It had been two months since I’d run the Boston Marathon as a guide for a runner who was visually impaired. Mel literally fell out of her chair when I told her that detail. What on earth was I doing guiding anyone, much less someone who was visually impaired in a sport that I hate? But this is the one character trait I have that brings me as much joy as it does pain. When presented with an opportunity to suck the marrow out of life, I always say yes.
I’d said yes when someone from the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in this once-in-a lifetime opportunity. And come on, it’s not like I would ever qualify to run the Boston Marathon. I’m an incredibly slow runner, not to mention that I hate running. It is my least favorite thing in the world. But, you know, the Boston Marathon. I remember thinking, When I die, I will get to say that I ran the Boston Marathon, having no idea that this very endeavor would be the thing that triggered the beginning of a depressive episode so horrible that I would very much want to be dead.
I can point to the day that I downloaded a Hal Higdon marathon training program for beginners, one that I printed out and pinned to the wall next to my desk, and say, “This is when it all went to shit.” I always thought that one of the worst parts about being depressed is not knowing why. We never choose to feel this way. We’d give anything not to feel this way. And the most maddening thing we try to explain to people is that we know there is no reason for us to feel this way.
But then I found myself in a state of hopeless despair—and I knew why. And the knowing why didn’t make it any better. In fact, I thought I’d stop being depressed once I’d finished the race. When that didn’t happen—when the loneliness and feeling of desperate isolation continued to consume me—I wished that I hadn’t ever had a reason to hold on to in the first place. Because what was there to hold on to now?
Also, telling people “I ran a marathon and it made me depressed” is not how anyone should ever talk about depression to someone who doesn’t understand depression. I am passing that knowledge on to you in case you’re terrible at running and get invited to guide a runner who is visually impaired in a marathon.
I even tiptoed around this when recounting it to Mel, and her profession requires her to understand the hows and whys and whens of depression. Because, yes, it was the physical act of running, but it was also what the running required of me, what it took from me, what it didn’t give back. The training program for beginners totally works—it prepared me for the 26.2 miles of pavement between Hopkinton and Copley Square—but it was grueling and relentless and unforgiving. It completely wrecked my life.
By the second month of training, I was clocking over twenty miles a week, and I had even run a half marathon by week eight. Seasoned runners eat twenty miles for breakfast before heading out for their leisurely fifty-mile run; I get it—you don’t have to remind me. But by the end of the program the only way I could get in enough miles during the week was to ram them all in haphazardly, like taking a load of clothes out of the dryer and just shoving them into drawers without folding them.
Oh, I should probably mention this: I was eating a strict gluten-free vegan diet. Just a minor little detail I left out. Yeah, one of those assholes.
How does someone get depressed while eating the cleanest diet on the planet and exercising every day? Spending money to hire a babysitter when you do your long runs on the weekends is a fun way to build resentment, and in my case I was giving up my weekends and paying someone cash so that I could do my least favorite thing in the world. Remind me again why I was doing this: For a good cause? To bring attention to a worthy organization? To brag about it on my deathbed?
Since I live in Utah and we are rarely short on snow during the winter, I did most of my training on a treadmill inside a basement gym at a Jewish community center. I am terrible at running and would otherwise slip on the snow and break my neck. In fact, I did my twenty-mile-long run on a treadmill, and when it was over I thought, Well that’s the most television I have watched in years!
As much as I can point to deciding to train for this marathon as the beginning of my depression, I can also point to a very specific moment on a beach in Cancún when my outlook on life took a sharp, downward turn. My boyfriend at the time, the second person I dated after my divorce—someone I had started seeing about a month before this depressive episode started—made a series of comments about the amount of food I was eating. Neither of us had our children the week after Christmas in 2015—mine were with my ex and his were with his ex—and we’d traveled to a giant hotel overlooking the Caribbean to try and relax and unplug ourselves from the grind of work and single parenting. But I’d begun my marathon training three weeks prior to this vacation and needed to log nineteen miles in a climate where the humidity was making inanimate objects sweat. One could say that I was hungry, vastly downplaying the mercilessness of my appetite.
My boyfriend didn’t have much of an appetite at all, and we were only having one full meal a day. He wasn’t really interested in breakfast. Lunch? He’d hesitate and then say he could wait for an early dinner; why couldn’t I? I’d packed a few protein bars like I always do but ran out of them by the second day. I was starving, on vacation, in a lovely tropical locale. If I had been an adequately functioning adult in any way, I would have had a conversation with him to communicate the need to fuel my running with food. But I had a very colorful history of suppressing my needs and desires in my relationships with men. It’s the reason my marriage ended.
I lived inside a prison that I’d built as a defense mechanism. It’s the same prison I’d built in childhood to protect myself from my father’s intimidating and unpredictable temper. When I was eight years old, I once forgot to answer my mother with “Yes, ma’am?” when she called me from across the house. I absentmindedly yelled, “WHAT?” instead—the equivalent of THE HELL DO YOU WANT? in a Southern upbringing—and within seconds my father entered my room, cornered me against a wall, and let his temper roar. His face was mere inches from my own.
