My boss and I had become friends through a mutual friend and connected mostly over our strict vegan diets and concern for animal welfare. When he offered me the job, he knew that I was struggling to book speaking engagements; and when I did speak, the travel completely disrupted my life. I’d booked gigs in Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, and in cities all across the country. Finding child care and someone to watch my dog made arranging travel a nightmare, especially when I had to be somewhere during the school week. It also proved problematic with my marathon training schedule, and on my trip to New Zealand where I spoke at two different conferences, I had to fit in a total of forty training miles. When I returned home, the fatigue of those miles combined with jet lag, and trying to find food that fit my diet left me in a useless heap. Except I didn’t really have the option of being a useless heap and instead attempted to tackle All the Things Needing to Get Done like a zombie. Two days later I managed to fit in a sixteen-mile long run on a treadmill.
I accepted the job for the stability of it and signed on as independent contractor so that I could still maintain my own business and pursue any other consulting gigs that might arise. However, it immediately became clear that I would have no time outside of this position to pursue anything, nor would I have the desire to. That’s another thing that people don’t understand about depression: we don’t want to take a shower, we don’t know why we feel this way, and even if we did, it wouldn’t make us stop feeling this way. We have lost all interest in doing anything, especially anything that once brought us joy—because that thing will not bring us joy, and we can’t bear the meaning of that. It would be too much. It would crush us.
My boss is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met and had worked in animal welfare for years. He started this nonprofit with a professor in San Diego, and the entire twelve-person team worked remotely. We had employees in California, Oregon, and New York, and three in Salt Lake City. And within that twelve-person team no one really had a firm grasp of the role they were required to play. Meaning: everyone did everything. And often we were working over each other, around each other, and in total darkness. Expectations were nebulous and often miscommunicated or not communicated at all. I’d worked in several Internet start-ups that operated this way—it wasn’t a huge surprise to me and I know it’s not uncommon elsewhere—except at that time I wasn’t raising two daughters by myself. Now I couldn’t drop everything to put out a huge fire if I was driving my kid to her piano lesson or picking her up from school because she’d caught yet another cold. Given my circumstances at home, navigating this kind of chaotic work environment proved almost impossible. And my boss would routinely text or email me upset about something that had gone wrong, something that had most likely slipped through the cracks while everyone was trying to figure out what they were supposed to be doing.
After only three months of working with this team, I developed a Pavlovian response to notifications on my phone. Usually these notifications vibrated the watch around my wrist via Bluetooth, and sometimes I would experience what I called ghost vibrations. Even if what I felt was only my shirt sleeve against my arm, I was certain it was a notification, and what if it was from him? What had gone wrong? What would I do? How would I fix that problem that I didn’t even know existed in the first place? My right hand would shake visibly as I reached for my phone to look at the screen or to tap my watch to see the notification. If I saw his name, I would stop breathing. I feared being cornered against a wall.
I didn’t see my boss’s name that morning, and swung my legs over the side of the bed to stand up. I hadn’t experienced a headache with the second treatment, hadn’t hurt or ached since I woke up from the anesthesia the afternoon before. But as I stood up out of the bed, I could feel the bed pulling at my waist, and I sat back down. It was a somewhat familiar feeling, comparable to the fatigue I experienced after a long run in my marathon training. I’d lie down and try to rest, if only just a half hour, but I’d be so anxious that I never fell asleep. And so instead of wasting my time lying there, thinking about All the Things Needing to Get Done, I’d try to get up and start marking things off the list. The exhaustion, however, turned the air around me into peanut butter. I felt somewhat the same that morning, but after greeting my kids in the kitchen I walked over to the couch in the living room and curled up into a ball. A few minutes later I was fast asleep, and for over two hours I had fever dreams of being unable to wake up and fix my kids’ lunch, of being unable to wake up and take care of their needs. When I finally forced myself awake, I grabbed my phone off of the coffee table to text my mother.
“I can’t really describe it,” I mumbled to her when she called me to ask what was wrong. “I feel like the Frankenstein monster. I mean, I feel like I died and someone brought me back to life.”
“Heather,” she said gently, “you do realize that’s exactly what happened?”
“Well, yeah, but . . . did I just say that? Except I’m alive and I’m swimming in peanut butter.”
I would call this the Peanut Butter Pool, and it happened more than once. It was more than a little discouraging. What if I was always going to feel this way?
EIGHT
LICENSE AND REGISTRATION, PLEASE
THE FOLLOWING DAY MY family gathered at my sister’s house for my nephew’s farewell. This term is used in the Mormon religion when referring to sending off young men and women on proselytizing missions. He had originally received his “call” to serve in South Africa more than a year before. Sadly, he inherited the all-consuming sadness that afflicts both me and my brother, and he had to defer for a bit because of a severe depressive episode. Somehow my sister escaped the scourge of depression, but it landed smack dab inside the brains of her two siblings. I was the first one in the family to break the silence, to admit that something was wrong and that I needed help. I remember my eleventh-grade AP physics teacher, Ms. Lorraine Jones, stopping class and pulling me into the hallway one afternoon to grab me firmly by the shoulders and warn me, “You can’t keep going on like this, Heather. You have to calm down and let go. Otherwise you’re going to break.” I was first in my class and an all-around horrifying kid to be around. If I didn’t ace a test or perform a task perfectly, I thought it meant that I’d end up homeless and alone. This is what my mother called my death spiral: if anything didn’t go exactly as planned, I’d end up homeless and alone. And this is another thing to add to the list of things you should know about depression. Depression robs us of the ability to think of anything but the worst possible outcome. Period. It is inevitable. That is the logical end to every thought and action and sequence. What is the point of washing my hair when I’m going to end up sleeping in a cardboard box in a gutter?
