43

For reference: 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, and 30. 

*

There’s a Care Bear in my chest, jumping up and down on the things he doesn’t want me to feel: depression, anger, grief. He tamps those feelings into the safest, bottomest corner of my heart. Except that safe little corner he’s been shoving things into is actually a deep geyser. 

*

Life without Prozac slid from this isn’t so bad to spiritual emergency swiftly. 

I jittered out of bed, instantly overstimulated to irritability and leaving me constantly recactive. My window of tolerance slivered. Irksome people became intolerable. Lovely people grated me within seconds. I became intolerable. 

The geyser blew, spraying every emotion my Care Bear had shoved into it through me. 

*

It’s hard to revisit that pain. Anxiety and depression fueling each other, stacking panic attacks and sobbing fits one right after another for hours on end.  Everything was oppressive. The sun. My house. My bed. And all this emotional pain physically hurt, like my insides were being scraped out with huge talons that scratched against the back of my skin while I hurtled through space and time.

Days stretched. Every minute was pain so excruciating it almost felt exquisite. I was inconsolable. 

Later, I’d call this trapped, warped, months-long experience the sarcophagus of emotion. 

*

A week into restarting my medication, I entered a nauseated nightmare so unrelenting and treatment resistant that over the course of a month, I lost ten pounds and my doctor gently prodded me to take a pregnancy test “just in case.”

*

Remember a time you felt better, my doctors said. The only way out is through. 

An old friend invited me to stay with his family. I carried my “disco ball of hydration” and a small carnelian stone with me from room to room, crying. 

Being a guest gave me purpose. I inserted myself into chores, washing dishes and putting the chickens away. I cried on the couch. I cried at the dining room table. I cried (quite violently) on the floor. The household’s teens sometimes emerged from their rooms and grunted at me while I cried. But their normalcy anchored me (and the fact that they’d pat me on the back and keep moving through their day). 

*

The nausea let up, but the depression did not. Each day was something to get through. The future didn’t exist. It was just me in the here and now. And I really didn’t want to be me anymore. 

All I wanted was to feel like I used to. Like the old me. But trying to find that person felt like climbing a wall of quicksand. I clawed at it, clambering, only to have no grip and fall ungracefully back to an ever dropping bottom. 

I wish I was different, I said over and over to my therapist. 

But you’re not, she’d reply. 

My therapist wanted me to stay with myself—in other words, to not abandon myself, subjugate myself, flagellate myself, or try to place anyone else’s experience above my own. I hated attempting this. 

What if I could just be different? I’d push. 

What would being different look like? she’d ask. How would that play out?

Everytime, I came to the same conclusion: it wouldn’t play out well for me. I’d tried to be that person. I’d tried so fucking hard. It was the “me” I kept wanting to go back to. And all of that trying had landed me here. Which wasn’t you know…awesome. 

And that’s the whole jig. That’s the laugh. There is no going back. There never was. 

*

A lot of anger and grief later, I accepted the idea of going forward. The idea that I would, I will, truly never be the same. I’m irrevocably different. Instead of hating trying to stay with myself, I surrendered to the idea that I just needed to figure out how to do it. 

I said goodbye to the old me. Where I was going, she couldn’t come. 

*

Where I went eventually led me to Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the only curriculum that’s ever been able to successfully teach me mindfulness. I learned practical skills for distress tolerance and emotional regulation, and eventually, the skills gave me a long sought-after map for how to slow down, experience myself, and thus practice being with myself. 

 I can finally say I feel noticeably better, I said to my doctor in March. 

What do you think caused the change? she asked with genuine curiosity. 

I thought about the 100+ therapy sessions. The ketamine treatments. Walks. Acupuncture. People who asked questions and genuinely listened to the answers. Laughing with my friends. Swimming at midnight during a rainstorm in Costa Rica. Coaching sessions. The patience of my care team. All the times I thought You’ve got to be kidding me, when someone told me to remember a time I felt better. The Care Bear, who has a new job accompanying depression and anger and grief to my wisest self, letting them know they’re welcome here. 

I think it was a little bit of everything.

*

I’m laughing as I wrap this up, because somehow, through literally the hardest fucking year imaginable, there was still a piece of me who insisted I live anyway. Who wouldn’t allow the entire year to pass me by without memories to show for it. Because of her, if you’ve ever thought, Man I’ve always wanted to see Alicia perform a Dropkick Murphy’s song, now is your chance; I made new friends; I learned some pottery and some woodworking and some rhythm guitar; I had a crush; I volunteered with Words in the Wild (donate a few dollars if you’re so inclined); I swapped silly texts; I went to see Phish, drank tea at Lake Louise, taught my nephew to scream into a pillow, and traded outfit pics with a few friends (curious? You can see all my outfits here).

If a younger version of me walked through the door, she’d be delighted by Maizie—and I hope she’d be satisfied with the pictures in the scrapbooks and the journals filled to the brim with tales of a life lived. Mostly, I hope she’d understand by looking at the sensational humans in her life that even though it doesn’t look the way she thought it would, she is loved.

*

Feeling it all, so hard and so deeply, was wretched. But I can’t say it wasn’t worth it.