at the end of the dating rainbow? It was like eating a box of Lucky Charms hoping to find a treasure chest at the bottom, but instead just getting more Lucky Charms. What if I just stopped dating? I wondered. Would that be so bad? It might even be a relief.

Up to this time, my longest relationship had lasted less than six months. Later, I realized that I prefer women to men sexually, but at the time the possibility of being queer was as distant as the possibility of my someday having children or being happy. Giving up dating completely, though? The idea had never crossed my mind. I deeply craved romantic love and took almost every chance I got at a meaningless hookup. Why not? At least it was something. That night, though, the rubber band of desire that always pulled me back toward the sin of lust snapped. I could run from men now, unhindered. And that’s what I did. Mostly. I told myself I was waiting for God to bring my husband. Till then, I would be enough. Just me.

It was simpler.

I was very grateful to that couple, and still am.

***

“Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau.

***

After graduating college with my hard-earned B.A. I did what most college graduates do: kept working my food service job. It had been a few years since my no-dating resolution had taken effect, and finally, someone came along and picked me. His name was Jake. Unsure about the relationship, I fled to China to teach English for a while. John fled, too, to basic training for the Army. When I returned, I found no boyfriend waiting but I did find a brick one-story house with original solid wood floors and trim on a quarter acre lot. I bought it, and with that, entered phase two of my hibernation.

This phase was better. I loved my new-old house. It was my lover, my boyfriend. Though I’d had strong feelings for a few boys, it had never felt like this. With them, it had always been about the general feeling rather than about the specific person. The way I felt about my house, though–this was the real thing. I loved this house. This one, in particular.

It was a romantic time. We’d meet after dark after my closing shift that was followed by an hour-and-half-long commute. I still remember the feeling of stepping over my property line and crossing the lawn in that quiet sort-of-suburban neighborhood. We were alone.

It was just us.

I spent all my extra money on it. Not to make it nice, but to pay it off. I spent as much time with it as I could. I was a bit obsessed. At the tail end of my college years, my social efforts had slowed almost to the point of stalling. Now, they were sputtering, as had the last car I owned before I swore off cars forever. My life was in transition. I’d outgrown my restaurant friends; I was now one of the older, more experienced people there. College was behind me, and none of my friends had stuck.

I kept things simple. I read a lot. I got a treadmill. It wasn’t enough, but it was. I’d always been a loner. But now I was a loner with a house. Home ownership isn’t the depression treatment of choice for everyone, but for me, it made a difference.

That first year, my mom brought a few of her church friends over to see my new house and pray … for it? I appreciated the gesture. They oohed and aahed appropriately. Then we stood in a circle, held hands and prayed. After everyone had taken their turn, Josephine, an intelligent woman in her seventies, asked me what kind of career I wanted now that I’d graduated. I told them I didn’t know, but that I was incredibly thankful for where I was right then. I said it again: “I am just so thankful. I have everything I need.”

To a woman, they missed a beat. Blank looks. I could read their thoughts: She’s a waitress with no boyfriend. She has everything she needs? Everything? Then, blessedly, understanding came over Josephine’s face. She saw that my gratitude wasn’t naivete. It was a choice.

“Praise God,” she said with a wide smile and shining eyes. “You have everything you need. That’s beautiful.” The other women nodded and smiled in agreement.

In hibernation, it seems like nothing is happening, but a lot is happening. The most that ever happens is happening. Somehow, without realizing it, I was growing up.

Better late than never, I suppose.

I was learning grownup things: how to be grateful for what you have. How to enjoy routine. How to take a day off. For the first time in my adult life, I had only one job and no classes. I learned that I didn’t always have to distract myself; I could be alone. Even more significantly, I learned that the ups and downs of unstable relationships were worse for my mental health than were the gentle slopes of loneliness.

I had always been a loner, and I was still a loner. And I was sick of trying to pretend otherwise.

It was the first segment of my life that I look back on and think, that was a good time. Not a fun time, maybe. But a good time.

It was a rest.

***

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” Seneca.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Cicero.

***

Inner peace is hard. Reading about it isn’t. Get The Power of Acceptance: One Year of Mindfulness and Meditation at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

Though my on-campus jobs served me well for several years, eventually, the lure of the food service industry became too great to resist. A job with tips: to me, this was success. So when I was hired as a busser at a cool downtown Asian fusion restaurant with some of the best food in my hometown, I felt pretty good about myself. I had already maintained paid work for more years than either of my parents had during my life–maybe even more than both of them combined. Now, I was making more money than they’d ever made, too. They were happy for me. If you can make it in a restaurant, they felt, you can make it.

They were not wrong about this.

Several months in, my manager stopped me mid-stride (as a busser, I was always mid-stride) to ask me an unexpected question. “Would you like to try out being a runner?”

I hesitated. A food runner. An expediter. Was she serious? This was big stuff. Food runners carried huge trays in one hand and a tray stand in the other. They actually spoke to the customers. It was one step away from being a server, and I didn’t know if I was ready. I’d just barely gotten over the shakes when approaching tables to refill water glasses.

My mind said no. But my mouth knew better. It knew I wanted the higher payout that came with the role.

“Sure,” I said, and when I brought my first tray out, I didn’t drop anything and no one seemed to notice my trembling voice. It was a party of six and I have a vague memory of a woman’s kind smile. After that, I knew I’d be okay.

