Content Warning: Discussion of self-harm & suicial ideation
I was thinking about my April 21 this morning: that feeling of being fourteen and untested in my capacity to withstand tough days, one after the other. The first time depression comes to town and you have no reason to believe it will ever leave. You’ve never seen it do so before. So when it pulls up a chair and crawls into your bed and permeates every thought in your head you think ‘So this is what my life is’ and then ‘So do I want to live it?’
I always wanted life’s challenges to look like fighting dark wizards or escaping the dungeons of a castle. Instead, at fourteen, it looked a lot more like trying to layer on foundation to cover my acne, pinching my stomach fat in the mirror, and wondering if some golden boy would ever notice me while I was too choked up to ever act like anything other than the shy nerd in his presence. It looked like feeling invisible when I just wanted to be seen (but also, ‘no one look at me!’) while feeling betrayed by my own imagination of what I wanted budding teenagehood to look like.
At thirty-one, all that seems normal. This is white American middle-class childhood, right? Listing what caused me pain seems kind of trivial in a life that was otherwise fairly privileged and full of familial love.
But it didn’t feel trivial. It felt hard and terrible and like walking through nails through every social interaction and then feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t smile through it. And there were patterns I learned then, in those first days of coping, that have been a bitch to break. Some of them will be here forever, hardwired into my brain.
At thirty-one, I have the benefit of another seventeen years of education – of resources, and therapy, and a few more cycles of debilitating depression that I saw the end of. Some of my metaphorical dark wizards in the years since might’ve stopped me in my tracks forever at fourteen.
If you told me back then that I would get divorced when I was twenty-four I might have died . . . or rallied against fate only to end up in the same situation. If you told me that I would fall in love with two babies only to have both adoptions fall through within a few months of each other, I don’t think I would have understood that grief. I don’t think I understood grief at all at fourteen.
I didn’t know what true anxiety felt like until I was twenty-two and googling if I was dying while at work because my chest hurt so badly.
But more importantly, at fourteen, I didn’t know how to change course. I was stuck in a depression with escalating self-harm and it felt like I had inadvertently gotten a train that there was no getting off of, even if the train was headed off a cliff.
But on April 21, 2007, I got off the train. It was not a big leap and then, ‘Wow, my depression is cured and will never come back and I will have no problem at all handling difficult times anymore.’. I wish. Certainly, that’s what I thought it meant the first time my depression lifted – I thought that life probably didn’t have anything more to teach me if I had gotten through that. Oh, the sweetness of fifteen-year-old naivety.
No – getting off the train on April 21 meant two important things for me:
One, that I did actually want to get off the train. That I did not want to die. That I did want to find another option.
Two, that I needed to ask for help.
It’s so poetic to suffer in your secrets at fourteen, but no one was going to read my mind and know what I needed. I had to tell someone something. (I did the next day.)
I used to call this day my epiphany day – it certainly felt like one at the time – but I’ve mostly retired the term. During my senior year of college, when I broke my promise to myself and ended my seven-year streak of not hurting myself, my depression returned that much stronger. In part because I had thought I had “solved” this problem already. I felt like I had ripped out my identity simply by being in pain and not knowing how to cope again. But I eventually asked for help once more and soon after one of my best friends reminded me that I didn’t have to stop acknowledging the importance of April 21 – that the day, and the years since, had still mattered, no matter where I was at now.
She was right, so I still celebrate April 21. There’s a tradition of making puppy chow and usually putting on a fun dress. Some years I’m with people but some years, like today, I’m with myself. I volunteered at the Writing Center today and was able to get some work and studying done while I watched the desk. I went for a walk in the sun. I made puppy chow. I wore my cherry dress.
There are no expectations anymore, but I try to have a good day on April 21, no matter what is going on. It’s my way of honoring that fourteen-year-old who decided she wanted to try, to go on. And in a way it’s honoring every pivotal moment in the years since when I had to make that decision all over again. Twenty-one in a dorm room. Twenty-three on the top of an apartment garage. Thirty and falling to my knees in a hotel in Kansas. Thirty-one and barely breathing on my bedroom floor.
But I choose to try. I go on. Onward.
With Love,
Natalie
P.S. Previous April 21 posts: