Speaking from The Dark Place

There’s a P.S. at the bottom of this. If you get that far, thank you. And if you’re just scanning, thank you. Please share if it resonates with you or someone you know.

These topics aren’t light-hearted. They require community.

We’re discussing mental health.

Consider this your heads up, but wrapped in a big hug that says “Hey, I see you, I know you, I love you” – even to yourself.

---

Readers, friends, family . . . I’m pulling you into this tight hug before we venture forward.

I am okay.

I need you to remember this.

I need you to not lose sleep or worry or message me frantic because I’m about to share something vulnerable and dark.

I am okay.

This fact contrasts in big bold letters against another fact:

I’m not always okay.

I’ve battled depression and CPTSD for a very long time, and while I love being a champion of both, I hate that they live in little pockets in my bones. I recoil at how these heavy stones occupy my mind and pop up in tactile, real life moments where my experience makes me a guide, a teacher, a listener to someone going through exactly what I experienced... I’ll always fight the fight with someone in need of help, sit with them, create a safe and listening space for them, and commit my time to them. But I know it chips away at the enamel on my teeth, my bones seemingly becoming more porous and breakable.

I wonder how long I can sustain living in this body of mine, now not at all feeling like my body but a mess of symptoms and syndromes fighting for the lead role in an exhaustive production.

I wonder how long my mind will take to let it all go.

These feelings are foreign to me and yet I know them so well. I want to force them out open doors and windows with a broomstick and smother their vacancies with mint and basil. I want to ceremoniously name them and ban them from my being before feeling hollow where they lay. But that is a battle in an ethos I can’t reach — even from my tippy toes, or on my best behavior, or with the help of temporary SSRI’s, therapies, and other micro-dosed drugs. Lord knows I’ve tried. Though I haven’t failed, I haven’t succeeded, either.

---

Like everything a poet writes, this post isn’t political in the way I’ve seen Substack Notes become a Facebook feed of “like this post if you support hard working Americans” — followed by the swift destruction of everything supporting hard working Americans.

We’re political in the way the air we breathe is politically affected, in how my right to speak is a protected right granted to me by the most powerful people in our country, or how you reading this means you have the time to read it and therefor aren’t likely restricted to limited media, or your labor isn’t strenuous enough to offer you “free time”.

We write from a broken futon, a sunny spot in a park, our pristinely organized workspace, in an app on our phones, in our yellow legal pads with curling pages . . .

We’re called to represent the moments that don’t neatly fit into any part of day to day life as we beckon milestones together in calamity and curiosity.

We write because that is our truth, even if that moment of truth is a glimmer in time. And the truth is politicized, so, in many ways, we’re journalists beholden to no one, and nothing, but life and death, love and loss.

---

Please consider this ode to depression as a short lived conversation and choose to embrace the things that make you feel alive: surviving another bout of depression from The Dark Place, hugs from people who fill you with comfort and wrap you in joy, coming home to your dog in a full body wiggle, or to your cat who detests your presence but tolerates your belly rubs, receiving a compliment from the people who truly see you… embrace what brings you joy like it’s your job, your thesis, your religion.

Not all of life is pretty, instagrammable, a cake walk, nor is everyone you know perpetually “a pleasure to be around”, “a smile that lights up a room”… sometimes it’s famine and destruction and death. Sometimes it’s crying and not wanting to talk about it. Sometimes it’s all you can think about. Sometimes the world spinning on seems impossible considering — and sometimes there’s so much to consider, your self of self is demolished.

Who we are in hard and trying times speaks volumes. The point is to survive them and sew seeds of change into the climate — whatever climate that may be.

WE DO ALL THINGS

FOR LOVE & POETRY

Right?

Right.

---

---

A reader told me recently, via text, “your work is getting dark lately — it’s kind of a bummer” and, babe, I agree wholeheartedly. She said, “I miss when you shared romantic stuff, you’re so good at writing that way” — and again I agreed.

Then again, I’ve promised no eternal delight nor positioned myself as the sun in the sky.

I am the dusk that weaves together the signs of a day in passing, greeting each night on the rise.

I am the bitterness you taste before the arrival of tender sweetness during a four course meal with melting candles and mismatched dinner plates.

I’m the cream and the acid, the salt and the sugar.

I am the fire that awoke the dormant seed bed; I am the bitter winter promising tender stone fruits in the spring.

I take time to recognize what’s lingering within and around me. I give it a name and sift through it until the sediment is gone. I know these feelings are passing through me and now is never the time to latch onto them or call them home.

And I’m sorry, to some, for presenting as someone who ever, at any point in her life, had her shit together, who never experienced gut wrenching depression or suicidality. That ain’t me, babe. I wish I were lying, but I owe us the truth. The truth is a heavyweight champion carrying a world title belt and sometimes you’ve got to see that and say “well, there it is”.

If you’re struggling in any way, if these words mean something to you, I’ve been there before, I’m there now, and I’ll be there again.

This connection we have to pain, our souls, our dreams, and all the muck and mire kicked up on the road is as real as anything else. It’s what keeps us knitted together in this life.

If you’ve been to The Dark Place — I’m so happy you’re here, our underdog champion, ruler of your future chapters, learner of past woes. I see you. I honor your life’s story from then to now.

Let’s move forward together, however we must, in the ways that honor where and who we want to be.

There are so many dusks, winters, and four course meals yet to be enjoyed. We can make the best of what we have and dedicate every impactful movement towards a future that welcomes us ALL as we are.

Until next time,

T ♥️

---

P.S. This piece was written in a sliver of “creative brain” function last year— maybe the year before? My memory is letting everything slip. I’m proud of it in the way I’m proud of myself for intervening in domestic violence incidents, in telling some asshole to fuck off when screaming at children playing on our streets, in the way I’m proud of stopping lexapro because it was mind-numbingly awful to experience as soon as I escaped The Dark Place. I’m proud of who I am, despite what I’ve had to live through and how poorly I held up through those stormy eras.

This piece has taken me a full month to write. I’m really pushing to have cognitive function while editing and formatting on this platform. I use voice to text and audible aids all the time for personal use. I still can’t read beyond a couple of short paragraphs before feeling exhausted, nauseous, deliriously dizzy and woefully defeated. But my process of writing has never been auditory. I speak this way with my hands. Always have. Working on the part that confidently says “Always will”.

Thank you for being patient with me as I continue to recover (PASC/Long COVID) and uncover my shame, grief, and humility along the way.

I’d say “it means the world to me” but today I’ll say “it means the entirety of language to me”.