The achievement was minor, but like saving your first few hundred dollars, it’s the early steps that make the later ones, like owning a house, possible. [fix that sentence] A few years later, I was promoted to server and even my lifelong shyness habit couldn’t survive seven years at a restaurant. Though I still wasn’t a cheerful person, I was at least a more comfortable one now. And for the most part, I was the same everywhere I went now–church, school, home and work. [fix that sentence]

It had taken a long time, but finally, I was myself.

A handful of years later, I came across the quote that became mine–my favorite quote forever, or at least for the coming two-plus decades and counting: “Always do what you are afraid to do.” It’s from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called “Heroism,” and when I read it, I immediately understood. Afraid? Do that. That’s what the hero does, and that’s what I wanted to do, too. I suspected that if I was going to actually become the person I wanted to become–the person who matched the mental image of my future badass self–I’d have to woman the fuck up. Reflecting on this today, I wonder how my life might be different if I’d never read it. Thank you, liberal arts education. I definitely never got advice like this in church.

Many years later, when I was in grad school studying to become a mental health counselor, I learned about exposure therapy, the practice of facing a fear until your brain is fully convinced of its safety. “Always do what you’re afraid to do” wasn’t just good advice, it turned out. It was also really good therapy.

***

“If nothing changes, nothing changes.” Alcoholics Anonymous members everywhere. If there’s a more stoic organization in the world, I don’t know what it is.

***

Inner peace is hard. Reading about it isn’t. Get The Power of Acceptance: One Year of Mindfulness and Meditationby Mollie Player at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

For me, depression has never been a particularly dramatic experience. And yet, its lack of drama is what I find most interesting about it. It’s relatively easy to form a story around suicide attempts and mental hospital stays. What’s harder to communicate, and even harder to understand, is the dailyness that is the defining feature of the disorder.

Persistent Depression is a lot like having a job you dislike, except that you never leave. There are good moments: morning coffee. Sex, when you can manage it. Regularly, if you use keeping busy as a coping mechanism, you enjoy a sense of accomplishment. But most of your day is spend either mustering the energy to perform banal tasks or actually performing those tasks. The reward for these efforts is a few evening hours of mild dissociation courtesy that lifeless friend-substitute, your phone. A few times a week, this is followed by waves of heartache, often experienced as loneliness, no matter who might be sitting or lying next to you. These final minutes or hours of the day bring on your worst thoughts: I can’t live like this. This will never go away.

Heaviness is a good metaphor for the feeling of depression, but the difficulty of the condition is expressed better as dailyness. Dailyness. As in, every day. As in, Sisyphus struggling behind his rock. As in, waking to your alarm clock yet again and wondering if you can do it.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Henry David Thoreau said that. This book features not a single depths-of-despair anecdote. Instead, I attempt to make Thoreau’s desperation look like an unkempt nine-year-old girl sitting around the corner from the playground, enduring yet another recess, alone.

There’s something else here, too, of course: The hopeful part. The antidote to the dailyness. But of course, it’s daily, too. It has to be.

In this book, I make every argument I can think of for putting one foot in front of the other, and another in front of that, until finally, the landscape has changed.

“Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.” Ovid, paraphrased.

Be the water.

***

After two years of Bible College, I transitioned to one of the four-year universities back in my hometown. However, the landscape of my life didn’t change much. I didn’t party. I didn’t travel. I didn’t find a fun group of friends or a meaningful extracurricular. I dated a bit, but it never felt right. Though I attended several schools, worked a handful of jobs and moved three or four times, most days felt about the same.

Dailyness.

Though the landscape of my college years and the rest of my twenties was nicer than it had been in high school–there was shelter and water–it was still a desert and thus, mostly featureless. That was mostly okay with me, though. I knew that someday, and suddenly, the mountains would appear. And if I kept walking through this place, I would get there.

As with regular hiking, though, the journey is always at least twice as long as you expect it to be.

***

When my philosophy professor Wayne Pomerleau asked to see me after class one afternoon, I agreed. When class ended, I waited for everyone to leave.

“I wanted to ask you how you are feeling,” Pomerleau said. “I wonder if you are okay.”

This wasn’t the question I was expecting. “Yeah,” I told him. “I’m fine.” I raised my eyebrows. Gave him my half-smile.

“You’re … fine.” His tone was flat. I mean, his tone was always flat but somehow, it was even flatter now.

“Yeah,” I said. I met his eyes. I noticed him noticing me and felt too many things, too quickly, to elaborate.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

What more could he say? But he went on. “I live with a woman who has suffered with depression for many years.” This was delivered in his usual teacherly, dramatic style. Was he always like this? Was he like this at home? No wonder his wife was depressed.

I wish that in that moment I’d had the courage to let him know that yes, I too, had depression. I wasn’t okay and hadn’t been for a long time. Self-consciousness prevented me, but not only that. There was denial, too–wouldn’t I, shouldn’t I, figure this out on my own? And its opposite: hopelessness. This guy can’t help me. No one can.

If someone in my life prior to this moment would have prepared me even a bit for it–“you know, counseling is always available!”–would that have been enough to give me the courage to say something that day, or even to say nothing at all but not to lie?

But they didn’t, and I did lie.

-blend with: Sure, I’m depressed a lot, I might have reflected after leaving the classroom that day. But isn’t the way I feel … logical, really? Life is hard, and lonely, and I’m still figuring things out. Global crises and private tragedies are a condition of existence. Maybe everyone feels like I do, but they’re just better at suppressing or ignoring it. And even if I am sadder than most people, so what? Therapy won’t help. What could anyone possibly say to make it better? And pills–they’re just for weak people.

I’m not weak. I’m sad, but I’m also tough. I will get through this–whatever it is–by myself.

