Learning to breathe out of water
“It’s these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder
Yeah, yeah, we were altogether
Lost in our little lives
Oh, but sweetness follows””
When I was 35 I fell (or rather, was flung) off of a tube tied to a swiftly moving boat cutting through the waters of Lake Marion. I sort of remember my nervousness while hopping from boat to tube, the speed of the boat, and the sound of the tube bouncing off of the waves. I remember that last huge bump as the tube hit an air pocket, and the sudden, harsh silence as I was submerged in the water. What stands out to me, is that silence. The world is reduced to you in this space, alone, trying to remember who you are, where you are, and the events that lead you here. For a second your identity disappears, and you’re floating in slow motion until your brain wakes up and your body remembers that it already knows how to save you, and you float. It seems like you’re floating through molasses, and the surface seems so far away, but you float, and you break through the surface, and time resumes it’s natural pace. You emerge and you doubt yourself again, because you’ve already accepted that you can only exist in the stillness of the water, and you fall under again. But this time you have hands reaching to pull you out to keep you from submitting to the depths again. Though you are finally free, you’re sputtering, coughing, confused, and embarrassed at having struggled at all. Eventually you just breathe, and you wonder if breathing has ever felt this good, and tasted so sweet.
Living with depression and anxiety means always bracing yourself for that sudden submersion into the waters of your own emotion and finding yourself drowning in your own body. While you know that you don’t belong there, you allow yourself to linger there, for it’s so much calmer here, and the voices in your head are silenced, and you feel peace. That peace is false. False Peace feels good for the moment, and can be destructive in the long term. Peace doesn’t require you to drown in order to feel it. There is work in figuring out when to kick, or simply float out of that space. In order to live, to thrive, to breathe in the sweetness, and even the sourness, for that is what true life is, you have to ascend, any way you can. Even if you don’t want to.
My life is built by those moments. I spend my life alternatively chasing and deflecting the sweetness that follows those moments of dark stillness since I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression almost 15 years ago. I have experienced days where all I can physically do is to sleep for hours, only waking to use the bathroom. I’ve had moments of absolute paralysis, during which I don’t know what to do, because every option feels like I’ll fall off of the edge, and times where ideation is so strong that everything I see points to another way to die. These are the moments where I’ve been plunged so deep into my own darkness that I can’t conceive of another plane. I live here now, I want this numbness. Feeling is too hard, too painful, too much. I just want it all to stop. And that is the danger zone, the edge, the decision point. My heart is an unwilling captive, screaming at me to wake up, to save myself, to float and free myself from this false peace . When all seems to be shut down, and the light is flickering, my heart refuses to stop. My heart isn’t alone in this. The people I love, and who love me, are reaching for me from the surface. They don’t wait for me to wake up, they are pulling me, grasping at my arms as my mind slips below the surface again and again, until I’m out, and laying in a crying, shivering - but breathing pile. I’m safe, I’ve made it again.
While the plunge leaves it’s own mental scars, I know to expect them. What I don’t know how to deal with, however, is the guilt and embarrassment that comes after I resurface. Is this when my friends will through up their hands and say, “Enough!”? Will the guy I have a crush on find out, and think that this whole bunch of crazy isn’t worth it? Will my job find a way to get rid of me? Am I just being dramatic, did my subconscious just need attention, and know how to get it? I’m too old to be carrying on this way. I need to stop burdening people with my issues. I need to stop telling people my business. No one likes a SAD GIRL.
I don’t know how to stop those aftershocks. I still think that there will be a day where I will be alone in this, that I’ve chased everyone who matters away from my illness. I’m working to get rid of those thoughts, but it is really, really, really hard. But I do my best to have hope, to remember that a life lived has both Sweetness and Sadness, Joy and Thunder. Those things are a part of me, they adjust to varying percentages day to day, and I never know what that ratio is going to be, but I always live through it, and those who love me are always there to love me through the whole spectrum of who I am. I will always have days when my mind wants to give up, but I have a stubborn, annoying heart that will exhaust itself to keep me going. I learn to float again. On the other side of Thunder, Joy will always ring true. You just have to let yourself believe that.
