I wanted to write this week about depression, not only because acknowledging and naming my depression has been a profound marker in my journey with mental health over the last two years, but because I think the more we talk about it the more normal I feel about it. And maybe you will too. I’ve re-written this 4 times trying to find a way to make it shorter, and unfortunately it’s just really long. Sorry.
Before we start I want to say one thing: depression is incredibly personal. How you acknowledge, name, care for and manage your mental health is your responsibility and yours alone. The ways that I describe my depression manifesting in my life may not resemble anything you’ve experienced or ever even thought about, which is absolutely okay, and how I have learned to cope with mine may be different than what you’re familiar or comfortable with. All of that is perfectly fine, we are all just doing the very best that we can. If discussions of deep depressive episodes or harmful intrusive thoughts will set you on the wrong mental path, then please skip this newsletter and I’ll see you back here next week.
I don’t know how you sum up depression in a nice little neatly wrapped newsletter with a subject line and a signature, I guess you can’t. Depression is big and messy and complicated. I guess you start by giving it a name. That’s what worked for me, when I was my saddest and darkest and lowest in December of 2020; when after 2 months of weekly therapy my therapist Pamela said, “I’m officially diagnosing you with Complex Depressive Disorder” because I told her that I would lay in bed for hours a day and feel like there was absolutely no reprieve from the obsessive thoughts and negative self talk. Only then, after she gave me permission for these big feelings to not be entirely my own fault, did I start finding a way to exist outside of my sadness.
My depression didn’t start in 2020 (although tbh, a good time to pick up a mental health disorder), it started (to the best of my memory) when I was 17. There were a lot of very big, uncontrollable changes happening in my life that I didn’t have the emotional capacity to know how to process and in a desperate attempt to feel in control and stable, my brain started writing new thought patterns that I could repeat on a loop over and over and over and over again until I felt a sense of control. What I now understand are called ruminating thoughts, then to me just felt like a little safe haven in my brain. A place that felt familiar and safe in a time that was otherwise rife with uncertainty.
Here’s how it worked: One potentially innocuous situation would occur, could have been as simple as taking the wrong exit on the freeway, and I would think “you are an idiot.” And then I would think it over and over and over again until it was a 100% fact. I couldn’t stop thinking about what an idiot I was. I would then tell myself that everyone I’ve ever known obviously knew and thought that I was, in fact, an idiot and just didn’t know how to tell me; that everyone was just tolerating me. This then became confirmation that I was an abject failure at anything and everything.
You know those toy cars you had as a kid that you put on a plastic looping track and then you’d pull the car back and let it go and it would whip around the track until it ran out of energy or hit the side and flew off? That’s what ruminating thoughts feel like for me. Once it starts I can’t pull myself off the track and I’m spinning around and around until I eventually fly off and land somewhere new.
As I got older those ruminating, intrusive thoughts got darker and heavier and I began to cope with these thoughts by completely shutting down. You have to understand that there is only so much that your body can hold at one time before the mental weight of it becomes too much to carry, and by my mid to late twenties I was so exhausted and burnt out that my body started to force itself to shut down. This means a lot of things for different people, but for me it mainly meant that I was so, so tired and I just needed to sleep all the time.
Here’s an example: when I was 26 I had just gotten married and moved to New York. I was interviewing for a job that I really, really wanted. It seemed like the golden opportunity, the culmination of all of my hopes and dreams and I was banking my future success on getting this job. I interviewed on a Monday and by Thursday they had told me they were going to move forward with offering me the role. And then I didn’t hear from them with an official offer on Friday and by Friday night I was in such a deep dark hole that I couldn't get out of bed. This is an absolutely absurd timeline of events. It took 24 hours of silence to confirm that I was, in fact, a failure, that they uncovered that I was a fraud, that I was never going to amount to anything, that I didn’t belong in New York and that everything I believed to be true was a lie. Honestly it’s funny to read this back knowing what I know now because I cannot believe how many times this exact pattern repeated in my life. Something doesn’t go the way I want or planned for on the timeline that I want or expect it to and I slip under water and then I’m tumbling and falling and I can’t get out. (I got the job by the way and worked there for exactly 8 months until multiple employees sued the owners and I was like I g2g but I’ll sign an NDA in exchange for 3 months of my salary.)
After years of successfully convincing myself that I was unlovable, a failure, extremely stupid, ugly, and any and every other thought you can have about yourself, I was just left feeling really sad all the time. I used to write in my journals that I constantly felt like I was swallowing quicksand; like I could physically be present in one place but in my head all I could see and feel was myself drowning in my sadness and I didn’t know how to stop it from happening. With nowhere else to go, the thoughts turned towards me being ungrateful. How could I feel this sad when I had so much? Look at what I have that others don’t? I have a beautiful life! I live in the greatest city in the world! I have a great job! A really great partner and marriage! A beautiful apartment! How can you, a dumb, stupid idiot, possibly be sad with all that you have?
And that is what led me into my heaviest depressive episodes yet. It’s really dark to already hate everything about yourself and then tell yourself that you don’t even deserve, that you aren’t even worthy, of feeling that way. By the time I was 32 I had turned my own mind so far against myself that I didn’t have anything left to try to control. I couldn’t trust my own instincts because I’d spent years telling myself they were wrong. I hated my body because all I knew was that it wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t trust any of the opinions of others because I was convinced they were all just lying to me to make me feel good. That’s the thing about negative self-talk, every thought becomes the foundation for the house that your body lives in. Each new thought becomes another layer and then eventually you’re trapped inside of a prison of your own making, inside of the house that you built on the hatred that you let yourself believe.
