TW: Discussion of depression and self-harm.
When I was fourteen I had a hard thing to say and didn’t know how to say it.
I was far along in my first cycle of depression, which, as a newly minted teenager manifested in a lot of moody poetry, dramatic silent crying in front of the mirror, and a loneliness I didn’t think I’d grow out of. It’s easy to laugh at myself from over a decade of distance, but the reality at the time edged on dangerous: showing up as cuts on my skin and dictating farewell notes as I fell asleep.
(It’s easy to call it teenage angst, isn’t it? When we don’t have the language for what was happening to us. When we are too young to feel it and yet do and must.)
I liked my secrets then and didn’t tell anyone until I decided I needed to. I decided I needed to because otherwise I knew I would just give up. I’m glad I had some sense, even then, that fourteen was really no position to be making judgments about the rest of my life.
I decided to tell my best friend at the time. A boy I was already in love with and though I didn’t trust him to understand, I trusted him. I was at his house, sitting on his twin bed with him staring me down across the room. It was dark in the room; for some reason we hadn’t turned on the lights. I told him I needed to talk to him, but I couldn’t get the words out.
He waited. And prompted. And waited. And I sat on his mattress willing the numbness to lift for a moment so I could ask for help. It didn’t.
Eventually, I said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
We walked down the side of the quiet country road. It was late April, warm for Wisconsin spring, and the sky did something for me I couldn’t do myself in that dark bedroom: opened me up. The movement as we walked loosed my lips and the sun coaxed the right words out of me. I confessed to my friend what I’d been feeling, what I’d been doing, that I needed some goddamn help.
That day didn’t make everything better, but it was a start, and it taught me a lesson I live over and over again. When you don’t know what to do, go outside.
Giving myself physical space when I feel boxed in my fear, shame, or sadness is an act of perspective for me. Sometimes my sadness can lose its potency under the wide sky. The things we hold in us that hurt and crowd us inside in our bedrooms have room to go somewhere else if we walk them a few miles. Sometimes we let what’s inside us grow too big. Sometimes it’s good to feel small in the world. Or better, connected in the world.
I collaborated with my friend Jenna Knapp (Milwaukee artist and creator of TheSelfCareStudio) on a video project a few years ago titled FOREVER. We wrote: “The earth taught me not to seek what’s enclosed, but what is open. Someone once said when I’m sad, to go outside. Let gravity of the open-air pull my problems away. Let the original healers take care of me.”
I believe that.
With Love,
Natalie