Underwater

I want to tell you this in case you need to hear it someday. In case one day, like me, you wake up and realize that the trees outside your window are kind of crummy, and that you'll never reach the moon. In case one day, you decide that you might need some help. In case no one believes you when you ask for it. In case you have to save yourself. 

Here's a thing that you may or may not know about me: I've had a super-fun illness called depression my whole entire life. I've had an even radder one called anxiety almost just as long. And you might not know that, because I'm really fucking funny. Because I'm really fucking smart. Because I write cool stories on the Internet, and because I have lots of friends, and because I have this one really great sparkle shirt that is covered in sequins and roses that I bought at the Fairfax Flea. You might not know that I'm depressed, because I don't look like someone who has depression. I just don't. I have a nice smile, and these big Tim Burton eyes, and I always wear fun dresses and round sunglasses and red lipstick, and I laugh. A lot. 

But I am. So, I do my best to deal with it. There are lots of days when I don't feel like getting out of bed, so I don't. There are even more days when I don't feel like getting out of bed, but I get out of bed anyways, because there's a bottle of whiskey across the room that I can't reach if I stay under the covers. There are days when nothing at all is good, and I hate everything, especially flowers and people on the sidewalk and going to work and eating food that doesn't come out of the frozen food aisle at the supermarket. There are mornings when I throw up while I'm brushing my teeth, because my stomach can't stand being sad first thing in the day. There are nights when I check myself into the hospital, because I've given myself another anxiety-induced migraine, and everything hurts and nothing is right, or good, or true. 

There are jokes that I write for my job, Facebook statuses that I post for my friends, text messages that I send to my mom, that really do make people laugh. And a lot of these jokes are pretty heavily based in sadness, but I write them anyway, because I read one time that Carrie Fisher said, "If my life wasn't funny, it would just be true, and that would be unacceptable." I clung tight to that mentality when I was younger, and vowed that I would never let all the bad things in my life just be "true." I wouldn't let all the loneliness I felt as a kid be real. I wouldn't let my broken heart dictate the rest of my year. I wouldn't let anything be normal, so I made everything funny instead. 

Pick a joke, any joke that I've written. The funniest ones were probably written mid-panic attack, mid-breakdown, mid-terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. Like, when my therapist cancelled our appointment after the nurse finished taking my blood pressure and I had been sitting in the waiting room for forty-five minutes. Or when my boyfriend broke up with me and threw my laptop and my brand-new dress and my house key out the front door of his apartment. Or when I got fired from my dream job and had to pack up my desk with the whole office staring at me. (Luckily, one of the other assistants caught me before the elevator doors closed and handed me a paper cup full of bourbon for the cab ride home.) 

I'm really only funny because I'm so sad all the time, which, I've come to discover, isn't very unique. Take a look at any comedian, writer, performer. There are the obvious: Rob Delaney, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman. And then there are the ones that we never saw coming, like Robin Williams and Chris Farley and Stephen Fry. 

But if we're going to avoid what happened to Robin Williams and other funny, likable, talented people, we have to start talking about this stuff, openly, and without judgement. Because here's something that the Internet doesn't tell you about coming clean to your loved ones about depression: sometimes, nobody will believe you. 

I've thumbed through all the magazine articles, and I've read all the YA novels. I've sat at my desk at work and scrolled through listicles, and I've read entire books about what it's like to come out and say that you have depression. They all say the same thing: people might not understand at first, people might stigmatize your illness, marginalize you, and judge you, and people might treat you like you're fragile, like you're damaged, like there's something wrong with you. But, after you've told someone, it should get easier, right? Once you confess your darkest secret, there will be someone there to help you. Your friends will listen to you. Your parents will love and support you. Your significant other will sit with you on the couch while you scroll through endless therapist recommendations on your insurance company's website. Once you tell everyone that you're depressed, you can begin the healing process. So it's worth the dirty looks. It's worth the Scarlet Letter, it's worth the judgement uncalled for. It's worth being labeled with a mental illness for the rest of your life, because hey, at least you'll start feeling better soon. 