Despite her advice, I didn’t calm down. Then two months into my sophomore year in college, I broke. I snapped right in half. Yes, I had graduated the valedictorian in high school and was attending college on a full scholarship, but one morning in the fall of 1994 I called my parents to tell them that I was coming home. I was dropping out of college. I could not take it anymore—“it” being breathing air and performing any task that ensured my survival. My depression had eaten me whole, and I was talking to my mother and father from inside its belly. My father, of course, began to tell me to snap out of it. Because I knew that this would be his response, his words starting blurring inside my brain: wah wah wah wah. He’d grown up in the projects of Louisville, Kentucky, only to pull himself up and out of poverty and become a successful manager at IBM, where he would work for over thirty-five years. If he could perform that feat, by God, everyone should be able to. Except I didn’t want to breathe air.
My mother, however, had witnessed how depression had wrecked the lives of several of her siblings, and within a week of that phone call she’d made me an appointment with a local psychiatrist. He prescribed me an average dose of Zoloft and within three days my roommates began to tell me that something was different, something was strange. Strange in a good way. I ha
dn’t noticed that I was breathing air willingly, and this is one way the medication manifests itself. I didn’t realize that I felt better, and when my roommates asked if something had changed, I suddenly thought, Oh my God! I’m enjoying this bowl of cereal! The clothes on my body don’t hurt! You know, I think I might go outside and smell a flower!
Over a year later I was sitting with my brother, his pregnant wife, and my cousin in a booth at an Olive Garden. We were celebrating my sister-in-law’s birthday with unlimited breadsticks, and it didn’t take long for my cousin and me to realize that my brother was in one of his moods. Dear Lord, his moods. They would come and go with no warning, pattern, or reason. My brother is the funniest person I know, but he’s also the angriest. Angry at what, we never knew. That night he could barely get consonants through his gritted teeth. And when he did, it was only to make mean jokes about my cousin to my cousin’s face and then berate the server for bringing a plate of fettuccini when he had clearly ordered linguini. After dinner we drove my cousin home, and then I made my brother drop off his wife so that we could speak alone. He drove me to the house I shared with eight roommates and we parked in the driveway.
“What is going on?” I asked after he turned off the engine.
“What do you mean?” he said, clearly surprised that this was the kind of conversation I wanted to have.
“What just happened back there? Did you really need to be that rude? Especially on your wife’s birthday? Your pregnant wife’s birthday?”
He shook his head and mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“Listen,” I said, and turned my entire body to face him, “you’re depressed. You have to be. Because if this isn’t depression, then you’re just the biggest asshole who ever lived.”
I hadn’t even finished my sentence when he covered his face with both of his hands and starting crying. My big, angry brother. Crying.
“Is that what this is?” he sobbed through his fingers.
“Is this what what is?”
He dropped his hands into his lap. “I don’t know why I feel this way, Heather. I can’t make it stop. Why won’t it stop? I don’t understand it. I don’t want to feel this way, but it just won’t stop. I can’t control it.”
“Ranger,” I said, and I reached over to put my hand on his. (Yes, my brother’s name is Ranger. He’s named after a box of cigars my father saw at a truck stop in Little Rock, Arkansas. Oh, and my sister’s name is September even though she was born in January. When I came along they got bored of naming children strangely and picked the name of every other girl born in 1975.) “That’s exactly what depression is. You are depressed. THIS is depression.”
Within a week he saw a psychiatrist, much to the chagrin of my father. It was one thing for his daughter to be “depressed,” if that’s what I wanted to call it. But it was an entirely other thing for his son to give in to feelings of hopelessness. Not his son. Snap out of it, boy. Pull yourself together. If you have no reason to be sad, then you just simply stop being sad. Had he taught us nothing by demonstrating the Herculean feat of his own life?
I still don’t think my father acknowledges that the mind is just as susceptible to disease and disorder as any other part of the body: the heart, the lungs, the penis. Even today he doesn’t understand that his two children have to struggle with feelings of hopelessness, and that two of my brother’s kids, two of my sister’s kids, and both of my children suffer from depression and anxiety. My sister had to come up with an alternate explanation as to why her son had deferred his mission, because she couldn’t tell my father that he might be suicidal. That would be preposterous. No, actually, not preposterous. Wrong word. That would be weak, and his grandson was not weak.