-blend with: At the time, though, medication wasn’t a thought in my mind. Neither was therapy. In my family, we just didn’t do those things. I’d figure something out eventually, I told myself. God would heal me, or I’d learn to pray the right way, or read the Bible more and with more sincerity.

“Well, okay,” he said. “Then if you are, as you say, ‘fine,’ then good,” and he let me go. I exited his classroom knowing I’d lied to him, but also not knowing. It was a strange experience of cognitive dissonance that was, at the same time, deeply familiar. 

I scooted out of the room, remembering my high school history teacher who’d had a similar after-class conversation with me. I didn’t think, “This keeps happening. Maybe I could use some help.” Instead, I just thought, “Thanks God that’s over.”

People with depression understand intellectually that depression lives–the nothing it tells us is the truth. “No one can help you. This will never go away.” If you would’ve asked me if I believed these things, I would have said I didn’t or at least that I wasn’t sure. And yet, I listened. I didn’t know how to.

I didn’t yet know how to change my story.

***

If genetics had been my only mental health obstacle, maybe today I’d be a studious college professor and a novelist. But I’m a mental health counselor and a self-help writer instead, and part of the reason is that for a long time, without knowing it, depression was my practice.

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung, paraphrased.

Depression was my habit.

***

Church was a questionable influence on my mental health; however, it was not without gifts. After testifying during a service about the end of her depression, a woman offered to pray for others who were suffering. I talked to her after the service about my longtime struggle and she invited me to visit her at her home. There, she prayed for me, then did something better than that.

She gave me a book.

It was called Telling Yourself the Truth and in it, authors William Backus and Marie Chapian repackaged an evidence-based depression treatments for an audience that normally eyed with suspicion worldly science-based ideas. They based their largely borrowed technique which they called “misbelief therapy” on two or three plucked-out-of-context scriptures, and gave no credit to the founders of cognitive therapy (or the many inspirational positive thinking authors before them). They were wise to avoid this. At the time, people like me needed to believe this was a Christian method. Regardless, the theme of the book was simple: tell yourself the truth. Since God is good, and God is on your side, the truth is always better than you think it is. 

Wait–changing my thinking? Was this even biblical? What about doing good deeds, trusting God and avoiding sinning? I’d never heard of cognitive therapy, and positive thinking–wasn’t that … denial?

The authors walked the reader through the most elementary perspective-changing exercises–exercises that, to me, felt nothing short of radical. I tried it and surprisingly, it worked.

Walking home from class one afternoon, I even tried a mantra: “Thank you, God,” I said, over and over, once for each step I took. By the time I was home, I felt better.

After this experience, I started experiencing something new: short breaks in my otherwise continuous depression. Though these were brief at first, the length didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were happening, and that later, they would happen more.

This was another grown-up that stepped in to help fill the gaps that my parents had left, and I appreciated it. 

I still do. These things matter.

***

Maybe a part of me was recalling that book as I lay in my bed one evening, feeling guilty. Guilt was a familiar feeling but today there was a difference: when I searched for a reason for it, I came up empty. I mean, sure, my thoughts weren’t always pure. I probably wasn’t always giving a hundred percent at school. But had I lied? Had I committed adultery? Had I treated someone poorly? I wanted to find some reason for what I was feeling so that, as in times past, I could pray for forgiveness then find relief. This day, though, an Earth-tilting truth: there was nothing to feel guilty about. I had done nothing wrong. 

Maybe this feeling of guilt isn’t real guilt, I thought. Maybe it’s just a feeling. Maybe, like my constant aching loneliness and my sometimes-bottomless hunger, it was another disguise for depression. 

I sat up in my bed and looked out the window. Just a feeling? Is it possible? It felt right. My jaw set, and against my upbringing, I allowed this to be my truth.

I am not guilty. This feeling of guilt isn’t the truth. And I don’t have to listen to it anymore.

Looking back, it probably wasn’t my decision to stop going to church, or critique questionable scripture passages in college theology classes, or hang out with non-Christians that was the first step to losing my religion. The first step probably happened in that single thought, that millisecond-long flash of understanding that one of my foundational spiritual beliefs was just wrong. 

I am not guilty. It was, for me, a rebellious idea.

And it was a healthy one, too.

***

“It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau.

***

Want to learn how to clean your house twice as well in half the time? Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

The following fall, I started what would become my illustrious, industrious seven and a half-year career as an undergrad.

It’s a new start, I told myself. Maybe it’ll be … good. I didn’t expect to conquer my lifelong sadness or become a different person. But I did hope to kick the shyness habit–preferably somewhere tender and vulnerable–and maybe even find a few close friends.

That first semester, I made small goals for myself: sit next to different people every day. Raise your hand at least once per class. Join things. And surprisingly, it worked. My freshman year of college, I found a group of friends–friends I remained close with till I switched cities and schools two years later. And slowly, I gained a bit of confidence. These changes didn’t make me feel cheerful, necessarily. But they did add a layer of hope and self-satisfaction on top of the heaviness. And this was meaningful. I got back something I’d been missing since my church youth group days.

I got a life.

It was a cheat: my friends were all Christians and therefore, smack dab in the middle of my comfort zone.

But it was a step in the right direction.

****

One of the most embarrassing facts of my life is that at the age of eighteen, on the advice of my mother, I attended bible college.

I didn’t feel ready for the real world yet, and for good reason: I wasn’t.

