I’ve had a hard battle with depression for my entire adult life. And every time I think I’m rounding a corner, my hopes are dashed.
I think I’m honestly at one of the lowest points of my life. My mental health has diminished to the point that I am in suffering almost perpetually. The thoughts in my brain have disintegrated to the point that they don’t make sense, but they feel like they want to murder me and they scream for my attention, asking me for the millionth time to decipher them so I can somehow be well. If I try to decipher them the cycle of futility perpetuates, and if I don’t they torture my unconscious so badly that no distraction is powerful enough to rescue me from raw pain and despair and shame.
My expectations for any kind of future for myself that would be really worth living have been reduced to almost nothing. I’ve stopped believing in the light at the end of the tunnel. For most of the last several years I’ve always thought I was going to reach a point where I would find my way back up. I’ve always been teased by the possibility that one more year, one more month, one more week, one more day would mark the moment when I would start to be okay. And when you get teased enough without truly seeing the light, you lose faith.
And yet, now I see more clearly than ever that faith is all I have. Whether we like it or not, we all believe something on faith, because all of us, on some level, are blind. And when you’re blind, you need faith to exist.
So here’s the faith I do have—I have faith that all of my greatest hopes and dreams will be ripped to shreds. I have faith that I will suffer for the rest of my life. I have faith that I will fail everyone I love. I have faith that I will hurt people, say bad things, injure relationships, get to the end of my life and regret more than half of it. I have faith that people I care about will die, that people will suffer and I will be unable to do anything about it. I have faith that I’m wrong about the universe, wrong about love, wrong about winder. I have faith that I don’t know who I am or what I’m talking about. I have faith that I’m so wrong that I might even be wrong about what I’m saying in this paragraph. Which is why, I think, in a weird sort of way, when you lose faith in everything you inadvertently find the slightest, phantasmal gleam of hope again. Hope in the possibility that you don’t know, and everything you think you do know is just a simple word speaking loudly—pain.
At the end of the day, mental anguish is just another form of pain. I’m accustomed to thinking of pain as physical, but that is only one kind of pain. To struggle with mental health is to struggle with pain as well. Mental illness is pain. And yet so often we stigmatize people for struggling with mental health, as if it were somehow their fault or as if they were “bad” for it or as if it were “imaginary,” and therefore not real. Why is it that when someone breaks a bone or gets the flu, we tend to them and bring them soup and a glass of water and visit them in the hospital? And if we are the one who is sick, we care for ourselves, get rest, take medicine, and wait it out? But when someone struggles with depression, we think it’s somehow different. We think we need to fix ourselves or else people won’t love us. We think we need to hide our thoughts and feelings so people don’t think we’re dangerous. And our caretakers think they need to fix us so that they don’t feel like they’re a bad person. Yes, I think many of these same dynamics actually do manifest in situations involving physical pain and trauma and disease, but they manifest around mental health situations all too often as well.
I genuinely believe that if I am too vulnerable around others and they see how sad and angry and afraid I am that they won’t want to have a relationship with me anymore. I can’t modify that belief; that is what I honestly feel, what my body believes. And yet a part of myself is able to look out above the stormy ocean that is my mind and say I don’t actually know. I don’t know the thoughts and feelings of others; I scarcely understand the thoughts and feelings in my own head! I certainly don’t know the truth or the future. I don’t really know anything hardly, except that I hurt.
It’s that perpetual courage to embrace not knowing that leads me to wonder if maybe I will be surprised. Maybe I will find the light at the end of the tunnel. And so I’m back to where I always have been, running the rat race again and hoping that maybe someday I will be healed. It’s a tantalizing thought and I’m too afraid to believe it anymore. And yet I do believe it, yet again, because I have to. To be human is to hope in something, even if it’s something that I simultaneously scoff at and denounce as ridiculous at the same time, to protect myself from the thousandth round of disappointment and dashed hopes.
For the sake of just putting one foot in front of the other, I need to embrace the courage to be sad, the courage to be broken, the courage to be angry, the courage to be terrified, the courage to be lost, the courage to be me. Who else can I be anymore? I can only be me. I cannot be good or bad or “enough”; I can only be me.
Embracing courage is nice to say, but it’s not exactly easy. I don’t know where you find courage. You certainly can’t go buy it at the store. Sometimes I hear stories about people who have gone through terrible things, and I think, “There’s no way I could have been brave enough to survive that.”
