I don't want to kill myself (but)
Mindful Mondays.
I felt numb as I sat on the front porch.
The scene before me was beautiful: peaceful, serene, organic. Orange day lilies ribboned in full bloom; spotted soft-pink tiger lilies sitting just underneath them. A single, emerald green, ruby-throated hummingbird with thrumming wings, gliding gently from bloom to blossom.
But the beauty was lost on me as I sat like an immovable statue, stuck.
It’s perimenopause season for me. I’m 51 years old, a late-in-life mother (having had my two boys at ages 40 & 43, respectively, beginning my parenting journey after 10 years of kid-free marriage), & I have spent a lifetime chasing my feelings & learning from them.
More accurately: I’ve been bombarded by, chastised for, hidden from, choked on & stifled unsuccessfully my feelings. And it has happened again & again in my life. Until it breaks me.
At age 5, I remember a similar front yard scene. After a day ‘helping’ my parents with yard work at our new house, tending the morning glories that climbed the chicken wire trellis on the side of our front porch, I cleaned out the cage of my tiny little hamster, Mrs. R. She was a tumbling acrobat, just like me, having just begun my first of many years of classes in dance, acro, gymnastics & other leotard-laden movement. We ‘got’ each other——so much so, that I named her after my favorite person: a man in the TV called Mr. Rogers who told me he liked me “just the way you are.”
Something snapped that day. Or maybe it was another day in the same front yard that same year with all the dissonant thoughts & feelings as a backdrop amalgam for my kindergarten year.
The move to the new home meant a newly long-distance relationship with my Grammy who had also loved me just the way I was. And it reminded me too much of the half-lifetime ago at that point, when at age 2, my younger sister was born with a then-unnamed, still-rare disease now dubbed VACTERL; a cluster of birth defects that meant months in the NICU & multiple death-defying surgeries for her, tears & heartache & joy & pain for my young, 20-something parents, & an unspeakable sense of volatile confusion & combustible meltdowns for me as a toddler who talked in full sentences with incomplete word formation that not everyone who took turns housing me for those months could understand, using language that even I yet barely knew.
My memory of 5 in the front yard is varied: trees I was learning to love if not yet climb, pseudo-friends in the new kids I was meeting in this neighborhood, flowers & hamsters & sweaters come fall as the weather changed … & the unchanging need to sing to myself all the sad songs that ruled the radio waves in 1978.
(Do yourself a favor & DO NOT look up the lyrics to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself.” And better yet, don’t watch the video, because you’ll get an ear worm that I can say from experience is haunting, at least to a small child who has just left her favorite grandparent-babysitter & still feels jilted by her baby sister as the prospect of another baby sis looms large on the growing horizon of her mother’s belly. … And who still thinks the line “when I was young, makin’ love was just for fun” means having loving feelings that sometimes break out in tickle fights.)
The sadness solidified & by Christmas, it was my state of mind. The following fall, the smell on the air of crisp leaves & the chill that saw us buying new school-year sweaters triggered a body sensation of all those unexpressed emotions all over again. And thus began my seasonal depression.
By age 10, I spent my first stint in bed in a full-blown depression that robbed me of joy & effervescence for two solid, heavy days. My brand-new, young aunt——who had just married my uncle & was visiting us for the holidays——finally pulled up a chair in my darkened bedroom where I would let no one open the shades to let in the weak winter sunlight.
“Well, if you can’t get out of bed to visit with me,” she said with just the right, delicate balance of cheer & sincerity, “I’ll just come in here & visit with you.”
She listened to me. Made me laugh. Told me she’d been in the same spot in her own childhood. Never once tried to compare the causes of our situations to tell me that her childhood grief at her mother’s passing from breast cancer was any more appropriate than my existential ennui that I explained in raw honesty had come from the fact that, in other parts of the world at that very moment, there were wars & killing happening & that girls my age were being forced into child-bride marriages.
It was all real to both of us. And all sad, all worth grieving.
I am 51. And there are still wars & violence & that-&-more perpetrated against women & girls in particular. Not to mention the repeal of a particular statute that went into effect the year I was born & that I had lived with my entire life ….
I grieve again.
At this age, it is commonplace that in the same week, my mentor, grandmother & mother-in-law can all be in the hospital in critical care while I mourn the birthday of a loved one who never got to reach 30, the death anniversary of another who was younger still & attend the funerals of a dear community member from our church & my kiddos’ piano teacher’s unexpectedly lost life partner. In this second act of life, I see this as practice for the way things are going to be.
