Two years ago I had told myself that if nothing got better I would kill myself. My self-imposed deadline came and went quietly without much notice. I’d almost forgotten about it completely and it turned out I’m still here. Sharing something like this is reflexively cringe, so bear that weight with me for a moment. Okay, now we can keep going. I usually tend to lean towards walking a fine line of intimacy and keeping more meaningful things to myself when it comes to the internet, but for the past couple years I’ve decided nothing is embarrassing anymore. I am me and one day I will no longer be me. Today’s shame will be reduced to nothingness when we are worm food in the ground. I’d like people to know who I am. And I’d like to tell you about something I know quite well these days, I call it The Pit.
I spent this past weekend in the Olympic Peninsula with my best friend. I breathed crisp air that smelled like wet dirt, I walked until my knees aged me and I felt the Earth pulsing life through every root that squished under my feet and in between layers of mud. I felt ‘there’- not just present, but there. The tops of the trees conspired to show a new type of closeness to me. Branches interlaced like the fingers that reminded me of all the ones that once held mine. I leaned in to hear the whispers of some hidden truth from the world around me, like the universe was specifically calling to me while no one else was around. On the sides of the winding roads guarded by thick armies of solemn Douglas Firs and Spruces I saw literal signs with various oddly specific messages. “Keep going”, followed by another directly behind it that read “Exciting things are coming” in stark white paint against a forest green highway sign. No other context or information. I laughed to myself.
It could be all too easy to forget just how much is happening around you when you’re plummeted to the depths of hell in your own mind. Two years ago I was freshly out of a breakup with the person I wanted to marry and build a life with. Someone who felt like home. I spent my whole childhood moving around, so ‘home’ was an aching novelty to me. Unassigned to meaning. Vacant in nostalgia. I built a home out of a person, and I guess you weren’t really supposed to do that. It wasn’t healthy or something. After I’d moved out and was alone again I had to face myself and the thing I call The Pit. The Pit was the vortex of feeling that weighed a million pounds permanently sitting in my chest for as long as I could remember. There were few constants in the story of my life that were as consistent and perpetual as The Pit. No matter how much I ignored it, The Pit stayed the same. Unattended and never satiated, The Pit was central to my personhood. Like a limb. There was never a time in my life without it and it operated like I’d imagined a black hole did, sucking anything and everything into its greedy mouth. The Pit sat sharply in my chest and often made being alive feel an impossible task, an overwhelming request of devotion I hadn’t possessed. It was too demanding to keep feeding it- this always starving thing. It took too much energy to live symbiotically with The Pit. As much as it consumed from me, I couldn’t picture a life without it. From the time I was a kid to now, The Pit was inside me.
I spent a lot of that time stuck in my mind, my body, my minimized world, and it felt like everyone else was moving in double speed, without me. I imagined that was how the banana slugs in Washington felt, left behind for a world too fast, always trying to catch up. Trying to cross the road before being run over. Unbearable wasn’t an encompassing enough word for it. I felt like a loser all the time, like I’d been given so much baggage in my life so that I could make something out of it, but all it did was weigh me down. And I was so fucking angry at my parents, because they’d never let me have a childhood and then angry again at the realization that I’d have to spend the rest of my life fixing myself. It was like trying to outrun the inevitable. Two years ago when I’d made this promise to myself I never imagined a scenario where life would feel good to live, and not just enduring.
So, I told myself that if things felt the same in two years, I would wipe my hands clean of this whole mess. That my time would be up and I could say “hey, at least I gave it an honest shot”. And somewhere between then and now, something started happening. It appeared that life began happening. And in a way, I think freeing myself from the weight of having to carry everything forever was exactly what lightened my load. Giving myself an out in a couple years took the pressure off of having to figure it all out. Not that I condone this method in any way, shape or form. Do as I say not as I do type of thing.
I started moving again. Inertia became the conquerer of my depression and I began working, creating, falling in and out of crushes, being alone. Being alone. Being. Alone. And if you, too, have A Pit; well here’s what I know to be true. Looking The Pit directly in its face was the neutralization of its never-ending consumption. I had to sit with it long enough to understand it. I spent many days and even more agonizing nights learning about it, where it came from, when it started, and what it wanted from me. I got quiet with it. Dropped my guard and stopped being hateful towards it. And at the very bottom of The Pit I heard a voice. It was me- my voice, disembodied from some point in the past and somewhere in the future. But instead of hearing what I braced myself for; the anger of a voice abandoned, I heard softness. I heard the gentleness of me at twenty-one deciding I could make it to see one more morning. I heard the shaky hopefulness of me at sixteen, promising myself I would leave home one day and never look back. I heard myself at twenty-seven, starting all over again. I heard myself at six, wondering if I was loved. I heard so many nights in the aftermath of despair, just before deciding to sleep, and being nursed awake by another sunrise. I heard every single version of me who allowed me to be breathing today, and the thing is- those voices were never weak like I used to think they were. They were relentless. They knew something deeply true about potential. They had nothing but the seed of optimism that one day- it wouldn’t feel so bad. And as an act of radical rebellion against a society and childhood that wanted me to hate myself- I pulled them out of The Pit. Two years ago I never thought today could feel like this. I am so grateful for every voice at the bottom of The Pit becoming listened to.
A lot of people believe in leaving their past selves behind, but I thank god- if there is one, that they never left me behind.
– To as many years as I have left to keep listening.
almondmilkhunni 