Absolutely, Positively, Without a Doubt, The Most Difficult Post I’ve Ever Written.

There is no doubt in my mind that I struggled with clinical depression in my twenties.  I knew I was really depressed, but I didn’t realize that everyone wasn’t experiencing life the same way I was.  I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal to feel a drape of shadow over myself that had no cause or sense of timing.  It came and it went, it returned and retreated and I never knew why it was there.  It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and that cloud was gone that I realized the way my life felt was not the way other people’s lives felt to them.

In my thirties, I definitely suffered post-partum depression.  2005 and 2007 were what I call my “lost years”.  I went through the motions, but I was in a deep well.  At least I could attribute my depression to a situation however, and that’s the way all of my thirties have been.  If I’m feeling sadness or overwhelming sadness, I’ve been able to attach it to a source.

I’ve struggled a lot while writing this post for a few reasons.  Most importantly, I should just assume that everything I write on the Internet falls under the category of “Forever Recordkeeping”.  My children will read my words some day and it’s bad enough that they’ll have to grapple with my love of “fuck” and talk of blow jobs.  I wonder if it will hurt them to some day read about the emotional chasm I’ve been trying to traverse this past summer.

So, here’s the deal:  I can’t share all the details because a lot of it involves other people.  People in my life who haven’t signed up to be the Mommytopia Feature of the Day.  But I will share the bits and parts that relate directly to me, even though they are so hard to type out.

In Hollywood, June-August 2009 was known as the Summer of Death.  And I’ve been walking dead.  None of my friends and none of my family knew what I was dealing with this past spring, summer … the past year, really.  In the darkest hours of my twenties, I never considered suicide.  It’s just that one place that I’ve never allowed myself to go to.  Over the past months, I’ve been there.  This is how it happened:

I’ve written before about my life-long propensity to allow every thing, every situation — even those that I cannot control — to overtake me.  They wrap around me like so many boa constrictors.  I lose my voice, the one that says “I need help.  I’m in trouble.”  I don’t want to worry anyone, I hate being a bother.  I feel bad even taking up space and I never want my family to hurt.

Over this past year, it got to be too much to take.  I shouldered things I shouldn’t have.  I tried to fix things I couldn’t have.  I planned an end that I wouldn’t have ever before.

Suicide is a direct contradiction to everything I believe in.  It’s selfish for those you leave behind.  It resolves nothing; the problems that one chooses to escape from are still there.  I am a mother and with that rite of passage I know I have abdicated my right to end it all.  Yet I was there mentally.  The shouldering and the attempted rescuing and the burdens piled up on me faster and heavier than I ever could have anticipated.  How serious was it?  I won’t go into too much detail here, because I did with Special K a couple of weeks ago and saw a look on his face that I hope to never see again.  I had a plan, I did things with the full intent of thinking that these were my “lasts”.

Now, more than ever, I understand the parents who don’t want their kids watching movies or listening to music that focus on the topic of death.  Because when you hear a message over and over again, eventually you can be sucked in.  These concepts and ideas start to make sense.  Prolonged thought fixation can change a person.  It almost changed me in a very permanent way.

Logically, I knew I didn’t want to leave my children and I didn’t want to leave my family.  I felt that there was no way out for me.  I never was able to solve the problems that sent me down this road, but have since learned that it wasn’t due to my deficiencies.  They were problems that could not be fixed.  Maybe they weren’t meant to be fixed.  And everything that has happened since has probably all been part of a bigger plan — one that I’m not privy to today.  I just didn’t know.

Where am I today?  I’m tired.  The road has been long and the burden has been heavy.

I’m afraid.  Fearful that I’ve shared a part of me that is so private, so personal, so mine.  Fearful of being stigmatized as “crazy” or “unstable” even though I don’t believe I’m either.  The few people who I have told now silently analyze me with their eyes.  I expect that others will distance themselves from me — I anticipate their distancing.  When I’m a totally famous writer, I am sure this topic will be brought up in every interview.  It’s like how “What tree would you be?” is forever associated with Barbara Walters.  Famous or not, this confession of mine will always be attached to me.  God only knows when I’ll log back on to Mommytopia or Facebook, for I even fear the reactions of my readership.

And I’m happy.  Because I’m realizing that there is nothing now that will ever take me off the planet or even threaten to.  I survived the seemingly unsurvivable and I’m here.  I’m looking forward to the rest of my life shared with my husband, mother, children.  Change is on our horizon.  It’s a complete unknown — I don’t know what our path is, but I know that there is a path and that’s what’s truly different.  Before, I had no faith in even the existence of a path.

Oh, and I have a shrink now which I am sure will provide plenty of fodder for my writing.  She has mastered the one-eyebrow arch that she likes to vault in my direction and that makes me laugh.  I’m not sure if she’s experienced a specimen quite like me.  She’s very nice and we are working on a plan to give me some tools.  I can’t ever again put myself in the place that I did.  It was unfair to me and those that love me.  I feel that I owe a huge debt to my family.  I’ve been unplugged for quite a while, paralyzed by my own issues, so now I’m making a very conscious effort to plug in and connect.  The goal?  Joy.

Finally, one of the biggest emotions that one feels when they are trying to be a one-man rescue team is loneliness.  Between the emails, the Facebook messages, the calls, my family’s love and support, I know this:  I’m so not alone.  I’m about as opposite as you can be from alone.  And I think that’s one of the reasons I decided to share this story.  I was feeling so isolated, and convinced that I was the only person out there who was able to put on the huge smile to hide the huge pain that no one knew existed.  I know for a fact that at least one person is going to read this tonight and relate.  If my story resonates with you, just one of you, outing myself was worth it.  It’s worth it no matter what, really.  This is just my life and one I chose to share with everyone.