A Beautiful Thing Will Grow Out of This Very Hard Thing

Sometimes beautiful things live inside the very hardest of things.



Yesterday, for the first time in a very long while, I ventured outside alone to go to the corner store. I wanted to see if it was open so that I could buy something cheap and sweet, but the store was closed. It was only a short block I had to walk to get there, but I felt so exposed, so far from my nest of safety, that my collar bones ached with the tightness in my throat and chest.

I am sometimes afraid to leave my home.



This fear happens when I am shifting, when I am changing my patterns of thought or behaviour. I panic, and my panic turns inward, where I question all the good of which I am capable. I have spent a week sure that I cannot write or make or do valuable things, that my faultiness far outweighs my abilities.

This insecurity is usually followed by the hatred of my own appearance, and this week was no exception. I became convinced that my own appearance was so terrible, so below acceptable standards, that I did not want to be seen by strangers who did not already love me.

"I can't go out," I sometimes say. "Strangers will see my face, and I can't have that."



I came home from my harrowing trip to the corner store with that familiar burn of shame running up the back of my neck while I tried to catch my breath, and I immediately asked the Palinode to come for another, slightly longer walk with me. I knew that my well-being depended on killing this thing in the moment.

I know my mind. If I let leaving be so terrible that it scares me back, and then rest into my safe spot on the couch again, I will more deeply train a pathway in my brain that confirms the messages that Leaving Is Bad and Staying Is Good. I imagined myself in the future on a talk show saying "I don't know how it happened, but one day I just stopped leaving, and now it's been 17 years since I walked out my front door."



The Palinode and I walked to another drugstore further away, and as we chatted about things like whether grease is wet or dry¹ and what the actual elements of moisture are, my chest loosened. The stuck feeling in my throat eased up.

That pathway in my brain, one that could have so easily become a deeper groove, unkinked itself a little bit. I bought myself some more time with freedom.



I haven't said much about my depression, anxiety, or addiction issues over recent months. As much as I've written about them before and talked about them in front of audiences across two countries, I am afraid to write about them here.

I am afraid that no one will believe me anymore that shame can be used to see rather than punish yourself, that your courage is bigger than you know, and that fear is surmountable. I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to stay on this path I have fought so hard to find and bushwhack my way through. I am afraid that people will second-guess hiring me, thinking that I am not up to the job.

Part of my job on this earth, though, and I deeply hold this to be true, is to be very publicly human.

I do have the strength, though. We all do. This is a bones deep knowledge I can't shake.

I'm just experiencing retreat after battle, or, as Brené Brown calls it in I Thought It Was Just Me, a "vulnerability hangover". You shouldn't trust someone who hasn't lived their subject, and so I'm treating this phase of change as intensive study. I'm diving in.

In the end, Ghandi said it most succinctly²:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

This course I take repeatedly through anxiety, depression, and the hard work of sobriety is difficult and terrible at times, but the most beautiful parts of my whole life grow out of the soil it helps me to turn over.

Fear is gripping, but love and belief birth hope, growing capital-c Courage larger than the self.

And, so, a beautiful thing will grow out of this very hard thing, and you will not see me on a show in 17 years wondering why I never left my home again in all that time. This, I can promise you.

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<sup>1. It turns out that grease is a non-Newtonian fluid that can be both wet and dry. Thanks goes to brainiac @jannymarie for the information. ↩

2. This paragraph is often paraphrased as "be the change you want to see in the world", which is an unverified misquote that Ghandi never actually said, because he didn't speak Bumper Sticker. ↩</sup>

David, Suicide, and We Are Still Here

An old friend of mine committed suicide last week.



I can't even properly tell you about that grief yet. I have lost family and friends before to age, infirmity, and addiction, but losing David to suicide has opened up a new kind of grief for me, a grief that piggybacks on older griefs, and grief that digs down into my own history with suicide and its place in my life.

My grief for David is also a grief for me, and while it feels selfish, and I am embarrassed to state it here, it is true, and it is necessary to this story. I have a long history with depression and suicidal thoughts, and, at 40 years old, my history with it is now 32 years long. I am so enormously glad that I am here to tell you that.