If I would have been the rebellious kid at church, this fact would be far less embarrassing. I wasn’t, though; I was the most Christian of all the Christians, and so were the others in my friend group. From my first day on campus–August 9th, 1997–I had friends. I was one of the early comers, which meant that I immediately bonded with the few other girls already settled into our dorm. One of them, along with my roommate and two other girls, became a good friend.

My friends and I spent every meal time together, sat next to each other during chapel and church and classes, hung out in the library during the day and in the evenings, went to the common area that had couches and table tennis and just … hung out. Our first semester, especially, we played countless games of ping pong and eventually, learned how to hold our own. My friend group even had a corresponding guy friend group that we spent weekend evenings with. As on the TV show friends, some of us paired up. I developed a crush on the extroverted leader of the guy group which quickly became an on-again, off-again flirtation. This was exciting, but I had a more fulfilling resource, too. At bible college, spirituality was an ever-present comfort. Prayer, and especially worship, were my primary emotional outlet, and at this bible college, worship was done right. Musically talented students led songs at every opportunity, especially during Wednesday chapel meetings. This was some serious kumbaya stuff; in a way, it was like always being at summer camp.

During the two years I spent at that school, I didn’t learn much in the way of academics. But what I did discover was much more useful than that. I discovered that I could be myself–tough-minded, hard working, a little unrefined, not terribly sweet or feminine–and still fit in.

First task complete.

My second goal, overcoming my shyness, was a bit more difficult than finding friends was. The good news: I had a plan. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was enough, and it was this: I would talk in class at least once a day. I would also sit next to someone new at least once a day (I was often the person responsible for messing up people’s seating habits). Finally, I committed to regularly starting a conversation with someone I didn’t know well.

The plan was effective. Little by little, my shyness wore away. I started surprising myself by even being a bit gregarious at times. Once or twice, I volunteered to lead our Wednesday chapel service–and I even got compliments later on how well I did.

This made me proud.

Many years later, when I was in grad school studying to become a mental health counselor, I learned that this was the kind of thing that a professional would’ve advised, had I had one to advise me. It was a kind of behavioral therapy called exposure therapy. It works because your brain usually can’t continue to feel afraid of things that you’ve already done many times over.

Always do what you’re afraid to do. It wasn’t just good advice. It was therapy.

***

In his memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression, John Moe tells about the first time he visited his doctor to talk about mental health. The doctor asked a few quick questions, then pronounced him clinically depressed. “You can tell from just a few questions?” Moe asked. “Oh no,” the doctor told him. “I knew as soon as you walked in. The questions were just to make sure.”

In spite of my newfound confidence, by the time I entered college, depression’s mold had shaped my body and face enough that Moe’s doctor would’ve diagnosed me on the spot, too. I slouched. I half-smiled when I smiled at all. And my laugh was usually a half-laugh–a one-syllable “heh”. Though life at college was a definite improvement over life at … well, any other grade, my default facial expression was a decent impression of Eyore. I had actually played Eyore in a summer theater production as a ten-year-old. My instructor, during casting, had insisted; she knew what she was doing, apparently. I didn’t mind. But I did mind when people (usually men) spontaneously urged me to “smile more”. Didn’t they know how hard that was? And were they implying that when I didn’t, I was ugly?

During my second semester, I found my first college job. I’d be a cashier at Office Depot–a definite step up from Kmart. While working at the register one afternoon, my manager pulled me aside. This can’t be good, I thought. And it wasn’t. And it was.

“You have to smile more,” Rob said. He stared at me. “You have to make the customers feel welcome.” Rob was exactly the middle manager you’d expect at a retail establishment. Worse than that, he was ambitious. He wasn’t one to phone it in: he wanted his store to do well. In this way, our goals were not aligned.

Though I disliked Rob, I didn’t hate him. I just wanted to get through my damn day. I liked getting a paycheck and genuinely feared being deprived of it. But smiling? Could I … do that?

“At Office Depot, we pay our employees more than minimum wage,” Rob went on. “And in return, we have higher expectations. Our employees go above and beyond for our customers. That’s what makes us different.” I nodded, unsmiling. It was true: At the time, the minimum was $5.15 per hour. I made $6.25.

Subconsciously, I performed a quick mental calculation. I made 110 cents over the minimum, which gave me a good-mood compensation of over 20 percent over my base pay. Would approximately 100 smiles per day equal roughly 20 percent of additional effort overall? I believed 15 percent was more likely. Rob the middle manager was right: I was getting a good deal.

“Are you ready to try it?” Rob asked. Again I nodded, again unsmiling. Maybe I raised my eyebrows a bit in a sort of smile-substitute that I employed when my face just wouldn’t cooperate. Likely, as he walked away, a pained, embarrassed expression took its place. I’d have to figure out a way to pull this off … but how? I imagined faking happiness half-heartedly and getting suspicious looks from the higher-ups, then flunking every performance review. Then I imagined getting fired, and failing as a cashier.

If I couldn’t be a cashier, what could I be?

Fortunately, money has always been a highly motivational force in my life, and on this day, it was more than that. It was … inspirational. When the next customer arrived at my humble checkout counter, I forced a smile in greeting. Did my manager, observing obliquely, give me a thumbs up and a phony smile of his own? Probably not. But I certainly felt like he was watching.

The next customer came. Then the next. I smiled at this one and the one after that. Soon, a rhythm developed. “Hi! How are you? Did you find everything you were looking for?” Beep, bloop, bleep. “Have a nice day!” I ended that shift feeling better than I had when I started. Maybe there was something to this fake happiness thing, after all.

Maybe, smiling was a choice.

