The Dirt Field

This will not be easy to read.

Two weeks ago, I left law school and my home all in the same day. It hurt and the tears and snot kept dripping as I packed up my textbooks and my belongings, but I was mostly numb and just going through the motions. It was hard to keep moving forward and remembering to breathe, but I just stopped thinking and feeling and kept pushing myself onward. Since that day, I’ve had moments of feeling sad and lost, moments when I’m confused about where I am and what I’m doing, but otherwise I’ve just kept going through each day with detached disinterest.

In the past five days or so however, things have started to go downhill. It’s no secret that I deal with depression, that my ability to smile on a regular basis is regulated by a little bottle in my medicine cabinet. But I thought the depression was under control, and when I saw my doctor the other day to discuss my prescription, I told him that everything was great and filled with sunshine and lollipops.

I spoke too soon.

For those of you who deal with depression, you know how it feels when it flares up. You keep telling yourself that you’re fine, but little by little you’ve started adjusting fine to be lower and lower. And your desire to laugh, to eat, to move starts to wane, and every little bad thing makes it feel like the scary darkness around the edges starts creeping inward. It’s a terrible, stifling feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, even George W. Bush. Even wonderful things, like sunny days and cake batter ice cream start feeling like you’re seeing them at the end of a very long tunnel that just keeps getting longer.

But despite knowing that I’ve been sliding downhill, I’ve ignored it. I sailed through my first counseling session with glib jokes and casual candor, even laughing at being the “eating little shards of glass” girl. I thought if I kept moving, kept smiling, and kept eating pumpernickel & onion pretzels in bed, I’d start feeling better.

Everything caught up to me yesterday. A few things went wrong, I was feeling really depressed, and then I got a letter from my credit union thanking me for the massive payment I made on my car but notifying me that, per the rules of my loan, it was only applied to the principle, and not to the next four months as I’d intended. And then I fell into a million little pieces that I thought would never be glued back together.

It sounds so stupid – I lost it because I now have to make four car payments that I hadn’t planned to make. But it wasn’t the car payments; it was the realization that I have another obstacle to overcome, that I’d lost control of something else. In addition to the problems with my school, my marriage, my family, my financial status, and my lack of job, I’d now have to come up with an unplanned $350 every month. In that moment, I gave up, I gave in, and everything I hadn’t cried about, everything I hadn’t discussed or even allowed myself to feel in the past two weeks hit me like a brick wall.

Once the train started crashing, I was hoping that maybe I could cry out all of the hurt and just start feeling better. I had been trying to drive home when I lost it, and had to pull into the parking lot of the mall because I didn’t think I could drive without dying. I sat in that parking lot and cried and cried and cried, and tried to imagine a moment after I left the parking lot and nothing came to mind. It was one of the darkest, most hopeless moments of my entire life.

But it passed.

I’d like to say I did it on my own, that I cried out my unhappiness and felt better, but I didn’t. Quite honestly, I don’t think I could have; I needed somebody to push through all of the terrible feelings and force the urge to keep breathing back into me. To the person who did just that, to the friend that knew what to say and how to say it, thank you. I know you’ve been through this before, I know you knew exactly how I was feeling, and I’m incredibly grateful to you for saving me from my own worst enemy.

I know things aren’t all better now. I know that one good breakdown is not enough to fix the hurt caused by the combination of major changes, big mistakes, and serious depression. But when I woke up today, I felt okay. Things weren’t so bad, they weren’t so dark, and I knew that I’d live through this. I’d feel better soon, I’d get a job, a new life, and the ability to laugh without hurting at the same time. I know that everything will be okay.