The first time that I nearly attempted it, I was eight years old. I sat on my parents' kitchen floor in the middle of the night with a knife, turning it over and over. I've been told that I could not have seriously meant such a thing at eight years old, but I did. Life was already too painful for me to bear, and I had no faith in happiness. Thankfully, my knee-jerk fear of failure and parental disappointment saved me that night.

That night in 1981 was followed by a hundred others, dotted over the last more than three decades. I've been medicated with psychiatric drugs, I've been offered electroshock therapy, I became an alcoholic. I saw psychiatrists and therapists and religious leaders. A deeply Christian woman once laid hands on my head to pull out my demons. I didn't have her faith, but I thought anything was worth trying once. I have foundered, I have fallen, I have gotten back up. Sometimes I find my way back to equilibrium, sometimes I grip the edge of it and hang on.

At no time over the last 32 years have I considered suicide out of weakness. Not once. I have considered it because the weight I bore was simply too much. My will to survive and my battles to do so, while unseen wars, have been powerful proof to me of what human strength I possess, and when I think of David's suicide and the battle that he must have fought within his heart and mind, I do not see a weak man or a failed man. He and I have both fought hard, and I am proud to have known him.

I do so very much wish, though, that David could still be here, that his war could look like mine does right now. It can't now, though, and my mind refuses to understand that there is no more David to be here. I was sure that I saw him on the street and in shops today. There's David's hat! I would think, and then the man in question would turn, and it was no longer David's hat. I wept in the back of Vietnamese café and wished him well.

I am telling you all of this, because, if you struggle with suicidal thoughts, I want you to know that you are loved. I want you to know that depression lies, that it narrows down and filters your view into a dark space that does not reflect true reality. I want you to talk about it and reach out and seek help until you find the idea/person/therapy that helps you remove the dark filter of hopelessness. I want you to know that I have fought this beast off more times than I can recall to document, and I am still here.

I want you to be able to say I am still here, because it is so very good to be here on the other side of that dark period.

There is a David-shaped hole in the universe, and I cannot take it. I simply cannot, and if I can help just one person find a way through, I've done my job, because I don't want anyone to have to touch this flavour of grief. Please check out the following resources for both prevention and reaching out:

Canada

Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention
Find a Crisis Centre (Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention)
Preventing Suicide (Canadian Mental Health Association)
National Resources

United States

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
Suicide in the U.S.: Statistics and Prevention
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
United States National Suicide & Crisis Hotlines

International

International World-Wide Suicide & Crisis Hotlines

Please use the above resources if you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or you are worried that someone you know is experiencing them, and check in with those you love who might be suffering.

We need all of you to stay with us, all of you, and I want you to be able to stand with me and say We are still here.

We are still here.

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David's brother sang "Nature Boy" for him at the memorial, so this one's for him:

You and Lucy and Me Make Three

This is me in the glow of my new full-spectrum light lamp to try to help combat my seasonal depression:


Please overlook whatever is going on with my eyebrow up there.

I first remember feeling depressed as young as the age of three — I have good recall of my early childhood — and the depression always deepens with bonus anxiety throughout the winter. Or at least it used to be only in winter. Now my season depression starts in September and carries right on through to May. I panic sometimes that what was once seasonal might just stretch out over the whole year eventually.

I take vitamins B12 and D3, St. John's wort, valerian root for better sleep, and Rescue Remedy to quel anxiety. I limit my coffee intake and try to eat decently. I run a gratitude community to keep me mindful of good things. I work at this every day. Some days, it feels like unpaid labour with an unrelenting boss who won't let me take a vacation. Other days, I just haul my laptop into bed with me, avoid world news, and try to give myself space to breathe without heaping on shame and guilt for not being the glossy picture of profiled success.



I know that a lot of you also struggle with seasonal anxiety and depression, and I thought about you this morning while I snuggled up to my new light for the first time. I thought about how I am not alone and how there are things I am doing and can still do that will help me not only get through but maybe even overcome some of seasonal depression's worst effects. I thought about how good that light felt even on this first morning.

I'm thinking of naming her Lucy.

You and Lucy and me make three, baby. We may still have a way to go, but we're getting there.