But while this thinking is understandable, I kind of wonder if it misses the point. Courage is not something you have because you mustered it up or tried your best to suck up the pain. Courage is suffering itself—suffering in the face of a greater desire. Even on my worst days, when I say I don’t want to live or wish I had never been born, I speak the truth of my feeling but not the full truth of my desire—I do, in fact, want to live. I want to live abundantly. Ceasing to exist is my second choice, a choice that in some moments somehow feels better than continuing to exist in pain. But it has never, ever been anyone’s first choice. You can take away someone’s hope, but you can’t take away their desire for love and goodness and wholeness itself. You can bury that desire under a lot of other surface desires, like the wish for revenge or money or safety or some other numbing agent, but you cannot rid yourself of that desire completely. It’s literally how all biological organisms are wired—to always search for a way to survive and thrive and live. In the face of such a weighty and beautiful desire, everything every human does and is reeks of courage! When we encounter suffering, we still hold to that same desire and are therefore courageous—saying we handled the suffering “well” or handled it “poorly” is an idea premised on a lie. Suffering just is; it is not something you do the right way or wrong way. It is not something you do at all; it is something you experience. You are not courageous because of what you did, but because of what you experienced, what you felt, what you knew, what you lost. You are not courageous because you did the right thing; you are courageous because you dreamt a dream, and then suffered for it.
If we already have this in-built desire to live and live abundantly, then I think we already have inside of us all the courage we need for whatever it is we are facing in our lives. And no, this desire doesn’t make us strong. It makes us weak. It makes us afraid. It gives us something to lose. It gives us skin in the game. It creates the possibility of suffering in the first place. Suffering is a feeling that points to a deeper reality—the realization that the way things are is not the way we desire things to be. To have desires, or a Heart’s Longing, is to automatically create the very ability to suffer. To resist suffering is to control the uncontrollable, to hit our heads against a wall and find that our heads break first.
In my mental anguish, I have been railing at a world I perceive to be unfair. I have been despising and resenting a world that chews people up and spits them back out, almost as if by design. And in my efforts to resist all this suffering, I have only smashed open my head, my brain, my mental well-being, my trust. And this head-smashing itself has been done in the name of love and care! In reality, it has been done in pursuit of what’s fair. At first glance, that which is care and that which is fair might seem to be two sides of a similar coin. But I think they are rooted in opposites.
The world is fundamentally unfair. When we become preoccupied with what’s fair, what we are really preoccupied with is control!
So rather than worrying about being fair, I want to focus on being compassionate. Fairness tries to fix the world and demonstrates judgment. Love accepts the world for what it is and demonstrates care. Care doesn’t mean you did the right things or controlled things for the better. Care means you care. It might mean you feel sad, or feel angry for someone, or that you smile at someone, or that you chip in a dollar for a cause you care about, when in the long-term none of those things make the world any more fair. The point of this world isn’t to experience goodness; it is to experience goodness and badness and suffering when they are kissed by love. And the kiss won’t fix or change a single damn thing, and that’s okay.
I’m tempted to say it’s not okay, because I tend to think that if I am not doing my part to do good in the world, I am part of the problem. Of course I’m part of the problem! We all are. But my value and yours has nothing to do with whether we did good stuff and everything to do with the fact that we’re loved. Even if we’re loved only in the dreams we have dared to dream.
So practically speaking, what does making room for pain look like to me today?
There’s a part of me that thinks I should be able to will it away—the pain, the shame, the dysfunction—by the grace of some kind of epiphany. What kind of mental hoops can I jump through to fix myself, be better, or make myself well? But jumping through hoops and seeking epiphanies is part of the problem. This is what I usually do, and it doesn’t work.
This is where I’m tempted to go to the other extreme—throw my hands up in the air, admit there’s nothing I can do, and that I will be trapped in this suffering forever. This is more or less what I did at the beginning of this post, and it leads me to despair. Making peace with suffering is not the same thing as claiming that suffering is one-hundred percent of all there is. The world is a mixed bag; so is my experience. And yet, rather than condemning myself for “wallowing” in my pain, I need to treat myself with the kind of compassion I would extend to any dear friend. I hurt, really hurt, and I must own it and show myself care. I must listen to myself without trying to correct or fix my feelings or trying to downplay my pain.
I don’t know whether I will be in pain forever or not. What I do know is that the pain won’t go away because I snapped my finger or pushed a button or turned my calendar to a new, beautiful year like 2022. If the pain goes away, it will be with a lot of time and tears and waiting, while trying to hobble around and do stuff in the meantime.
This is not a message of “suck it up and take the pain” or a message of “put on a happy face and pretend I’m okay.” It’s a message of being honest with where I’m at, that I have a real wound, and that yes, just like other people who have health problems (whether physical or mental), it will impact my life and prevent me from living the way “normal” twenty-somethings live. It means I will be different, I will be in pain, I won’t be able to do things that everyone else is doing or enjoy things many other people can enjoy. And most of all it means accepting my own sadness, embracing myself and my predicament with compassion, and being okay with not being okay. I can’t take away the suffering, the mental anguish, the despair, the terror, the anger, the shame. I can only meet it with love. We think the choice is love or suffering, and that love is out of our reach because of the suffering. But instead love is with us all along, and we get to live in it, and suffer. I no longer care about living well. I no longer care about being happy. I no longer care about being okay. I care about love. I’m too broken to care about anything else. And perhaps, maybe, love cares about me.
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