* * *
My nephew survived that depressive episode, and when he sent in his papers again, the church called him to San Antonio. This thrilled my sister, knowing that if he were to relapse while away from home, he’d at least be in the country and not on the other side of the world. We were gathering at her home to celebrate not only the milestone of his mission but also the fact that, you know, he didn’t kill himself. I may not be a practicing Mormon anymore, but I am not a monster (usually) and wanted to show my support for this significant event. I was still swimming in peanut butter as I got dressed that morning and helped Marlo brush her hair, and by the time I got through the controlled chaos of gathering up food for both kids and getting us all into the car, I was exhausted. And sad. Profoundly and inexplicably sad.
I wasn’t necessarily obsessed with the idea that this wouldn’t work—this being, of course, willingly dying on a gurney three times a week while my mother watched. But I was worried. That worry hovered in and around me like a noxious gas. Instead of that worry adding to my anxiety, it just made me sad. After I backed out of the driveway and turned out of the tiny secret side street where we’d just moved, I pulled up to a stop sign heading east. Since we’d only been in that neighborhood for a couple of weeks, I was unfamiliar with the traffic traps you learn when you navigate certain roads with frequency. I am also a flagrantly aggressive driver who regards all the rules of the road as merely suggestions. I routinely drive at least 10 miles per hour over the speed limit and can hop a speed bump better than Bo Duke. There are at least three four-way stops on the way to Leta’s school in the morning, and because no other human being alive knows how to navigate a four-way stop, my kids know every single four-letter word in the English language.
I pulled up to that stop sign, glanced down at my phone to press PLAY on a music app—DO NOT JUDGE ME; YES, I KNOW BETTER—and slowly rolled through the intersection. Without actually stopping. Zero stopping. I came close, I always do. Right as I looked up from the music app—STOP JUDGING—I caught the silhouette of a cop car to my right. Now, I am a white woman with two young girls in my car. My registration was up-to-date and I had no broken taillights. And yet, the terror that seized me in that moment almost choked the breath out of both of my lungs. My entire face burned bright red with fear and panic and dread, a perfect cocktail of emotion to mix with my sadness. What I so desperately needed to do right then, right as he turned on his lights and siren, was sob.
I pulled over to the side of the road while assuring a now panicked Leta that I was okay, or at least I would be in the future. Not sure if it would be the near future, but eventually. The more I tried to assure her, the harder I cried. The sadness just poured out of me in waves of sobs. By the time the officer approached my window, my entire face was covered in tears and I was shaking. By any measure, I was acting suspiciously. I could be hiding something—anything—and I was either covering it up by pretending sadness or I was genuinely crying because he was just about to discover my wrongdoing. I rolled down the window while simultaneously fumbling through the glove box, looking for my registration, tears splashing the gearshift. I wondered who I would call for bail.
“Hi there,” he said, once I had turned my red face toward him. “I’m sure you know that you ran through that intersection back there. I saw you looking at your phone as you ignored the stop sign. And I was right there. You didn’t even see me.”
Every word of what he was saying was true, except I did see him out of the corner of my eye. Just one millisecond too late. I tried to blink back the tears and was unsuccessful. The only thing I wanted to do as I looked at his face was say, “Please help me. I want to die. I just want to be dead. Please.” But Leta would have heard me. Marlo would have heard me. So instead I just bit my lower lip and continued to blink.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, and this is when I thought for sure he was going to ask me to get out of the car so that he could search it. He wouldn’t find any drugs or severed heads, but he would find a shit ton of used tissues. He’d find dirty socks, two umbrellas that didn’t open, months of old graded homework tucked into the spaces between each seat, and several hundred gas receipts I will one day file in a folder labeled “Gas Receipts.”
“I just . . .” I didn’t know how to answer
him. Anything other than telling him that this whole giant mess sitting in front of him was just a simple case of wanting to be dead would be a total lie. “I have had . . .”
He could tell that I was having a hard time getting words out my mouth. “Have you had a bad day?”
I involuntarily and immediately nodded my head and choked in a sob.
“Let me have your license and registration and I’ll be right back, okay? Just sit tight.” He then patted his hand on the door, a reassuring gesture, as if everything would be all right.
The three of us sat in silence while he retreated to his car. I reached over and grabbed Leta’s hand to try to comfort her, if that was even possible, given my emotional state and the fact that law enforcement was now involved.
In my side mirror I saw him get back out of his car to approach me again. My heart began racing and I could feel the rhythm of it in my neck against the collar on my shirt. When he got to my door, he patted it again before speaking.
“Listen, I’m going to let you go and urge you to heed that stop sign next time, okay?” He handed me my license and registration. “I hope your day gets better,” he continued, and then he pointed first to Leta and then to Marlo in the back seat. “Are these your girls?”
I glanced around at both of them and then faced him. “Yes. Yes, they are.”
“Beautiful children,” he said. “You all have a good day.” He patted the door one last time and then he left. He turned and walked back to his car. I marveled at the nature of that entire interaction, starting with the fact that my panic and fear arose only from the idea of getting a ticket or, at worst, having my car searched. I did not once fear for my life (despite wanting to be dead) or the lives of my children. And then he showed me compassion. He offered me comfort. He patted my goddamn door three separate times. I got to drive away from that encounter without a ticket, and he wished me well. If only every person’s traffic stop were so earnestly rosy and not, you know, fraught with the idea that they might have their face blown off.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 7