When Depression Comes Back
Hi, it’s been a while.
This felt like the “right” first post to come back with because, well, it has been a while since posting on my blog and you deserve an explainer.
In order to explain why I haven’t been posting regularly I have to take you back to 2021. In 2021 we started the year off in Portland, OR and then by that summer we were back east. I was on board and happy about both moves, but what I didn’t realize then is that I was throwing a move into an already formed tornado. It just made the depressive hit that much stronger.
Here are some things that contributed to my depression that have since changed:
Fear of not knowing how I would preserve my independence, boundaries, and mental health while living so close to my family (I love them, but 3,000 miles between us had helped me set boundaries that I had been too scared to set when we lived closer, I was afraid to lose that with the move)
My birth control
The ebbs and flows of being self-employed
Not being able to drive
Refurnishing a new apartment
My boyfriend’s new travel schedule
Alone any of those things would have been a lot, but manageable, all together they did me in. I would show up to therapy and I wouldn’t even cry, I would sit in numbness and a lot of “why do I feel this way?”. My biggest tell that things had gotten really bad is when they started getting a lot better and my therapist said to me,
“You’re making jokes again, I can see you’re coming back.”
I may have cried from relief for another hour after that.
Falling into another depressive episode hadn’t been on my 2021 bingo card, but it’s what I had to navigate through. Because writing has always been a safe place for me to work through my feelings, I’d set the boundary way before last year that I don’t publish anything on the blog that I haven’t already somewhat worked my way through. It’s not fair to you or to me to work through things in real-time. I was struggling with my mental health and so I turned solely towards professional help and my immediate support system to work through it and then, months later, I finally had more clarity of mind to be able to write.
I know it can feel hard to do that, to sit in the worst of a season and not take a hit of the thing that makes you feel the most at peace, but I found that writing and journaling were actually keeping me more stuck than they were freeing me in those moments. Actual peace was what I felt in therapy or in the doing of things that would help in making my tomorrow better — it was new for me to allow myself to sit in those feelings and especially new to believe that I would survive them and be better for sitting in them.
So, here’s what I did to try to work through my depression cocktail:
I took driving classes and finally got my license in November
I got off birth control and have been resetting my body for the last 5 months
I started taking charge of my money and my work in different ways
I set some boundaries with my family (and honestly New York City as a whole) that have helped me feel safe
I’ve found peace and pleasure in slowly refurnishing our apartment
I reached out to people whose partners also had “out of the norm” travel schedules just to feel more supported (This also helped me realize that once I focused more on the “me” things that I needed to get on track with (aka everything else on this list), his travel was less of a weight on my shoulders. Still miss him because I love him lol but it’s less tension filled for me now)
So, the truth is that instead of writing, I spent the second half of last year recovering my sense of self, a sense of financial security, a sense of joy, and a sense of hope. With each bit of myself I reclaimed, I felt more creative and more like a new version of myself I was just getting the chance to meet. (Very a la Taylor Swift, somewhere between “this is me trying” and “happiness” as a love note to myself.)
This is where I am right now. My life is so different and I feel like I’ve actually caught up to it enough to live it.
I drive to Home Depot on the weekends after getting my eyebrows done in a suburban strip mall right next to the local bagel shop. The way that this is night-day to my life in New York City is wild. I love the new parts of me that feel at home with weekends like this, but also I’ve come to see that there is so much of who I’ve always been (a city girl at heart) that I just don’t want to give up. I’m still figuring out what that means, but I feel like I have the emotional bandwidth to do so now.
About the time when I started feeling more like myself, I pitched and wrote this article for Well + Good — When Depression Comes Back, You Haven’t Failed. Similar to this blog post, I wrote it because I needed it and I hoped someone else could grab value from it too. I wasn’t able to write that (or this) until I was okay enough to look back instead of just trudging forward to make it through the day.
Survival mode and a depressive episode can feel pretty synonymous on your worst days. On your best days, you try not to think whether it’s one day (singular) or will be multiple days (plural) because hope is contagious but can feel so easily spooked. My depression looked like a lot of keeping the hope and trying not to spook it at the same time. The juggling act was hard. I started with telling you about our move because even though our move didn’t “cause” my anxiety, it made it hard for me to feel grounded during an already rough season.
While the changing of grounds was literal for me, I know that there are depressive seasons that can be triggered by symbolic “changing of grounds.” I want you to know that if you’re going through one of those, you’re not alone. I was just on that path, do you see my footprints? They may look faint now, but if you try hard you can see them and know that I’m waiting for you just a few steps ahead. I know it’s comforting because when I was on that path, I looked down at someone else’s footprints and they helped me keep going, maybe they were yours from a time before too?
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