Note: This newsletter addresses depression and anxiety. If you are struggling, you are not alone. Find resources here.
I am laying on the floor. I find solidity comforting, gravity a crucial promise tethering me to reality. Which reality remains to be seen. At any second I fear my skin will split, spilling shadows that will stain the rug. But then it will be over. When I dream of walking into the woods, driving toward the horizon, stepping into traffic…I know I’ve crashed through my threshold.
Lying on the floor, I wonder what is wrong with me? Some sort of chemical imbalance? But where and which sort? I want to call someone, but who? Once I texted a crisis hotline. The first thing they ask is if you are at risk of hurting yourself or someone else. It’s a loaded question. Like this second? The one that came before or the one that is to come? Aren’t we all at risk of hurting someone or something at some point?
For the first time in a month, I leave the house for more than a couple of hours to have a rabbit tattooed on my left forearm. As the needles buzz the artist casually mentions having anxiety and depression. Her mentor says, Me too, and I almost chime in but we’ve already connected over hysterectomies and blood clots and woefully high tolerances for pain and I don’t want to seem too eager to be one of the gals. I think about this long after my arm has been wrapped in plastic. Our shared maladies are pervasive.
I want to reach out, to ask someone to come sit me, keep me company. Loneliness is a stone pressing my heart, restricting breath. I can’t think of anyone to text. I imagine them all busy, living full, productive, happy lives. Do we all tell ourselves this same story? I can’t bother them. Not with this. There is nothing unique about my problems. I am so blessed with so much. What right do I even have to feel this way? I circle back to brain chemistry, ponder the uninterrupted mycelium of depression creeping through my familial line. Maybe yours, too?
I practice yoga. I draw. I go for a drive to take in the watercolor hues of winter skies. I feel a little better but winter’s bleakness is woven into the fabric of this feeling I cannot escape. The mud, the gray, the cold, trudging in and out for hours daily with the puppy. We’re in the doldrums, he says, his hand on my hip as I sob into a pillow. I can’t stop crying. It terrifies me. I google this phrase and learn all about the functions of tears, the reasons people cry, and why some of us are prone to tipping headlong into this human form expression. On average women cry emotional tears 30-64 times a year, while men cry 5-17. I feel a little less freakish after this research. My body is shedding cortisol, running a course set by nature.
So I press on as we all do. I am wintering in a world determined to defy natural order. Maybe you are too. Is it any wonder that our cells revolt?
On a gray afternoon, as the dread of passing endless hours of another solitary evening begins to set in, a text chimes across the room. An offer of dinner and company. These friends have no idea that they have just cast a lifeline into my dark waters. We haven’t spoken in months, evidence of our overly busy lives. They’ve crossed my mind as someone to text but did not, and now here they are, standing in my kitchen with bags of warm food and welcoming smiles and firm hugs.
We eat. We talk. We laugh. We share stories of our lives. My friends ask me how I’ve been. I find myself saying words like isolated (home), exhausted (work), hyper-vigilant (puppy), overwhelmed (life), and they nod in understanding. Me too, me too. This exchange is more nourishing than the meal shared across my table. Our conversation stretches into the night and the hours do not feel endless. Each word-filled moment taps at the stone pressing my heart, chiseling away at the bulk until a piece of it splits and crumbles. I breathe a little easier.
The following morning I meet friends for brunch. Again, hearts zipper open, just enough to release the steam. Me too, me too. I see work colleagues days later and we talk about Taylor Swift, the Grammys, difficult dogs, and the upcoming election. Someone apologizes for talking too much and I say it’s just nice to talk to someone. On a Friday I sit down with a fellow artist and the conversation is warm over eggs and buttered bread, and the stories we share fortify the protective cloth these connections have been weaving, a net beneath the cracking stone.
When I climb into bed one night, I notice that my heart feels satiated, warm, akin to the sensation in my belly. I haven’t felt this way in weeks, not since Christmas when my little family hunkered down in the beautiful quiet of a commitment-free week. Then January 2nd came, like a shot, and ever since life has been a race, running on a treadmill without controls. Fast, faster. Busy, busier. Even when we aren’t busy we’re busy. Me too! Me too! Screens of all sizes transmit requests, reminding us of all there is to do, along with physical environments, the needs of our families, the crumbling world, and our frequent inability to make positive impact on global tragedy. Our work is never done and it can feel like no life space is truly free or quiet or without some measure of demand. We are charged at every turn and the currency is sanity, peace, and rest.
Hellebore blooms in winter. Victorians thought this poisonous buttercup to be symbolic of delirium, anxiety, slander, and scandal, though modern florographers have embraced softer meanings of peace, tranquility, the ability to overcome in the face of defamation and disgrace. All parts of the plant are toxic, rendering it safe from wildlife grazing in shaded gardens, but the plant has a long history, in medicine and folklore, of putting its narcotic properties to use. In some versions of Greek myth, the daughters of Melampus, who were divinely inflicted with madness by Dionysus, were treated with hellebore-laced goat milk to cure their hysteria. Evidence exists that the roots of the Black Hellebore were used to increase menstrual flow and induce abortion in the Middle Ages, to treat melancholia, mania, dropsy, skin disorders, and was a purgative for any number of ailments. In stories and traditions the flower is known as the Christmas Rose, Lenten Rose, Oracle Rose, and others, all in association with the winter timing of its blooms. Hellebores are early risers of spring.
Anxiety stems from the need to control the uncontrollable. We worry over what might happen and how can we exert control over all those mights. We spend so many of our cognitive resources in the past and future, we overlook the serene beauty blooming in the present. Is it any wonder we are cast into delirium and depression, that we find ourselves lost in the noise of curated scrolling, double and triple-booked calendars, ceaseless digital demands?
Perhaps the anecdote is as simple as good conversation over a glass of wine. A warm hug to loosen the despair. Laughter to remind us that soon the hellebores will bloom, even if their colors are beneath the snow or obscured by the detritus of the forest floor or mulched garden beds.
My battle isn’t over and I suspect yours goes on as well, but we are not as alone as we feel ourselves to be. We are connected. By tears and laughter, by the breaking of bread, a hand on a hip, even the chime across the room lighting up a tiny screen. We are social creatures, even those of us that recharge in solitude, that love spending time alone with just our dogs. We all need companionship to thrive.
Send the text. Make the call. You just might save a heart while saving your own.
Dear friends, thank you for reading. I wrote this a few weeks ago, choosing to sit with these words as I struggled to find a ray of light, which I have and always do (sometimes it just takes a little longer). The day I’m writing this postscript would have been my brother’s 39th birthday. I googled him and found his obituary, which I wrote on the plane ride to Texas for his memorial just days before the pandemic was declared. He still feels so real to me, as though he’d answer if I called. He struggled with many mental illnesses, depression being just one. It’s a sickness of the heart as well as the mind, tricking us into believing we are alone when we are infinitely connected. I think that’s why I still feel him. I forget this sometimes, but I am deeply thankful that I always, one way or another, remember. I hope you do, too. Never forget: you are loved.