The strangest part: the mood altering effects of those few hours of customer service wasn’t a one-off. During my next shift, I hit the rhythm again. Smile. Into the eyes if possible. Greet the customer. Wish them a good day. Be sincere. After all, don’t you actually want them to enjoy their day? Why wouldn’t you?

Being nice feels good, I realized. A great truth. And there was another one: Sometimes–most of the time, even–you can choose your mood.

Many days that semester, and during the rest of my OD tenure, I walked into my shifts feeling semi-miserable. On busy days, by five minutes in, my mood would noticeably shift.

I even discovered a hidden talent for small talk–a talent that would pay handsomely in my later career as a waitress. I liked talking to people. And I loved feeling competent. Soon, I was promoted to the customer service desk, where I balanced cashiering with answering the phone and other miscellaneous tasks.

The confident church girl was back. But this time, she wasn’t only at church.

At work, I could put on cheerfulness in a moment, like changing my outfit, only quicker. Home, though, was harder. Home was where the heartache still was. I couldn’t distract myself like I could at work. And of course, it didn’t come with monetary compensation.

Fake happiness can help, I learned. But it’s far from a cure for depression.

***

“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.” Dolly Parton.

***

Want to learn how to clean your house twice as well in half the time? Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

The summer prior to my Junior year of high school, my mother finally finished building our house in the country. At first, we still drove to town twice a week for church and Wednesday-night youth group. Eventually, though, something shifted–I don’t remember what–and we started attending our local country church; the energetic, high-excitement days of youth group were over.

It was the end of an era.

Our new house was beautiful, as was its setting. During my final two years of high school, I found myself mellowing. The hard line between my school self and my church self softened a bit–I was neither as outgoing at church or as quiet at school. I was a serious, studious, spiritual person everywhere. And deeply lonely, too.

Many evenings after school, my mom and I would watch Oprah together on the couch, eating whatever snacks were available. After the episode ended, I’d remain there and cry while Mom tried to comfort me. Then my sister would join us, and we’d eat dinner in front of the TV while my brother ate in his room. We’d watch till the prime time shows were over, then I would go to my room.

Will I ever be happy? I wondered often, lying on my new solid-pine bed in my new, beautiful bedroom with a window to endless sweet-smelling fields of wheat. Will I ever get married? Will I ever have another group of friends?

Will I ever not be depressed?

I didn’t know. But, lying on that bed, I knew something else: I knew that I would never stop trying. I’d keep being honest with myself, and I’d keep trying.

The problem: it was a very long time till I knew how.

***

“You have to learn to love rejection,” my father told me one day. Were we sitting in front of his fireplace? Was he making me a dirty mug of his signature weak coffee, the kind that frequently contained cat hair?

I looked at him. This wasn’t what I’d expected to hear, yet considering the source–my reclusive, chain-smoking, feral-cat owning father, whose shack of a house was filled with complicated train tracks for model trains–my surprise was mild.

“Everyone thinks you need to have friends to be happy,” Dad added. “But it’s not true. You don’t need anyone. Just be your own man.”

I paused, considering. First of all, Dad, sexist, much? That was my first thought. Then: Maybe he’s right. Rugged individualism had its merits, I knew. And Dad had that special credibility that is often afforded a true eccentric.

It didn’t help that Dad wasn’t the only one exhorting me to remain socially isolated. It was part of the moral superiority package I received from both my parents. My mom was still regularly pulling out her biblical refrain about not casting pearls before swine–not lowering my standards of friendship and instead holding out for someone who was truly righteous.

Was she reassuring me, or herself?

Cognitive dissonance again: I knew she was wrong. And yet … Why did I believe her, anyway?

The larger cultural narrative: friends and family are sort of great. My family’s narrative: We’re loners, and that’s okay.

It was an unhelpful worldview, but a pretty decent defense mechanism, and for a time, it comforted me. Unfortunately, defense mechanisms have a way of outlasting their need, and lack of vulnerability and individualism plagued me for far too many years to come.

In Dad’s smoke-filled living room that day, I wasn’t sure what to believe. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to figure it out. The righteous friend my mom talked about never came.

By default, my parents’ advice won.

***

The spring of my senior year in high school, while driving my mother’s light blue Dodge Caravan to my after-school job as a cashier at Kmart, I had a strange experience. I hated this job. It wasn’t only the boredom–I was used to that at school. It was the boredom combined with the expectation of friendliness and good cheer.

I had no good cheer. My senior year, my tenuous friendships at school had become acquaintenceships, and my best friend, Judith, had moved away for college. And yet, there were my supervisors, wielding their retail-conferred power and reminding me to smile. Though pit-in-your-stomach boredom isn’t generally good for one’s mental health, it can be endured until you’re forced to pretend you’re actually enjoying yourself.

That afternoon in the car, I became aware of a strange sensation. I felt like I wasn’t the person that was driving the car anymore; instead, I was somewhere else, somewhere outside my body. I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t know that it had anything to do with depression. I certainly had never heard the term “dissociation.” I just knew that what I was feeling was horrible, beyond regular sadness, even the kind that was accompanied by heavy sobbing and the feeling that nothing would ever change. It was despair, but it was despair that seemed to be stuck somewhere inside me, unable to get out. It was like watching a child in a room that was locked from the outside as that room slowly filled with water. She was staring back at me, begging me to release her, but her words were muffled and I had no idea what she was asking of me or what to do.

I was a child, too, after all.

Many years later, when I learned that other people have this feeling, too, and that it is a sign of serious clinical depression or trauma-related repression, the experience made sense. At the time, though, I didn’t understand what it was, and I knew no one around me did, either. So, I didn’t tell anyone about it.