What they don't tell you, is that you might tell your parents, or your best friend, or the love of your life that you're depressed, and they might not believe you. They might stare back at you with blank faces, or they might bust up laughing. They might say the words, "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" They might not care. They might not even listen. 

I know, because that happened to me. Because after months of punishing my liver and thinking up creative ways to die, I finally got brave enough to tell someone that I was sad. And the outcome wasn't at all what I expected. My mother told me to grow up. My step-dad told me that sometimes, he worries about the fact that he's going to be dead in twenty years, but that he just tries not to think about it too much. My then-boyfriend told me that there was nothing that he could do to help me, and that he didn't want to try. My friends just stuttered, "But...you always seem like you have your shit together." I felt like I was being punished, because instead of doing lines of cocaine off the toilet seat in the bathroom at the Chateau Marmont every night, I was trying to make people laugh instead. Like maybe I should have been misbehaving and lashing out at people so that someone would believe me. 

I asked my mom to help me find a therapist, and she sighed and told me to Google it. I asked my then-boyfriend to come with me to a support group, but he was busy playing video games with his friends. I asked my girlfriends to come over and spend time with me, but they got sick of my moping around. I asked the moon, the Milky Way, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain to send someone, anyone, to help me, because I thought I couldn't possibly get better on my own, but everything in my life stayed the same. I went to the doctor and got a bunch of blood tests and EKGs and MRIs, because I was frantically hoping that a lab technician or an X-ray monitor would be able to prove that there was something really wrong with me. 

And then one day, I was so low that I couldn't even see straight. It felt like my whole brain was submerged underwater, or trapped inside one of those Frankenstein jars from a Mel Brooks movie. It felt like my whole stomach was full of butterflies, but the bad kind, like when a bear is chasing you and you don't know where to run. I felt sick and weak and stupid, and I realized that I was dying. I was dying, and no one was coming to save me. You know that scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban where he's standing at the side of the Great Lake, convinced that his dad is going to show up and cast a Patronus to scare the Dementors away, but Hermione gently takes his arm and says, "Listen Harry, nobody is coming"? It felt like that, and I realized that I could keep asking and begging and pleading for help, but nobody was going to rescue me. If I wanted to keep living, it was high time I rescued myself. 

It is nearly impossible to care about anything when you're depressed. This is why countless professionals urge people with mental illnesses to confide in someone else, because surely somene around you will care about you enough to slap some sense into you. They don't tell you what to do when it's just you, alone in your apartment, with no one to turn to. Sure, there's the Suicide Hotline, but I wasn't TRYING to kill myself, it was just happening on its own. I didn't have a razor to my wrist or a gun to my temple. I just had all these terrible little voices in my head that all sounded exactly like me that kept telling me how stupid and useless and worthless I was. I had nasty ex-boyfriends, and memories of how mean kids used to be in middle school, and a ruined career. I had nothing to look forward to, except whiskey and death. And I was fucking exhausted. 

I can't tell you what to do if you find yourself in this situation, because I probably didn't do the right thing. There were probably resources that I could have used that I didn't, meditation exercises that I could have exhausted, yoga classes that I could have taken, gluten-free diets I could have tried. But after almost a year of struggling to stay alive when I felt completely trapped by my own brain, I decided that I had to take action. I could either live, or I could die, and it was completely up to me. That's the thing about depression; most people who have it don't actually want to die. 

And I was one of those people. I didn't want to die. I wanted to publish a book, adopt a French Bulldog, climb Mt. Whitney. I wanted to make people laugh and learn how to surf and see the Rolling Stones in concert before they retired again. I wanted to maybe fall in love, and maybe be a mom, and maybe get famous one day. Granted, my scumbag brain couldn't actually feel that I wanted to do these things, but I knew that they were somewhere in there, tucked away and hiding for someday when I could feel things again. 

