Calling It Out

You know, I almost don’t want to put a label on it.

I can almost look away from the reoccurring pattern of moods or emotions or chemical states of the brain that crop up month after month, season after season, not so predictable as clockwork but like a reliable weed growth in the front garden. It doesn’t look so bad, you know, not when there are all the other flowers and bushes and shrubs to balance out the unwanted undergrowth, but this garden is my life and I am the soil feeding these growing things and more and more of the nutrients, the good things, the strength in me are being sucked into these invasive thoughts and feelings that do not build up, but only tear down. It doesn’t really matter how much rain or sun I catch when the drops and sunbeams fall equally on the good and the bad in me. But I don’t want to call the weeds depression. That would spoil the metaphor with assumptions and pity and cures.

I can almost ignore the racing, bounding thoughts that take over my mind, completely unbidden, when I need to leave the apartment to go shopping or go talk to someone new or wait on a reply to an email or a message or a text. I can almost entirely push away the quickly branching train of thought that seeks to detail every potential disaster and trace all possible futures to their most dramatic ending, derailing it before my mind gets its hooks into it and carries all the rest of me along with it. I can usually find some reasonable explanation for the bouncing feet, the twisting of rings, the repeated gouging of my scalp, and the clenching of my jaw when I try to stop any of those things. But I don’t really want to say that any of those things are symptoms of anxiety. The solution for that particular problem surely means slowing my thoughts down all the time and even if the side effects suck from time to time, I like my mile-a-minute brain. It gets stuff done.

I can almost always walk away from the snide and weepy voice commenting on my body that’s become a permanent fixture of my mental landscape. It only occasionally comes out in conversations with friends, in moments of weakness when I don’t want to be fishing for a compliment or laying this particular bit of brokenness out in front of people but it slips out anyway, like the truth behind poorly-constructed lie. I know I haven’t had as much practice at silencing it as other women have, mostly because I was oblivious to these head games in middle school and high school and probably college when you were supposed to be noticing your body and other people’s bodies. I read a lot instead. The voice has emerged with a vengeance, though, racing through the weeds like some tiny troll, reminding me that I always knew I was ugly and that’s why no one ever looked at me, that I’ve always been and always will be too fat to be attractive to anyone, that no matter how much makeup I wear or how many better-fitting clothes I buy or hairstyles I try, there’s no covering up how truly terrible I look, and even if there was, there’s no fixing the fundamental brokenness of the part of me that makes me worth something. But I don’t want to call these lies body image issues because surely body image issues are much more significant than this low-boiling desire to break every mirror around me and scratch up every screen so that I never have to think about my reflection again.

Besides, body image problems are for those other people, the girls who genuinely are pretty and just don’t know how beautiful they are or the guys who are plenty strong enough and misunderstand the importance of the muscle they have. They’re problems for the people who have been robbed of their confidence by the unkindness of others (or of society in general) or those who place a too-high premium on appearance because no one else has exactly told them where else their value could lie. I have no reason to have body image issues, so I must not have them.

And depression and anxiety, those are conditions for artists and actors and people with the money for therapy and Xanax. Who am I kidding with all these descriptions of how I feel? They’re probably just stolen from some book I forgot I read or song I forgot I listened to, written by somebody who has actual problems, not just some casual sadness or occasional frightened thought. That’s the great thing about mental health awareness month—deep, heartfelt descriptions of genuine struggles are only a click and a share away and they’re often written with such pathos that it’s nearly impossible not to empathize. I've never been to talk to a mental healthcare provider, but more than likely they'd be able to see that my “depression,” if you want to call it that, was lifted from a spoken word video on youtube or a twitter thread by someone who’s wrestled extensively with these very real demons. My battle to get out of bed some mornings or some… Saturdays must be fabrication on my part, an excuse to be lazy. We all know how much I like to be lazy.

Except.

Except all those artists and actors and authors, those people who use their platforms to open up about what they’re going through, they all keep on telling me that depression lies. Depression tells me how unloved and worthless I am and how things are never going to get better. Depression tells me that my friends are only here because they pity me and that my family doesn’t want to put up with my bullshit. Depression tells me that I certainly can’t talk about any of this because if people knew how small and pathetic I really am, they’d hate me even more than they already do. They’d know for sure what a dumb disappointment I turned out to be, how weak I’ve always been. They’d look at me and see the waste of potential and space and oxygen I embody. That’s really where depression gets its punches in, in the blatant lies that still manage to have a hint of truth: I might not be a waste of breath, but I do waste my potential sometimes. I could always do more. Why don’t I do more?

A couple thousand years ago, Jesus went up to a man sitting by a pool and asked him if he wanted to be well. If I had been that man, I too would have avoided the question and explained to Jesus that I wasn’t well because of all the things happening around me. Jesus would have to sit down beside me and say, “I didn’t ask about them. I asked about you. Do you want to be well?” And I would have to think about that. Because I might look like the man by the pool, but I feel like the man among the tombs, the one who screamed and scratched and broke every chain meant to keep him safe from himself, the one whose demons called themselves Legion. I don’t need Jesus to ask me a bunch of questions and to try to pull a desire for wellness from me. I need him to act. Lord, can’t you see how I bleed? Don’t you know how little control I have over the things that writhe inside me? I can’t seek you out in a crowd, can’t even grasp at the hem of your robe. I need you to find me, to search out the one that you’ve loved and cared for and called by name and show me a better way.

And let’s just admit that that better way is going to be more involved than I want it to be. It’s a way, after all, not a fix. A better way is going to be more than what I can do on my own and is going to involve a community that understands at least part of what’s happening in my brain. A better way will probably involve love and support from my family and friends and yes, therapy of some kind, at least. I know that depression lies and that I am worthy and loved and I know that there is healing in relationships and community but I also know that I don’t know the lay of the land in my mind, not exactly, and that if I’m going to actually make sustainable progress, I’m going to need someone else who’s had some practice dealing with this specific kind of problem before. Or even if this truly isn’t depression and anxiety, I still have a lot to sort out about how I came to the place of asking these questions at all. I’m not going to understand what’s going on just by letting these thoughts ricochet off the walls of my mind day after day. It’ll do me good to get outside of myself.

Which of course is what love is about, right? It’s what that better way is—taking me out of my self-imposed solitary confinement and opening me up to the care of and for others. Love takes many forms and that’s why we’ve told these gospel stories for thousands of years: they’re stories about Love encountering someone who has been torn apart from Love and refusing to pass them by and leave them as they are. They’re stories that give hope that everyone, even someone like me, could be, should be set free and brought back to Love, where we’ve longed to be all along.

Let’s go weed the garden. I've been told does a body good.