cobwebs in dark corners.

When I was a kid, I would often escape to my bedroom with a book in order to avoid the hullabaloo of my house. In college, I spent half my time surrounded by friends in crowded dorm rooms and off-campus parties, and the other half alone, manically scribbling in my journal in dark booths in coffee shops and on soggy couches in dorm lounges. As someone who craved routine her whole life, was quickly bored, then needed to seek out excitement, while ironically easily overstimulated, I found books and writing helpful ways of balancing my need for both internal reflection and external sources of stimulation.

Growing up the oldest of three with a large, loud Middle Eastern/Slovak extended family, our house was never quiet. My mother was always baking or cooking or running errands to drop off food to a friend, relative, or neighbor. I didn’t realize growing up that a bustling household was my mother’s way of keeping the cobwebs of her memory from darkening her present. The only time I had heard her talk about depression was in the context of her struggle after the death of her father when she was 32.

Although I didn’t recognize my own lows as depression until somewhat recently, I have experienced bouts of it throughout my life. When I was younger, I was mostly fueled by rage, which created the adrenaline I needed to keep fighting to have my needs met. But because I had no idea what I needed, I spent most of my life fumbling in the dark, feeling around for a light switch that could shine the light on what I was looking for. The upside of this approach was that, on the outside, I was game for pretty much anything. My motto was–and still is, for the most part–“I’ll try anything once and most things twice.” Often, I played the poster child for insanity: I kept doing the same things over and over and over again, hoping for a different result each time. On the inside, however, I was a latent volcano of anxiety that bubbled over in fits of rage directed at my siblings, my parents, my partners, and my children. I had been taught that depression and anxiety were things that other people experienced because they were weak, and because we were strong I learned to shove those feelings down into the deep, dark crevices of my psyche. As my feelings intensified, the dark crevices became entire rooms I would find myself trapped in for longer stretches of time.

During the lowest lows, when I was unwilling to unlock the door and step out of the shadows, suicide was never even a glimmer of a thought. I might contemplate suicide in such a way as to wonder how a person’s fear and hopelessness could be so strong as to overcome the abject terror I had of no longer being. This, I suppose, is the critical difference between a suicidal brain and a non-suicidal one. No matter how much I hated my present life, my hatred was a passion–a frustration with the way things were and a consuming desire for them to be different, not over. During these times, I would imagine packing a bag and running away, disappearing from everyone’s lives, abandoning what wasn’t working and reappearing somewhere else. As if adopting a new identity in a new place would be a respite from everything that wasn’t working for me. For so long, I deluded myself in thinking that the problem was with where I was, not who I was. The problem was with everyone presently in my life, not the way I was showing up with the people in my life. As if I could hit the road and find some magical place, a community filled with like-minded people where I would stop feeling so misplaced in my own reality.

The imaginary places I might go in my mind had always been a great way to escape. When I could write, I wrote abstractly and concretely. I wrote realistic fiction and fictional reality. I mixed genres and characters, weaving myself and my family and friends into imagined selves and projections of people I hardly knew. During the lows, I wrote prolifically; when I was high, I was too busy to write and too manic to want or need to process or question my choices.

And then the ink dried up. The computer screen froze. My mind became a blank slate. Unable to imagine an alternate reality or daydream about the future, I was suddenly shuffling numbly through each day. My journal languished in my bag, where it lived for a month, then two, then three.

The sneakiest character trait of my depression is the way it lurks. It taunts me, luring me with cozy blankets and binge-worthy television. It flirts by offering endless reels to scroll, word games to play, and social media content posted by people I know and minor celebrities I’ve never met. As someone who runs on adrenaline until the tank is empty and I need to pull over to refuel, taken out for days by chronic migraines or a flare-up of fibromyalgia, I’ve become accustomed to giving in instead of fighting through the pain. But the slope is slippery between restfulness and depression for me. This time, I thought I had a foothold. I knew I was depressed and I was vocal about it. After several weeks of malaise, I told my partner I needed help. A month in, I began reaching out to my sisters, my mother, and my friends to try to explain how far gone I was. I kept texting friends to tell them I needed distraction but wasn’t ready for it yet. I begged them to stay in touch even as I felt myself sliding farther and farther down the slope. If anyone threw me a rope, I couldn’t–or didn’t want to–see it.

Unable to escape through imagination or anger or frustration, I found myself completely trapped in a dark room, unable to remember where I’d left the key. This time, it wasn’t so much that I was unwilling to unlock the door, but that I didn’t have the resources to do it.I couldn’t see anything clearly, and without the ability to write, I wasn’t able to get clarity either. So I wallowed for weeks, then months, becoming more and more numb. The longer I wallowed, the less I cared. Even fear–the last barrier between living and letting go–was gone. I knew I needed professional help, but I didn’t know whether to call a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and given the mental health crisis that Covid created, I figured I wouldn’t be able to find either available. I wanted to be like Holden Caulfield and go somewhere to “rest up” for a bit. I didn’t have the energy to even imagine packing up and moving out west somewhere to start over. I just wanted a break from what felt like the hamster wheel of life. I wanted to quit the responsibilities that came along with being a parent, an educator, a partner. I began wishing for a critical illness that would require hospital beds and pain killers and the complete relinquishment of control.

I suppose that’s why the only two entries I wrote in my journal during this time were about a desperate desire to run back to my ex, to be the person I thought I used to be, to live the life I used to have. Without the bandwidth to imagine the future, I could only return to the past. To my younger, feistier, less self-aware self. Because self-awareness had failed me, because communication that had once been impossible was nevertheless incapable of finding someone to break down the door to the room I had locked myself in, I yearned for the ignorance I once had. I wanted to return to the false bliss that blinded me from reality and allowed me to move through my life with a cavalier sense of adventure without a care for consequences.

Fortunately and unfortunately for me, my partner, in a desperate attempt to figure out where I’d gone and how to get me back, read what I wrote. After weeks of interrogation about my emotional absence that I was in no place to engage in, she finally admitted what she had done. The shock of her invasion of my privacy and breech of trust jolted me back to life, forcing me to reach out to an old friend and former therapist, who in no more than two sessions was able to help me gain the much-needed perspective I had been unable to find.

What she was able to help me remember was the importance of allowing myself to think all of the thoughts that lingered like cobwebs rather than shuddering away from them in disgust. Of embracing the dust and dirt and messiness of the room in which I had retreated. She reminded me to bring a damn book with me, so that when my own imagination failed me I could enjoy the imagination that others had been generous enough to put into words and begin to find my own words again. As she reminded me, journaling was my therapy when I wasn’t in therapy. Journaling was the light switch that would help me find the key, so that I could unlock the door when I was ready to come out instead of barricading it from the inside while simultaneously expecting someone to break it down. This latest experience has helped me to understand what Virginia Woolf meant by a “room of one’s own.” It is in this room that I can find the precarious balance between recharging and combusting. To remind myself that rest is as productive as exertion. To acknowledge that while a body in motion may stay in motion, a soul needs no corporeal action in order to be fulfilled.