Earlier that year, I’d stopped crying with my mom on the couch after Oprah. I’d learned to move my feelings down, stay busy and distract myself. It wasn’t the worst option. I read a lot and made a lot of plans for the future. I worked on being a better Christian. I made a lot of rules for myself. I tried to be perfect. It gave me something to do. I spent the rest of high school just waiting for it to be over. Anyway, I knew that real life—the things that mattered—would start in college.

I was right.

***

Throughout my school years, I made little progress in my quest to overcome my chronic depression. But I make progress of other kinds. I learned how to be honest with myself–self-reflective and thoughtful in my choices. I also developed the identity of a strong, determined person.

Finally, I learned that if I couldn’t feel good, I could, at least, feel hopeful. I could build a foundation for my future that would bolster any happiness to come. I might not be a happy person yet, but I was a strong one.

Maybe that would be enough.

***

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Seneca, paraphrased.

***

Want to learn how to clean your house twice as well in half the time? Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

The following fall, I entered high school. Surprisingly, the first few weeks weren’t too bad. The kids I’d joined for lunch during middle school had become, if not friends, buddies. I never felt fully accepted by them, but we passed the time together. When I think of those kids now, I wish I would have appreciated what I had: They were artistic, unconventional and hella smart. On one level, I knew this; on another, I could only see that they were sinners. Cognitive dissonance is such a bitch.

It wasn’t only confusion about others that bothered me; I couldn’t quite figure myself out, either. At church, I was radiantly confident and perfectly clear where the line lay between right and wrong. At school, I was devastatingly lonely and desperate to fit in, even if that meant swearing once in a while. I often wondered what each of my lives would think about my other life if ever they should meet. They rarely did.

Freshman year passed without major incident. I used plenty of unoriginal coping skills for my depression–boredom food, random crushes, beauty treatments. I also continued to developed a few healthy ones–books, baths and friends. There’s a picture of me holding a mug and resting my Converse All-Stars on Judith’s dining room table, smiling confidently. There were blond streaks in my pony-tailed hair. In the picture, I am pretty, and looking back I realize I was never ugly. It was the confidence, and the smile, that made the difference.

Then, of course, there was the ultimate coping skill: religion. My belief system gave me much-needed hope–but there were strings attached. Church gave me a place to practice being my best, most outgoing self, but it also gave me a … problematic … worldview. I feared the wrath of God if I listened to non-Christian music or had a crush on a boy. I was wracked with guilt over things I hadn’t even done, but just thought or felt. Everything, it seemed, was sinful. Could a more effective tool for exacerbating my puberty-fueled identity crisis be invented?

***

One of the many clashes between my identities came during my Sophomore year when I attended a weekend camp with my youth group. During the lengthy Friday and Saturday night services, amid evocative music and other carefully crafted bonding experiences, the participants were asked to share their sins and repent. I’d always had a tender conscience, and a strong sense of personal responsibility, which is why at the time, repentance was an attractive option. It would cleanse me of my sins, but also demonstrate, publicly, my goodness and humility. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t view the group dynamics or my expected response this way. Instead, I saw my choice to take the microphone in the front of the room and confess to “swearing” as a deeply honest expression of my values. The retreat drew me closer to my church friends while challenging my interactions with the rest of the world: It’s us or them, my community seemed to be telling me. Not surprisingly, I chose my church friends, and by extension, God.

It seemed like the more prudent bet.

The interesting thing about this experience was that, briefly, it worked: For an entire week following the retreat, I felt a deep inner peace. I was blissed out in that way meditators describe sometimes. It felt like being in love, but without all the nerves.

It was the best feeling I’d ever had.

That Monday, I returned to school and life as usual. But something felt a bit off. I didn’t know how to interact with my friends anymore–what would Jesus do, and all that. Noticing my near-silence, one of my friends said, “What’s wrong with you? I haven’t heard you swear once all day.” I shrugged my shoulders and tried to play it off. She didn’t press the issue, and neither did my other friends at the table.

That day, I pondered an existential question: Was my deepened spiritual awareness compatible with my life at high school? I didn’t think so. I was faced with a decision: continue to try to fit in with my school friends, or ditch them for God? I chose the latter, and withdrew from the best school friendships I’d ever had in order to honor my newly minted inner stillness with outer calm.

Anything else would be hypocrisy.

Additional social isolation wouldn’t bother me too much, I figured, as long as I could maintain this spiritual high.

But there was a problem: As the days wore on, the feeling began to recede. I became concerned: How could I hold on to this blissful feeling? Clearly, I’d have to be careful. I would avoid all sin and read the Bible every day. I would repent regularly and maybe even witness about Jesus now and then. But would it be enough?

Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be. I was right.

It didn’t happen right away. But by the end of that year, I had stopped going to dances and spending time with them after school. We still ate lunch together but I sat on the end of the table so I wouldn’t be in the way and I didn’t talk much. 

I was a loner again. 

And I was sick of trying to pretend otherwise.  

***

Though this spiritual experience might have been my most profound to date, religiously inspired euphoria wasn’t new to me. On at least four other occasions, and on several occasions following that weekend retreat, I had briefer significant experiences with the Divine.

Several of these occurred at other Christian retreats. (Those camps. They know what to do.) Maybe it really was God that blessed me with the feelings of peace and love. Or maybe the situations were orchestrated in a way that encouraged belief that such feelings were possible.

Belief is a powerful thing, after all.

