One warm autumn evening, 52 years into my life, the world suddenly stopped spinning. It paused just long enough for me to discover I wasn’t broken all that time, I was just gay. Then it slowly started spinning again. In the opposite direction.
Within five years, so much had changed in my life, I felt like a visitor in my body, observing every thought and behavior of a woman I did not know. I didn’t plan to lose my family, my husband and best friend, my career, my health, my future story – in a word, my identity – when I came out. I didn't expect my future to fall off the other side of the horizon. I was too dazed by staggering relief to know I wasn’t actually broken. I expected change, of course. I did not expect the loss. But the losses did come. They came with the fury of summer storms up the mid-Atlantic coast, one after the other. At midlife, I had to find a whole new life for myself. And a reason to live it.
Depression has a way of finding hopeful, unsuspecting people like me who wander into unknown territory. It smells fear seeping from the slightest crack in our vulnerability and swoops in. Suddenly concrete slabs are falling from the sky. Soon you are buried. You'll hear people walking around those slabs calling for you. You'll feel too ashamed to call back. I urge you, call back. For the first three years, I didn't. Eventually my people thought I wasn't there and left. In the fourth year, when things got bad - but not worse - I began to wonder why nobody was there to help me. In isolation, perspective is the first thing to go.
I stared out my bedroom window, watched endless hours of Netflix, moved to the living room window, listened to podcasts, and weeded the garden. Anything to numb the raw, visceral ache of despair gnawing away the flesh under my flesh, my bones, my spirit.
One day, I was taking my car to have the tires changed, not convinced there was a point to it. I came to a stop in front of the tire store, where I had to make a U-turn. I watched a mass of cars speeding toward me from the opposite direction. I positioned my foot over the gas, knowing it would just take an instant for the pain to go away. A man in a tire-store uniform on the sidewalk flailing his arms wildly caught my eye. They never come out to wave me in. How did he know I was the customer who called in earlier? So struck with disbelief, I followed his signal and drove in.
I realized later that, under the rubble, things had gone from bad to worse. I had been waiting for the oxygen to run out. Luckily, I remembered from my work in mental health what we want people to do when they're in that kind of trouble. The next time someone walked by the pile of slabs on top of me, I spoke up. She was a therapist and talked to me through the cracks. People saw her and formed a crowd to help.
One gave me antidepressants. Another suggested mood enhancing supplements and diet. Others introduced me to Brene Brown, Tara Brach, and Cate Stillman. My daughter and nieces showed up with weekend visits, weekly dinners, and outings. One wrote to me: "This is the year I discovered my aunt is a warrior."
In therapy, I learned sadness needed its space so that it could flow on through. After months of carrying a boulder in my arms, occasionally I discovered a place to rest it for an afternoon. Some days became warmer than others. For months, a year, more, I allowed for nothing to happen. Until something did. The flow of sadness began slowing. When my chiropractor asked me why my body was shaped like a spoon, I told him I had been hiding in the back of a cave. With genuine concern that surprised me, he said, "Just move. You don't have to go anywhere. Just move." I started by getting up. Then walking down the hallway. I went to the garden and pulled weeds. I dug out my yoga mat and stretched my arms and legs. Eventually, I walked out the door and around the block.
Walking became something I could do that made me feel continuous again. Like I'd merged back into life around me. It wasn't my life, but it pulled me along. It was all I had, so I kept walking. Across the street, across the neighborhood, across the city - until I found myself on a 150-mile trek through the Himalayas. After 5 weeks, I returned home with enough muscle tone back in my spirit to push the concrete slabs an inch, then another, each day. I started calling on friends. Each time I had to come out to someone else, a squall of grief knocked me over, but eventually I could do it without crying. And then without grieving. After a few more months, the pieces were falling into place.
I reconciled with my mother, who had rejected my coming out. I worked out an amicable divorce agreement. I survived the holidays. I wondered about my lost career, and in the eye of the storm started graduate school. By the end of the year, I completed training as a coach. I returned to friendships with a spirit of family. I had a daily yoga practice again and daily walks. (When I started writing this, I didn’t realize how much I’d accomplished. Depression does that to you; keeps you in the dark.) That's not to say any of this came easily. These were concrete slabs I was pushing. But with help over the course of two years, one good push would fuel another, and eventually a foundation began forming.
Looking back at that time, I know this: it took a lot of effort to live. It was that effort that made me more awake and alive than I'd ever been in my life. I crawled. I prayed. I sobbed. I froze. I fought. I fell. I gave up. I got up. I idled. I pushed. I pleaded. With people to help me, I was able to reach out for what seemed unreachable. Isn't that what it means to be alive? To keep reaching with whatever we have for one thing to mean something? It hurts. Sometimes unbearably. So much that we think we'll never reach what we need. But we can reach out. Someone will come. They'll walk with you. You'll get home.