Sad

For a few years in the middle of my life I felt a little sad.

I think the clinical term was ‘mild depression, anxiety and burnout’. Dr Y gave me a little white pill called Zoloft - it sat in my drawer and I looked at it every day, pondering if this was the path I was going to take. It was like a white little troll that sniggered at me daily, saying ‘See, just give up, you stupid stupid b*&^h’.

I read some books that gave me an understanding and words for the feelings that I didn’t have the words for. Words like:

"Never real and always true," (Antonin Artaud for describing how depression feels)

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life.” (Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon).

"I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep...Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass." (May Sarton - A Journal of Solitude)

Their articulation gave me clarification. Their atlas made my journey easier; that the obstacle was the way, that these dark nights of the soul were called for the important transformation/transmutation/reckoning.

During those days my children saved me.

Because I had children, I had to at least pretend and try at ‘normalcy’. I’m sure otherwise I would have just locked myself up in a room, cried and never gotten changed, felt helpless about me and the world. It was a looking glass - where I could see the sun and light, children laughing, us eating ice cream, me speaking with the galvanise and pretend knowing - yet all a façade, I felt hollow, empty, void of emotions. All the time.

For two years I couldn’t look in a mirror - too afraid to see what I feared - the shell of a ‘put together person’. It was also this time, I grew a business, won accolades and got into an Ivy school.

The internal and external mismatched like a bad arranged marriage.

I felt like I was breaking apart at the seams, thread by thread, and if I took too many breaths, I might break it with air.

Some experiences are too hard to write about in the moment, only in retrospect do they make sense. This is one of them.

It passed. From beginning to 'end', when I could truly feel the light and the brightness again, it took about 4 years. The weight and grey slid off, layer by layer like old skin, and I wasn't reborn so much, but wrinkled, battered, worn-out but alive and vital again.

May Sarton writes "At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft that implies a new way of looking at the universe." She was talking about Love; I learnt the language of doom and gloom. A way to see the world through

saddness.

Whenever I now despair or moments where I feel that heavy doom - I breathe and calmly say, “What are you trying to show or say to me”, rather than hide or run the other way, or worse, push against it showing - I'm better than that.

I am not.

I am not stronger than my pains and sorrow, traumas and sadness - these parts are all a part of me - beautiful, vital in every single way.

I feel blessed that I can write these words now without collapsing - into a pile of mess - a pile of perfection - just being and accepting that this is here, here is now and now is where I am.