These spiritual experiences weren’t problematic in and of themselves–for the most part, they were lovely and life-affirming. It was the interpretations provided to me that increased my already significant feelings of guilt and alienation and decreased my chances of finding my way to mental health.

An example: One weekend, at a prayer retreat I attended with my mom, brother and sister, families were invited to wash each other’s feet, as Jesus had done for his disciples. As I kneeled before my mother, touching her beautifully creased and tanned skin, I burst into spontaneous tears of love. Afterwards, she told me that I now knew true repentance. I hadn’t known true repentance before? I wondered. There are tiers to this? My siblings hadn’t cried that day. Had I surpassed them spiritually?

At another retreat, as my sister and I doodled on sketch pads and otherwise tried to calmly endure the boredom of a long and featureless meeting, my mother turned in our direction, then knelt over her chair to pray. I glanced at her face, and as I did so, I was struck suddenly and hard. The look on her face was one of deep pain.

Immediately, I began to sob, then joined her on the floor. I told her over and over that I was sorry for ever hurting her, and that I loved her. Because I did. I really, really loved my mother, and the experience we shared could have remained pure. Instead, the following day, my mother said this: “Last night, you received the baptism of love.”

In her eyes, I had leveled up. Again.

And so, it will come as no surprise when I say that after the youth retreat that fall, my spiritual identity was further strengthened, and the rules that went along with it, more carefully adhered to. Pray more, sin less. That’s what Godly People Like Me did. It was my new plan for becoming the person I wanted to be, and for feeling better.

From that week on, and through the end of high school, I tried as hard as I could to be a good person. I went to church twice a week. I devoted myself and my future (Christian writer? missionary?) to the betterment of my soul. Nothing is ever simple, and some of the takeaways of my faith were positive; I generally treated others well and didn’t make any seriously detrimental life choices. I maintained a few school friendships, but my efforts towards them were minimal. Virtue would be its own reward.

Wouldn’t it?

***

“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them.” Epictetus.

***

Want to learn how to clean your house twice as well in half the time? Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

My eighth grade year, my sister and I switched schools, joining the kids we would live near when our country house was ready. On my first day, I sat in biology class reading Seventeen magazine with what I hoped was diffidence. I wondered if the new start would make me new, too.

The new school didn’t have recess, but it did have lunch periods and mid-morning breaks. Though I quickly found a table to sit at during lunch–it wasn’t hard to pick the other geeks out from the crowd–the breaks confounded me: how would I pass fifteen minutes inconspicuously? It was a daily struggle. Often, I lingered in the bathroom. Sometimes, I sat by the lockers and pretended to read. Then one day early on in my eighth grade career, after exiting the bathroom, my worst nightmare presented itself: there in the main corridor where our lockers were located, seemingly all of the other kids had formed two rough circles.

I scanned the circles quickly. One contained all of the more popular kids, while the other contained everyone else. Only two girls sat on the bleachers, off to the side: April and April. Best friends. Unpopular, but kind.

I knew that if I joined one of the circles, no one would mind. I also knew that if I joined the two Aprils, they’d probably welcome me.

I didn’t do either, though. The distance between my locker and the other kids was too great. So I looked back at my locker and pretended to look for something. Then I returned to the bathroom.

Maybe they’ll think that I was having my period, I thought. Not surprisingly, this idea was little comfort.

Ten minutes passed. Finally, the bell rang. I had made it through another embarrassing moment.

***

The incident was not an isolated one. Despite improvements in my home life, my depression was worsening. Middle school, for me, was the deepest valley of my sadness, and high school was the beginning of the slow, long climb toward higher ground.

These are hard years for most people, right? The self-consciousness and hormones. The fear of not fitting in. But the harsh combination of loneliness and puberty was not the only contributing factor to my declining mental health.

Genetically, I was likely at a disadvantage. My father’s depression was as much a part of him as his joblessness and alcoholism. Sundays were his drinking day, my mother told me. She also told me of the times he would call her on those days, gun in hand.

Self-esteem, too, was a big part of the problem. I was never particularly pretty and I had no sense of style to balance out my aesthetic shortcomings. Later in life, confidence would become my most attractive feature, but that day was many years away. Our family didn’t have the money to purchase me a new look, either; as I write this over thirty years later, I still have occasional nightmares that I have nothing decent to wear.

I didn’t like my glasses, so I simply didn’t wear them, even though my vision was in the legally blind category. How many years did I spend squinting? When that year I finally got contacts, another blow to my self-esteem came: I discovered what I really looked like.

I’d been doing my makeup all wrong. My hair was even worse. But the really bad news: I just didn’t look good. This realization hurt, but not just because attractiveness is a cultural requirement for female sufficiency. It hurt because of its perceived symbolism. Something was wrong with me–indelibly, intrinsically wrong.

And I was powerless to change it.

***

Years later, during my grad school residency, I entered the school cafeteria to see most of the tables filled. At each, students chatted amiably, bonding over chicken and rice. The only spot left for me seemed to be at an empty table.

An empty table. This again. Would I eat alone, as I had throughout my school years? Though technically, I always sat next to other kids, in every cafeteria in which I ate, my place was at the far end. I was ignored. As a thirty-nine [?] year old woman, I should have known that someone would join me at that empty table. But my reaction to the situation wasn’t logical; it was [word]. A wave of desperate loneliness came over me, a physical memory, and unlike some other waves, it was too high for me to breathe over. After an almost imperceptible pause, I joined the food line, hoping no one would speak to me.

Someone did speak to me. I didn’t reply, though. I shook my head and they seemed to understand. They turned away.

