January 19, 2023 by Amy

Climbing Back Out

I hit bottom, y’all. I sank down and settled into the muck and just stayed there. It was comfortable…for about five minutes. Then I got stuck.

I think it had been building for a long time. Lots of little things piled up that I managed, for the most part, to tamp down and sweep under a rug or hide behind a potted plant. The tipping point, the proverbial straw, the one more thing is gonna send me over the edge y’all, was losing Daddy. Losing my grandmother-in-law, who had essentially been my grandma for nearly 30 years (because God knows I loved her like that), a few months later was the icing on the cake. It all came tumbling down.

I stopped doing all the things that make me happy. I wasn’t making photographs. I wasn’t writing. I stopped walking and practicing yoga. I stopped, for the most part, moving much at all. My body and my mind. There was a lot of sitting. There was a lot of scrolling on social media. There was a lot of sighing and an absolute fuckton of crying. I wasn’t sleeping well which wasn’t anything new but the insomnia was exacerbated. Well, I take that back. I had no issue falling asleep in the middle of the day. You know, when it’s not socially acceptable to sleep. 

Grudgingly, I got on the path to sleeping better by scheduling an appointment with a sleep doctor, but thanks to our country’s absolutely fucked-up health system it took four months to get to a solution. In the meantime, I stayed stuck in neutral in all other aspects.

Shortly before Christmas, I found it hard to get out of bed at all on the weekends. I would lie there, staring at the ceiling fan, and think about all the potential in the hours that lay before me. I could walk or practice yoga or write or edit or do anything I wanted, really. I could do more than the bare minimum that was required of me (which was cooking and laundry and sometimes cleaning but not as often as I should). But I couldn’t move. The weight of it all felt overwhelming. I could do it all and instead I chose to do nothing. When I finally got up, I moved to the couch. Same result, different scenery.

Friends, this is not how I want to live my life.

M and I went shopping for Christmas presents one Sunday after I had completely wasted the day before. I forced myself to get out of bed and we made our list and mapped out our route. The first stop was out of gift cards. We realized that the second stop was probably closed on Sundays. This was not going as well as we planned. Well, whatever. We found a restaurant for lunch and sat across from each other, figuring out what to order. I didn’t really care what I ordered. I didn’t care about anything. Not one single thing.

So I told M this and said that I thought I needed help. And then I cried. It was the first time I had admitted it to myself.

He understood and reminded me that we’ve been through so much in the last year. Which is when I cried even more. Our server wondered why I was so emotional about a buffalo chicken sandwich. M asked if I had someone in mind. I did, and he made me promise to reach out to her as soon as we got back home. We finished our errands, checking every single thing off our list (the place we thought was closed on Sundays was open, turns out) and returned home. He took our packages and gently instructed me to take the first step to get help.

I emailed a therapist I know and trust, and she responded within 10 minutes with a phone number for me to call. This was on a Sunday night, proving once again that the earth is littered with absolutely amazing people. We spoke for 20 or 30 minutes, and I hung up with two appointments made (the first a double session). I already felt better simply for having some help to look forward to.

Since then I have had several sessions. I wrapped up all the sleep study stuff and have a brand new CPAP that purrs me into the deepest sleep I’ve had in years. I have started walking again (per instructions from my brilliant therapist), and practicing yoga on the cold or rainy days. I am writing. I’m looking for photographs. I start each day by making a to-do list that motivates me to work through it. And I walk into each therapy session wondering what we’re going to tackle and then out at the end amazed that we uncovered yet another thing that’s been bothering me for a long, long time (the rugs under which I hid things are being rolled up, the potted plants moved), and even more amazed that I have been given tools to figure it out and move past it.

Since then I worked with a writer friend to create a do-it-yourself writing retreat. I’ve been looking for the perfect retreat for years and, from what I can tell, everything I want costs more than I’m willing to spend and/or is inconveniently timed and/or is difficult/expensive to get to and/or won’t let in an unpublished writer who can’t even seem to pick a genre (having fumbled my way through creative nonfiction, short story, a middle grade novel, half an adult novel, flash, and poems…I’m like Bert from Mary Poppins when he’s got all those musical instruments strapped to him and he walks around making a bunch of noise). So my writer friend and I made our own and we went last weekend and holy hell. This perfect little retreat is the topic for another post but, suffice it to say, the long weekend was absolutely magical and was like the very best bandaid for my wounded heart.

I recently read about a study that shows that human happiness hits its lowest point around the age of 50, which I’ll be in seven short months. Reader, I believe it. The good news is that it starts climbing right back up again.

All this is to say that there are lots and lots of resources out there to help, if you need it. Don’t know where to start? I can hook you up. Or I can just lend a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on. Nearly everyone I know is going through some hard shit right now. Please know that you do not have to go through it alone. I learned from the poet Ross Gay that there is joy in suffering and sadness, because the joy is in finding your community and letting others carry you, even if just for a few steps.

#daily life#personal essay#therapy#writing