It’s an honor, really, A privilege to live long enough to appreciate the losses as they come & to stick around to mourn them (because someone has to, & so far, I am it).
At 23, life got even harder. A lifetime & nearly 20 years in a row of fall depressions that extended through winter (& that year, into spring) meant instead of wishing I could “just sleep through it all & wake up when it’s over”——cue Green Day & my GenX ‘90s grunge anthems/ear worms, like “Wake Me When September Ends”——I actually fleetingly considered combining the bottle of cheap wine in the fridge & OTC sleep medication in my medicine cabinet.
It scared me so much, I phoned my parents on my red plastic landline & asked them to come spend the night. They left me alone later with love notes taped all over my apartment & a promise to stay alive until they could get me an appointment for help.
Depression skewed my vision so I saw their words as hollow. But I luckily still carried the weight of my promises. I stayed alive & saw the doctor. And when I was prescribed Zoloft, I immediately felt like I had found heaven. … Until I entered an unbridled hell of my own making after a medication-induced push into hypomania that took me straight to suicidal. With numbed feelings & confusing questions about what were my moods & what was the medicine, I found myself secretly smiling at my inner plan to take all the medication in my cabinet——mine, my roommates’ & the stuff in the med chest of another apartment throwing a party that night——& wash it down with a 100-tablet bottle of aspirin I bought at the corner convenience store along with a full case of beer. I was already falling unconscious when my then-boyfriend Kyle kicked in the door & saved my life. THANK YOU, KYLE. A difficult childhood had fast-tracked him to coming to terms with always trusting his own gut instincts. That was my first lesson that listening to our inner wisdom will never steer us wrong, no matter what everyone else at the party is whispering in our ears.
The age of 35 found me shattered & sinking again: I’d made my way to Chicago after college, falling into what we termed New Media as a career track, abandoning leads & contacts & career plans & so many articles (& even a little pay!) from my journalism career studies. I’d sheltered myself in words from elementary school & my very first light-pink silk-bound journal. Protected with the showiest & most inefficient lock & key, it housed my heart & hid my soul. I stowed it in the headboard of my bunk bed where it lay unprotected from my prying sisters. I learned to write in code & later in the sloppiest handwriting ever as an added layer of secrecy. That part is a habit I can’t shake even now.
Words stayed my friends & made my paycheck worthwhile as I found more & novel ways to earn money through writing——in marketing, technical manuals & company newsletters, then eventually in corporate production in ways I hadn’t even known existed, like sales meeting agendas, product skits & internal awards speeches. With an unrealized inner sense of irony, I freelanced for multiple Big Pharma companies while I cultivated a love-hate-ignore relationship with my own prescribed psychiatric meds. The list grew … & so did the list of street drugs I used to self-medicate with shorter-term side effects.
I met my husband freelancing (& clubbing) in our late 20s. A couple of years later, we were married, living in our new home, surrounded by beautiful land & living our best life on paper … until our high-functioning facade broke down when our property flooded. The major depression that had hit me shortly after our wedding (fueled by the fiery realization that I was not healthy enough to become a mother & that I did not know how to stay sober long enough to get better) lasted through seasons & on into years. I struggled to shower, to feed myself, to get the mail. My sisters took turns calling me——one in the morning, one in the evening——to ask me questions & track my answers in a spreadsheet to help me manage self-care.
No matter that I had created the spreadsheet on my own (I was moonlighting as a moderator of a peer support group). The incentive to take care of myself as a person worthy of loving care was too short-lived to sustain for me.
With no hint of irony whatsoever, I awakened one fall morning at age 35, early (& only a little hungover) to rally my group for a suicide prevention fundraiser walk. There was an ocean of water out my back door & a pond in my driveway that was forming to overtake my car. I waded my way through & focused on not feeling any feelings about it as I did the next right thing.
Through more than a decade of mostly-consistent therapy at that point——& more & more consistent medication for my mental health with even a few dry desert stints abstaining from drugs & alcohol——I had learned that I was supposed to have feelings, that all humans did & do. At one therapist’s urging, I made a list of every emotion I could name, called it 55 Feelings Words … but didn’t know what to do with it beyond that.