“You will not disrespect your mother like that, do you understand me?” he yelled through clenched teeth. “Nod your head and say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”
The earliest memories I have of my father aren’t even of my father. I remember my mother standing in the doorway to their bedroom. She was sobbing and repeating the plea “Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t” as my father disciplined my brother. The second memory of my father is of my mother standing in the doorway to the kitchen repeating those same words to him.
In my private sessions with Mel, she had made the correlation and shown me that I was repeating old habits. For years she wanted me to find my voice and defend myself, to own my irreverence, to simply be me. To stop being afraid. I feared being cornered against a wall even though my ex hadn’t ever intimidated me in any physical way. Although, metaphorically, that was precisely our dynamic. My fierce independence and sometimes brazen personality threatened my ex, and because I always feared that he would shame me for being inappropriate I constantly stifled those parts of myself. He often convinced me that what I was feeling was wrong and bad. I had feared being cornered against a wall in every romantic relationship, but especially with him.
Ironically, training for the first marathon I ever ran back in 2011 signaled the end of my marriage. Hours spent alone on miles of pavement, my bones jolted by every painful step—it all fractured my soul and tore me apart. It exposed all the pain I’d tried to suppress—the pain and stress and exhaustion of remaining vigilant, of making sure I was being appropriate and feeling the right things. Less than a month after I crossed the finish line of the 2011 ING New York City Marathon with a broken foot, I asked for a separation. A separation he did not want.
We saw Mel a few times during our separation: he wanted to try to save the relationship, and I wanted help breaking out of it. In our final session we were sitting on a couch opposite her. I was speaking at a tech conference directly after
our session and had put on my best clothes and decorated my face with an assortment of makeup I didn’t normally wear, details I have to point out because of what happened after she said, “Who wants to start?”
“I’ll go,” my ex said as he gripped his leg with his very large right hand. “I figured it out,” he continued. “I finally figured it out. I have gone over this and over this in my head and now I understand: I am paying for her daddy issues. I am suffering because she hasn’t figured out her daddy issues.”
He didn’t stop there, but I didn’t hear the rest of his twenty-minute rant. I had turned my head toward the window to analyze the arthritic curve of a tree branch outside. I thought about winters in Utah, how they expose the bones underneath what was once a blanket of vibrant leaves, brilliant foliage that suddenly surrenders when it’s time to go.
When he had stopped talking, Mel turned to me and asked me if I had any response to what he had said. She could see the clenching of my jaw reach all the way to my left temple, and that’s when she casually put her hand over her mouth. Maybe that’s why I am so drawn to her: because I have no poker face, either. She uses her hand to hide the reaction she must hide as a professional.
And then I let go. I let go of the fear and the worry and the vigilance. I let him know, in no uncertain terms, in a tone that registered on the Richter scale, that my “daddy issues” were the only reason I had remained in our marriage. I had married my father as much as I wanted to believe that I hadn’t. And I would be removing myself from this prison cell I had built.
At one point I had to stand up so that the roar in my stomach could make its way out of my throat. Years and years of pent-up resentment echoed throughout the room, going all the way back to the day that he moved in with me—the same day he found out that my ex-boyfriend lived down the hall. He spent weeks convincing me that it wasn’t normal. Why hadn’t I moved? I should have moved. Living in an apartment down the hallway from an ex-boyfriend was disrespectful to a current boyfriend, you see. Finally, in that small room overlooking that tree, I yelled, “AND HE WAS PROBABLY GAY! Why did you care?”
Mel was smiling behind her hand. I couldn’t see it, but I could see her eyes. I knew that I was giving her what most therapists probably don’t ever get to witness in person. I was serving up the fruits of her labor on a platter engraved with the date she’d received her license. I wanted to apologize for the tears and mascara that were dripping onto my nice blouse and the dress pants I’d put on to look like I knew what I was doing when I sat in front of an audience at that tech conference who would hear me speak about writing about life online.
Let the evidence show that I am terrible at communicating my needs in my relationships with men, which is why I am as much to blame for things going wrong as they are, if not more so. Perhaps if I had said to my boyfriend in Cancún that I needed a goddamn sandwich—you know, since I’d run nine miles that morning—I could have curbed the hunger. I could have solved it all with a simple “I am hungry and need to eat.” In hindsight it sounds so easy.
Instead I suffered in silence, and when we did eat a meal I would almost resort to using my hands to get the food into my body as fast as possible. I became an obsessed animal, a dumpster raccoon. Over a dinner of beans and rice, he watched as I aggressively scooped every last morsel into my mouth.
“I’ve never seen anyone eat as much as you do,” he said in total disbelief. I set my fork down and tried to swallow my last bite. I felt like someone had punched me in the face, and the force of it caused the room to spin. I’ve never seen anyone eat as much as you do. His words echoed in my ears. And just in case you didn’t know this little tidbit about social interaction, let me fill you in on something: Do not ever comment on how or what or when a woman is eating anything. Don’t do it. Because you know what might happen? You might trigger an obsession with food that the woman had managed to stifle for over twenty years—an obsession that throttled her ability to function throughout high school and college—all because you couldn’t resist monitoring her refried beans. Good job. Well done. Five stars. Ten points for you.