So, I hopped on my insurance company's website, and I found a therapist that would see me for twenty-five dollars a week. I decided to only visit her twice a month, because I needed to do other things with my money, such as eat food and pay my electricity bill. But I can't even describe how much less lonely I felt when I knew that I had a standing date every-other Tuesday with a person who would listen to me and believe me. I joined a support group for people with depression, and it was exactly like Fight Club: cheaper than a movie, and they had free coffee. I forced myself to do things, like call my friends and ask them to hang out, instead of convincing myself that they hated me and didn't want to see me. I apologized a lot, to people that I had ignored and neglected and hurt while my brain was underwater. I wrote a lot of essays and stories about myself that sounded really dumb, but I saved them anyway. I started taking medication for my panic attacks instead of trying to ride through them, or drowning them in whiskey. I even started drinking like a normal human being, instead of like an alcoholic the night before rehab. It was great, because I got to experience what it was like to wake up in the morning without smelling like a mini bar for the first time in over a year. 

But those things weren't easy to do. It wasn't easy to find a good therapist, and it wasn't easy to pep-talk myself into showing up to the support group. It wasn't easy to make restitutions to the people I had hurt, and it definitely wasn't easy to ask people to grab coffee with me after I hadn't seen them in so long. All of those things were absolutely crippling, and they didn't feel good at all in the moment. In the moment, they really stressed me out. I cried a whole lot. I looked for excuses, and for other ways out of this. Every time I helped myself, it just reminded me that nobody was there for me when I needed it most, and thinking about that made me even more sad, and even more angry. I wasn't suddenly, miraculously cured just because I decided that I wanted to live. But I kept trying, because the alternative was death. I kept going, because my only other option was to fail. I had failed at a lot of things in my life up to this point, and I didn't want to lose again. I wasn't brave for pushing through; I was terrified. 

And then one day, I woke up and realized that I had gotten three really solid nights of sleep. That I hadn't felt that familiar ache of dread in my stomach when I came home to my apartment alone at night. I hadn't tried to drink myself happy, or latch on to other people to make myself feel less alone. I had just been going about my week, feeling pretty okay. I wasn't bursting at the seams with happiness, but I didn't feel like I was dying anymore, either. 

I started noticing things that I liked again, like the way the Los Angeles city planners spaced out all the palm trees on the sidewalks in Hollywood, or the way my dog smushes up her nose and smiles at me when I come home. I started enjoying reading books again, taking walks again, eating food again. I wanted to call my friends. Not because I needed to use them to make me feel less lonely, but because I actually cared about how they were doing. When my boyfriend broke up with me this time, I didn't run to the nearest bar and throw six gin and tonics down my throat. I stopped having nightly full-scale meltdowns about nothing, because I just didn't feel upset anymore. I actually felt kind of normal. And it was awesome. 

I want to tell you this, because someday, you might have to do whatever it takes save yourself. You might have to jump ship in the middle of the night, scale down the side of a mountain, cut off your own arm to survive. You might have to force yourself to eat when you're not hungry, go to sleep when you're not tired, care about yourself when you don't. You might ask someone you love and trust to help you, and they might tell you no. You might have to fight even when you don't feel like it, get out of bed and put pants on when you think that you can't. 

You might have to do these things someday, and I just want you to know that you're not alone. That it isn't easy, but being alive is a lot better than dying. That you might think you can't, but you can. That maybe nobody out there is proud of you, but I am. That you might not do things the right way, and you might fuck up a whole lot, but you can absolutely find a way to survive your own shitty brain, your own stupid heartbeat, your own messy soul. 

I want you to know these things, because I am tired of hearing that comedians are dying and that smart, caring people are sad. I'm tired of hearing that nobody knows what they can do to help others, or what they can do to help themselves. And I'm tired of hearing that someone might not believe you, or might not like you anymore just because your wiring is different, or your thoughts don't make sense. And you should be tired of those things, too. Because we're all made out of the same cool stuff; stardust and old dinosaur bones and jokes and comic books and pizza and rose petals.

And all of that shit is definitely worth living for.