I arrived home the afternoon of the suicide prevention walk where we had circled a freshly-dug pond again & again, honoring the continually drizzling downpour as god-grief for those lost & those surviving, only to find my land & garage completely flooded & the sky freshly breaking open with a deluge of more rain. The Great Flood as we later termed it broke open our lives, forcing us to ask for help. I got clean & sober through the process & drifted my way to mental health recovery, as well. The 55 Feelings Words became a catalyst to so much more material that following my bliss led me to discover, create & share as a Communications Coach, helping business professionals & their teams & families to cycle out of the brain freeze of fight-or-flight & to speak their truth with confidence. (I like them just the way they are! For so many, they have forgotten that’s an option.)
In rehab, I’d re-discovered joy in the cafeteria, dancing to Michael Jackson. My first full day home, I made my first proactive playlist. On an actual i-Pod shuffle device, I programmed a series of songs to match my feelings. And, with curiosity, I tentatively made one meant to elicit new emotion. I named it Gratitude List & cued up 3 different versions of James Brown’s “I Feel Good” along with every song I could find of any genre that mentioned the word “gratitude.” I learned to let go of the sad songs, especially in low moods that threatened to linger without any help.
My support group had introduced me to a library of books on mental health. The Mindful Way through Depression (aptly subtitled, “Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness”) taught me that body associations can bring back stored messages we’ve saved to process later. With a newly developing clarity of mind, I began to put in the work of being present to the present moment.
While we worked to secure aid to rebuild our home, I built my business as a Communications Coach & taught all the things I needed to know in order to better learn them.
Motherhood has brought its own peaks & valleys. And medication milestones——including attempting to go off meds (& being quickly reminded of how much suffering there is in mood swings) in order to get pregnant, titrating & transitioning medications for a safer pregnancy, making proactive plans with my psychiatrist to buttress the inevitable postpartum depression (that, yes, definitely came) … & even reducing the cocktail to one low-dose psych med until I finally accidentally forgot to pack it on a vacation & the little bit I’d still been on left my system over my 10-day trip.
Now I am naked with my moods again. And I feel them everyday & live to tell the tale.
I don’t believe that medications are bad. There’s little in life that black & white, after all, including life & death. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you are a survivor who is reading this, I’m so sorry for your loss. I hope you also continue to remember that feelings come & feelings go.
I sat on my porch feeling numb just hours ago as I write this. (It is Sunday; you should receive this Monday if you’re a subscriber.) And I know it is hormonal; psychosomatic; environmental & existential. It is all of these things.
Because our feelings are divine.
They teach us that something important needs our attention. At 51, I know that can be almost anything. And it is never frivolous.
If I feel it, then it needs to be known. As much as the fragile hummingbird soars between my hearty flowers in wordless flight, drinking the riches from their depths, then flying to a mid-air standstill to look directly at me over my front porch railing, my gift for tending their nectar.
In a world without emotions trackers or mood apps or even Bluey & Daniel Tiger, I had to struggle to name feelings words. And so, I dug deep & found them from inside of me. And then I shared them with my clients.
If you’re emo-curious like I am, let’s excavate more together. Let’s learn to feel and heal, to recognize with reverence that our feelings are divine information that bursts open to be known. And there is help available along the journey, whatever that looks like just for today.
I looked up the symbolism/message of the hummingbird & the tiger lily: among other things, healing & heartiness.
Perimenopause is no more the monster that postpartum depression or suicidiality or childhood seasonal depression ever was. Because when I remember that all feelings come & go; that their message is important & that I hear it best when I am grounded; that it’s not up to me to choose how long I live this life (not yet, anyway); that the resources of all of nature are universally available to me today from around the globe, I can feel and heal.
I cried through church this morning where I had struggled to show up (but made it there!). My dear heart-friend Michele made a beeline for me after the service & asked directly, “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said with all honesty.
And, because she is a trained prayer chaplain, she ceased all questions & enveloped me in presence. She held me, healed me; prayed over me & invoked all angels (even the ones we know). Her final wish for me was peace. And I actively received it.
The peace preceded self-acceptance. That, first pronounced on the porch as I slowly began to unfreeze, has gently blossomed & finally burst open as I write this letter to you: my newest, rawest, real-est ever newsletter as the first in a decided installment for Mondays where I will talk about what’s on my mind. … Perhaps not always with this much gravity.
My feelings have come. My feelings are going.
You don’t have to be a woman who is reading this. But chances are, you know quite a few. And it is the women in every sense of the word who have always done the healing & the tending & the birthing & midwifing. (Not to mention the real wife-ing.) It is women who see me & wordlessly understand. In my perimenopause, I just want you to know that.
