May is perennially one of the roughest months for my depression. As someone who absorbs dates like a sponge (see my TEDx talk), I often remember some potentially triggering anniversaries.
The first and foremost is my suicide attempt in 2011, but there are others, like when I told the most popular guy in my school growing up that I liked him—yikes, that was brave, but how I handled it was humiliating. That was about twenty years ago, but it’s still easy to beat myself up about things from that time.
There are other, much happier anniversaries that can nonetheless make me feel a kind of lonesome nostalgia: a standing ovation walking at my college graduation in 2010; some of the most meaningful awards of my life in 2016 and 2017, including from my graduate school for outstanding writing—I was ridiculed for my writing growing up—and from a state communications contest; and the much-needed end of a fifteen-month severe manic episode in 2015.
Those were all exceptional events, full of joy and sometimes relief, but sometimes I can beat myself up for a feeling of SHAME, the idea that I Should Have Already Mastered Everything.
Why couldn’t I have seen that standing ovation coming? Why couldn’t I have healed from mania sooner? Why couldn’t I have absorbed that my writing was good a long time ago? The truth is, those are all out of my control, and I’m learning to accept them, one day at a time.
That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes I look back on certain events and feel a lot of “woulda, coulda, shoulda” as if I had been able to process them.
At the same time, they mean so much more because of what I’ve been through. I don’t know if my trauma made me stronger—and yes, multiple people have called it trauma and abuse when I’ve downplayed it: it could’ve been much so worse, yes, but it was still awful growing up the way I did.
I do know, however, that I have much more gratitude today because I don’t feel the need to feel like a victim and because my life is so much better.
Maybe the two are connected. Hopefully if I experience calamity or trauma in the future, I will realize that I have choices in how to deal with it.
There’s another key event in May, no matter that’s it’s a greeting card company holiday: Mother’s Day reminds me of my amazing mother, who fought for me as autistic when very few others cared. She still makes me proud with everything she works at.
There’s a new aspect of May this year: on the day before May 1, country music icon Naomi Judd killed herself at age 76, the day before she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame as part of the mother-daughter duo The Judds. Her death reminds me of the fragility of both mental health and popular narratives of mental illness: Judd wrote at least one book about her depression, but in the end, her issues never resolved.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the Judds recently, and a song like “Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days)” hits harder than it already did because it reminds me that for Naomi, and likely for many others, there were no good old days.
Naomi Judd was never alone, but mental illness is a lying SOB. I would know. The suicide attempt I made in 2011 was predicated on the belief that I didn’t care if I lived or died because my life could never get better after college.
I’m very grateful I didn’t succeed in ending my life. This month I got two amazing job evaluations on the same day, I gave a workshop for a storytelling company, I’m doing a storytelling gig on May 26 at a major theatre in Chicago, and am doing well without caffeine and sugar, the latter of which is new for me to abstain from. I’m also working on potentially my first paid essay for an online publication.
Without caffeine, sugar, or other habits, I will admit, I still have the desire to numb discomfort. What’s helping me is reaching out for support so that I stay healthier. I text and call others who understand. I also set boundaries with people who don’t.
I’m hoping that I can stay off sugar and caffeine this summer, as I do miss the taste of heavily sweetened iced and blended drinks. I don’t miss the way caffeine affected my sleep, speech, or mood, though, so I will need to keep “playing the tape forward,” remembering the consequences of potential actions.
So, maybe May is a month of triumph, but as Naomi Judd’s death reminds me, healing and recovery are never linear, as we might like them to be. I can still have bad days, but I’m grateful I’m still here to feel the uncomfortable emotions and to experience the joys of what’s happening in my life now.