On the final day of our vacation, we chose to read and relax next to the ocean, and when someone from the waitstaff approached us to ask if we’d like anything to eat or drink, my boyfriend’s words flashed in giant neon letters at the front of my brain: I’ve never seen anyone eat as much as you do. I calculated the hours before dinner and ordered the largest serving of nachos on the menu so that I could have something to eat throughout the day, to tide me over for nine hours. Yes, the largest serving. The Super Nachos. Los Nachos Más Grandes. He’d already made the rude observation about my appetite, and who was I to prove him wrong?
A half hour later the server returned with a Styrofoam box overflowing with chips and beans and salsa. I had only a few bites, since I was saving most of it to snack on throughout the day and then covered it up with my towel to go for a quick dip with my boyfriend in the ocean. We returned not ten minutes later to a gory crime scene. Chunks of Styrofoam and half-chewed beans littered a twenty-square-foot area. My towel was bunched up in a wadded mass more than four feet from where I had left it. Feathers floated through the air. I quickly pieced together what had happened when two of the culprits showed up again to scrounge for those half-chewed beans.
That’s when something snapped in my skull, like a rubber band stretched too far. I ran to my towel, unfolded it so that I could use its full length, and began chasing those seagulls up and down the beach, swinging the towel like a propeller over my head. I am not proud of this. I do not recommend behaving in this manner on a beach where people are trying to unwind. I hope there are no photos or video footage of the crazy white lady in hot pursuit of birds on that one tragic morning in Cancún. But I’m glad I got my energy out, because when I returned to my lounge chair and my boyfriend shook his head and told me through fits of laughter, “You’re a little too obsessed with food,” I didn’t have the energy to cry.
SEVEN
NOTIFICATIONS TO THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
THE DAY AFTER MY second treatment was a Saturday. I woke up to the sound of one of my children rifling through the kitchen drawer where we store the boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and s’mores-flavor Pop-Tarts that my girls have for breakfast. A week prior to starting treatment, we had moved across town into a house almost 75 percent smaller than the house where I had lived through the entirety of this year-and-a-half-long episode of depression. My bedroom and Marlo’s bedroom were located in the basement, and the kitchen was on the ground floor. Now, instead of heading downstairs for breakfast with a directive from the universe to burn it to the ground, she headed upstairs, ready to follow through. This also moved us outside the route of Leta’s carpool and added to my schedule an hour-long route to drop off both girls at their different schools every weekday. So much Needing to Get Done.
I blinked a few times and could see light shining through the tiny gap between the two panels of blackout shades hanging in my window. I had barely moved during the night. My down comforter lay flat across me as if I’d just tidied my bed. I rolled over to look at the time on my phone and it read 8:24. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept that late, even on weekend mornings when my mother would take my girls to give me a break. My anxiety would wake me up before 7:00 a.m.
More than twenty email notifications cluttered the screen of my phone. Twenty emails overnight. A Friday night. I quickly scrolled through them all, looking for key words like “due” or “denied” or “cannot process” or “invoice.” Mostly I was looking for the name of my boss. Whenever I saw the letters of his name on my phone, via either text or email, my entire body would seize. For the previous nine months I had been consulting with a nonprofit working to protect animals. He’d hired me to help overhaul their entire brand and online presence. I brought over twenty years of experience working with Internet-based companies, most notably my blog, which had supported my family for over eleven years. I had pulled back quite a bit from blogg
ing a couple of years previously, given that making money as a blogger had completely transformed. I could no longer make a living off of banner advertisements and instead had to write sponsored content for brands who wanted to insert their products into the stories I was writing about my life and children. I had to manufacture experiences with my kids to fit the talking points of a creative brief and present that as real life.
I knew I just couldn’t do it anymore when I was trying to get my kids into the car to play a word game while driving to a ranch in the mountains. This would be the third of three posts I was to write for an automotive brand about quality time with my kids in the car. Except my kids and I don’t like to drive long distances or play word games or act even remotely friendly to each other, because we’re confined in a car. We’re either listening to music or staring off in silence or the two of them are bickering about God knows what.
Marlo did not want to participate in yet another ruse, and I had to bribe and threaten and cajole to get her in that car. Right as she opened her door, she looked up at me through tears and begged, “Please, Mom, don’t make me do this.”
My children had been written into the contract I had with the ad network who negotiated on my behalf with these brands, and I felt dirty and wrong.
When my contract ended with that ad network, I continued to blog a bit, but I turned my focus toward public speaking, an endeavor I thoroughly enjoyed. However, making money as a public speaker is incredibly difficult unless you’re a former president or you’ve discovered the secret to happiness. Not much demand for the opposite of that.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 6