I’m okay. I’ll get through this, I repeated to myself forcibly. No one is looking at me. Just get your food and sit anywhere.

I returned to the empty tale, sat down and stared at my plate. Soon, the dean of the school, an unfailingly kind man, the kind that you trust immediately, joined us. This was too much. After pushing the food around my plate for a few moments, I excused myself and went to the bathroom, bringing my phone with me. I locked the door, sat on the floor and called my husband, David. He’d know what to do.

And, to his everlasting credit, he did. “Yeah, that happens,” he said after I told him about the awkward situation.

I took a few deep breaths. “What should I do?” I asked.

He said, “Just go back in and pretend it never happened.” His tone was respectful but also casual.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You can do this,” he said.

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

When I returned to the table the dean and a fellow student who had joined us were discussing the merits and drawbacks of publicly funded early learning programs. I joined the conversation, disagreeing with the woman who opposed them before learning that the dean had worked closely with one of these programs for years. He and I continued talking long past the time the others excused themselves. Was there a hint of surprise–maybe respect?–in his eyes when he realized that I had fully recovered my composure? I knew that he knew that I had powered through a difficult moment. Still, the force of it shook me.

This wouldn’t be the only time being alone in a crowd would overtake me in that sudden, whole-body way. And most of them didn’t end this well. Even today, I often have to breathe through the first half hour of any social occasion in which I’m surrounded by strangers. Sometimes, just breathing isn’t enough.

***

In summer, I often sleep in a tent in my backyard. I look up at the trees and realize with gratitude that compared to them, I am small. One evening as I lay under the blankets I listened to a comedian describe her experiences with her several serious mental health disorders. In the midst of the expected self-deprecating jokes, she said that depression isn’t normal sadness. Depression is not getting out of bed. It’s genuinely wanting to discontinue living because not only your mind but your physical body hurts so badly. Anything short of that, she said, is just the blues.

I thought, That can’t be right, though. I know that feeling of hurting physically from depression, and I know what it’s like to lose the appetite for living. But most of the time, I want to stay alive. I appreciate what I have and who I am. But also, there’s a sadness that never fully goes away.

I know from my training and work as a therapist that there’s a difference between Major Depressive Disorder, the kind the comedian was describing, and the kind I have, Persistent Depressive Disorder (formerly called Dysthymia). I’m thankful that my depression isn’t a debilitating thing–not anymore, anyway. But having lived with the condition from before my earliest memories till the day I write this–over forty-five years in all–I don’t underestimate its power, its tenacity. Persistent Depression isn’t the fire that burns the house down, leaving you to rebuild once it has flamed out. It’s the water in the basement that you have to siphon out each day, lest it creates cracks in the foundation.

My favorite poem is “The Heavy Bear” by Delmore Schwartz, and I would quote the whole thing here if I could. Since I can’t, I will just say that “The heavy bear who goes with me … Has followed me since the black womb held.” He “Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,” and I don’t quite know who I’d be without him.

Sadness goes with me, but it’s not the kind you feel when the home or person you love is no more. It’s the sadness of yet again entering a cafeteria in which you have no place to sit.

***

Want to learn how to clean your house twice as well in half the time? Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

***

“What can I say? I’m depressed. You gotta do what you gotta do.” This was the first joke I made about my depression. It was also the first time that I self-identified, out loud, as a person with this disorder, and if doing so wasn’t actually a treatment attempt, it was at least one step closer to one.

I made the comment on a Saturday afternoon during the eighth grade after bringing a large stack of Peanuts comic books home from the library. Comics weren’t usually my thing, but recently, I’d branched out. While stacking the books next to the bath, preparing for a bit of escapism, my mother commented good-naturedly on my odd reading selection. Feeling a bit defensive, I spontaneously divulged this painful fact of my inner experience.

For the first time, I told someone I was depressed.

Recalling her reaction now, it seems a bit … inadequate. She laughed. Not a mean laugh, just a shoulder-shrugging kind. And there was something else, too, in her reaction that day. Was it helplessness? Or fear? Maybe, too–yes, definitely–there was relief.

Of course, looking back, I see that she could have done more for me that day than to simply acknowledge and reinforce my acceptance of the pain I was experiencing. Some follow-up, at least, would have been helpful, but alas, this was not to be. Due in part to her spiritual beliefs, and in part to her make-do small-town upbringing, she didn’t believe in counseling or medication; she believed in God’s power to heal, and in our power to believe harder and do better.

Mom wasn’t skilled at confrontation or open dialogue, either–any uncomfortable conversation was almost palpably painful for her. She embarrassed easily and passed on this trait. Which is why I sensed that my newfound ability to joke about my problem brought her some relief.

She wouldn’t have to be the one to say it first.

Her laugh told me something else, too: she already knew what I was going through. How long had she known? Who can say? But one thing is certain: the fact of my depression did not surprise her that day. Only my admission of it did.

So now, I knew that Mom knew I was depressed, and she knew that I knew that she knew. The knowing didn’t help, though; it contained no hint at next steps for either of us. Maybe she talked to a friend.

Maybe she prayed.

I never felt resentment of my mom for her seeming helplessness in this difficult parenting situation, though. During my bath that day, I even noticed some relief of my own. A joke. A joke helped. Note to self: this isn’t a disaster. Mom’s laugh told me that she understood, at least.

And that was something.

***

“Remember that you are an actor in a play, of such a kind as the playwright chooses … If it be his pleasure to have you act a poor man, a cripple, a ruler, a private citizen, play it naturally.” Epictetus.

“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.” William Shakespeare.

***

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