Can you Write a new Life Into Being?
The page is the only safe space I have.
When I lost my writing voice for five years as a result of major depressive disorder, that one safe space disappeared. I started withering away; the vocation for which I had sacrificed so much and which defined me became a fading memory.
As my brain began to atrophy and cannibalize itself, the illness attacked everything that made me me. My trademark sunniness and good humor vanished. My playfulness died, and my ability to see beauty in everything and everyone disappeared. A world I had up to then experienced in vibrant technicolor became black and white.
Soon, everything blended into the uniform gray of inescapable sadness reflected in my eyes.
Even when I made a superhuman effort to crack a smile, my gaze betrayed me and remained that of someone who was barely alive. I could no longer recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror.
Without the financial wherewithal to access therapy, I got increasingly worse.
Anthony Bourdain’s death jolted my brain and triggered a fight or flight response. Someone I had never met but related to in many ways had shown me my future.
It was a future I didn’t want.
The only way to escape what looked like a certain fate was to reconnect with words.
While vocation can be a blessing, it becomes a curse when you find yourself unable to practice it.
Mine wasn’t a simple case of writer’s block but a complete inability to string words together.
I couldn’t think.
My brain was a small child throwing a tantrum, rolling over on the floor, screaming in outrage, and refusing to budge. My mind was pure psychic pain that defied language. If you know Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”, this is how living in my head felt for five years.
When you can’t think, you can’t write. You can type if you’re lucky but what comes out is nonsense.
As my survival instinct kicked in, I realized I’d have to face the page again if I was to save myself. And so I did, eking out fragments of text that were so steeped in angst and pain they were unpublishable. It took me a while until I ended up with an essay, it took me even longer to work up the courage to share it and out myself as a fallible and imperfect human.
Vulnerable, still unsteady on my feet, and with no clue how to proceed, I was once again the mother of children made of ink and paper, or rather pixels and data packets.
With motherhood comes great responsibility, and that first essay meant I had rekindled my vocation.
If only I could salvage it, I thought it might just save me.
Istarted using words as little bricks with which to build bridges toward the outside world.
I desperately needed to break out of isolation and loneliness.
Because depression felled me as soon as I immigrated to America in 2013, I never got the chance to build a network of my own.
Because I married someone who has no friends, I never got the chance to tap into an existing network either.
Because depression turned me into a hermit, I never got the chance to reach out to anyone.
Cue a five-year nap I almost didn’t wake up from.
Turning to mental health advocacy was the most logical thing in the world so I embraced radical honesty and resolved not to hold back. To this day, this commitment continues to inform my writing.
Most days, distress, doubt, and despair are strafing me from all sides, day and night. Old demons from a traumatic past have come back to life now that I am spending so much time in France with my family while Stage IV cancer keeps trying to kill my stepmom.
And now, the mutual rescue mission that saw another human and I attempt to save each other’s life seems to have collapsed. It’s all the more crushing as we had managed to co-create the kind of energy that allowed us to project ourselves into the future for the first time in years.
For two people beset with crippling chronic illnesses, this was nothing short of extraordinary.
I started smiling again, often dancing in the kitchen while serenading my cats. I tasted happiness, I tasted joy, I recovered the belief that had guided my entire life before depression: I can write my way toward anything I set my mind to.
Alas, that joyous, wondrous present quickly started turning into a past that hung heavy as that human fell silent, for reasons I am not privy to.
While they may be trying to protect me, their silence is nonetheless painful.
Words are my flashlight, the one tool that cuts through the fog of depression.
To write, I must maintain the ability to think.
As the muse kept coming in and out of focus and fading to black often after my friend disappeared from view, my thinking and reasoning capacities got more and more impaired.
Against all odds, muscle memory kept me going. Prior to this, I had spent several months reactivating the editorial habits acquired over many years working as a journalist and found out they could still be relied upon.
I did have my doubts at first but making myself write and not coming up for air until I have produced copy that has legs never fails. It is a way of working that remains hardwired in me.
At the beginning of the year, the above was the reality of depression, the reality of going it alone, the reality of trying to be present for others when no one was there for me. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep going like this as my body was already malfunctioning in myriad ways, some more worrying than others.
I had gotten used to bootstrapping wellness and was making slow progress but another human’s presence made all the difference. The constant exchange of energy between us was my fuel, a self-replenishing supply of goodness we created, together. When my friend disappeared, I was bereft and I still am.
Because I was determined to pull myself out of depression and hardship regardless of circumstances, I kept writing to defy the impossible.
In the midst of chaos, burgeoning friendship offered me its hand to hold.
And this time, it’s not letting go.
When I set out to rebuild a life that works, word by word, I didn’t know whether it could be done, or even how.
You might just be surprised by what happens once you do.
I’m a French-American writer and journalist living out of a suitcase in transit between North America and Europe. To continue the conversation, follow the bird. For email and everything else, deets in bio.
Can you Write a new Life Into Being?
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