Confession

I grew up with an unhealthy view of mental illness. I was told that people on ADHD medications were usually just victims of poor parenting and medical overreach. I was taught that most people on antidepressants didn’t actually need them. I got the message that being on psychotropic medications was a weakness, something shameful.

I remember reading in teen magazines about things like eating disorders and self-mutilation. I remember when I started seeing things like that in kids my age. I remember when my best friend in Junior High ripped out most of her hair and tried to slit her wrists. I stopped talking to her. I didn’t know what to do, what to say.

I remember the first time I contemplated suicide. I was 12. I remember feeling like no one on earth loved me. I can look back now, having learned and knowing better, and I can see the disordered thinking, the self-isolation, the rumination, the extreme anxiety. I remember lying in bed crying so hard that my lips would tingle and I’d feel lightheaded, unable to breathe, but being so full of shame, that my worst fear was that someone might hear me.

These spells came and went episodically. I came to think back and be able to categorize my life into, “good years” and “bad years”. Good years I was outgoing, active, friendly. Bad years I was withdrawn, in nearly constant emotional pain, and almost absent from my own life. During a “good” period, I would worry about the “bad” times coming back. I could feel it looming over me, just waiting for it to fall like a shroud over my mind, and drag me down to that other place in spite of my struggles against it.

At some point in my life, I suppose after a college psych class or two, I came to the conclusion that I had what I called “depressive tendencies”, but I told myself I didn’t need medication, because medication is for weak people. I could deal with it myself with exercise, herbal supplements, yoga, religion. My “dealing with it” still involved fairly regular suicidal thoughts and anxiety attacks, which occasionally progressed to vague plans. But mostly those thoughts were semi-conscious, ignored. Mostly my “bad nights” involved me crying silently, trying not to hyperventilate, fighting my spiraling mind, hoping none of my roommates could hear me. Not wanting anyone to know.

I guess I believed that if circumstances in my life were different, if I got what I wanted, if my plans worked out as I hoped they would, then the “bad times” would go away for good. If I was able to achieve my goals - personal, professional, educational, social - then I wouldn’t have this problem any more. If I could just keep it together long enough to achieve the Mormon dream: have kids, a husband, a job I loved, then how could the “bad times” come back?

So imagine my shock when I had those things I wanted, when I’d arrived to the place I’d been taught was the pinnacle of joy and fulfillment, and I still sometimes had to hide outside in the living room at night, desperately trying to control my breathing, trying to calm my racing mind, my thoughts tearing at me, implacable, relentless.

There’s something about marriage that takes you to new limits. It teaches you new levels of intimacy, betrayal, stamina, fulfillment, strength, fury, joy. New heights, new depths. At one point I was finally willing to ask for help. And here’s what I learned:

Therapy is awesome and it would benefit every person I know to do some. Choosing to make your life harder by not asking for the help that is available to you is stupid and proud. I am a happier, more stable, confident, resilient individual when I take antidepressants, and that does not make me broken.

I wish so badly that I had gotten on those drugs 20 years ago. I sometimes think about what might have been different if I had. What choices I would have made differently if I didn’t have the fear of my shadow constantly chasing me. If I had felt more able to love, more able to be vulnerable, braver. But there is one thing I’m grateful for about the experience I had.

Confession: when you reduce your existence to its bedrock, when you stare down the barrel of the gun that is suicide, when you contemplate the bleak and ugly world that is visible through the lens of depression, it forces you to prioritize. It forced me to find what was worth living for, what held meaning, what sputtering light existed in the void. I am grateful for the perspective that it taught me, and the empathy for others.

Most people don’t understand mental illness. They should be so lucky. I’m sharing my confession because I wish someone had confessed to me this truth: life doesn’t have to be pain. It’s ok to ask for help. It’s worth whatever personal pride you have to swallow to get that help. Your life can be so much better.