In October of 2020 when I was at my lowest, I would lay in bed for hours at a time wondering why this was happening to me. Some part of my logical brain knew that this couldn’t possibly be the way that my life was going to be forever, but the other part of me, the part that I’d become so comfortable with over the past 15 years, only knew how to cope by shutting down. I just kept shutting down. I wasn’t going to harm myself, but I just didn’t want to do any of it anymore. I wanted to just finally sink into the quicksand and slip away into this sadness that had become my most comfortable home. With absolutely nothing left to lose, I went back to therapy and asked for someone to help me understand why I was just so mind-numbingly empty.
I was looking back at my journal from that time and this was what I wrote a week before I started therapy:
October 14, 2020
1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3
On repeat, cycling through my head, up and down and down and up and every day feels like a repeat of the day before and tomorrow will feel like a repeat of today.
I think a lot about how life keeps happening to you even if you do nothing about it. Like the way that a wave keeps carrying you further out if you don’t stand up and walk back to shore. I think depression is a lot like that, like being carried further and further out into the ocean and not having the energy to pull myself back to shore. It feels like every single act requires so much intention. And then when you do find the energy to get there and you do what needs to be done, it feels like a waste of time.
Anyways. It’s all a lot of work. And sometimes the work bears no fruit. And sometimes even when it does the fruit isn’t what you wanted.
I look back at that version of myself now and I wish I could pick her up and drag her back to shore. I wish I could pull her out of the water and hold her and tell her that there’s joy on the other side of that sadness; that if we can just learn to get off the track then we’ll create a new reality that doesn’t feel so sad, so up and down, all the time.
I guess that’s actually what I did. I gave my sadness a name. I told myself that it wasn’t just me, it wasn’t just my thoughts, it was depression, and that felt bigger than me. It wasn’t my fault anymore. I gave it a name (well, Pamela did) and then I could look at it not as a failure of my own doing, but as the reality that it is: I am a person who struggles with depression. It has been in my blood since before I was born. It is a part of me that ties me to certain members of my family because it is a reality that we all share. It is not because I did something wrong, it is not for a lack of my personal gratitude for the life that I have, I am just someone who has depression. These thoughts and these feelings don’t all have to be real, they can just be symptoms of something that I deal with. That is how I stepped off the tracks, by giving it a name.
Pamela explained that all of this, these thoughts and these patterns of behavior, were originally just a means of self-protection. That home that I built for myself wasn’t meant to be built out of hate, it was just my attempt to create safety within my own body. Can you imagine the relief that brought me? To understand that all of this didn’t stem from a desire to be at war with myself? There is a lot of freedom in understanding that this started from a place of love and that we could find our way back there and start again.
There isn’t a quick fix solution to not feeling sad everyday. You have to try to take down the layers of the house that you’ve meticulously crafted for yourself. You have to acknowledge that it no longer serves you and that you want to leave, and then you have to do the really hard work of understanding how you got there. You have to understand what situations and scenarios will put you back there if you aren’t careful. You have to create a plan for what you do when your intrusive thoughts inevitably return for another go and try to convince you that you are someone that you now know that you are not.
I got covid in January of this year, and while the physical symptoms were thankfully fairly mild, the neurological side effects were extremely severe. It dragged me down to the lowest depths of my depression. I can’t explain exactly what it felt like except that I wanted to die. The ruminating thought that I kept thinking was that I was a burden to everyone around me and that everyone would be better if I was just gone. The difference between this and October 2020 Libby was that I knew these thoughts weren’t real. They would pop into my head, I would think them over and over and then I would immediately say “this isn’t real, your brain is playing tricks on you. This isn’t real” and I would repeat that over and over until it would all just stop and I could move on to something else. This lasted for 7 days and then it just broke. I felt okay again. I wasn’t on the track anymore.
I chart my depression everyday. I assign it a number and if it’s above a 4 I make a note about why that is so that I can know what caused the spike and I can write a new plan for what to do if it happens again. Most days right now are a 0, but that’s only because I work really hard to take care of myself. I have to eat food that feels good for my body (that mind/gut connection is very real), I have to exercise a certain amount each week by doing movement that feels good and not punishing, I had to significantly reduce the amount of alcohol I consume (sad, I love wine) and I have to keep showing up to therapy each week so that I can shake out some of my emotions and let Pamela help me determine what’s real and what’s not. I have a mental toolbox of tricks that I use to pull me out when I feel myself starting to spiral. And it’s all worth it. I’ve found a really rewarding new richness in my relationships since I started being able to hear and believe the things that people tell me about myself. I now know that I’m not a burden to other people, that everyone in my life is there because they choose to be, not because I’ve tricked them into it.
I guess all of this is just to say that there is nothing wrong or broken about your sadness; that if depression is a valley that you live in then just know that there is joy at the top of the mountain if you can find your way there. You don’t have to let yourself drown in the quicksand or die in the house that you built in your mind. You aren’t broken, you’re just sad sometimes. And there’s a lot of freedom in acknowledging that you’re just doing the best you can.
Your mental health is your responsibility but that doesn’t mean you have to carry it all on your own. If you don’t feel like you have anyone to carry your sadness with you, then I hope you’ll find a way to love and care for yourself in all of the ways that feel good. I hope you’ll build your own toolbox and get off the track. I hope you know that even on your saddest day, there are people who not only love you but really, really like having you around.
Fight your way to the top of the mountain. Drag yourself to the shore. Don’t give up until you’re there. I promise it’s better here.
Thank you for your bravery and for writing about this. ❤️🩹 I sent you a message on your shop Instagram.
A tough read, but such an empowering one. Thank you for sharing your experience. I have always admired you, from the first time I heard you present at BT on maybe my second day?! You blew me away then and ever since, and as we became friends I loved more and more about you. We are each on a journey, and I’m glad our paths crossed.