The quicksand is making that terrifying, suctioning sound.
It has been a long time since I heard that sound as anything but a distant echo. More than ten years in fact. Up until a few weeks ago I had hoped that I would never hear it again. It seemed that motherhood had brought such a change in the daily landscape of my life that I was forever removed from the neighborhood of the dangerous bog.
But apparently not. Incautious and distracted feet have wandered back into old territory, and I find myself caught. The soft but relentless grip has closed around an ankle. And my instinctual flinch has elicited the familiar, inescapable sound of enclosing mud, pulling me irresistibly down.
Perhaps I should explain. Quicksand is my name for depression.
Several months ago I wrote about my past experiences with depression in response to the suicide of Robin Williams. In that post I offered this description:
My experience of depression is like the slow, inexorable descent into quicksand. It’s just a pressure at first, a sucking drain on joy and energy that feels like I should be able to just shake it off. But the effort to shake it off triggers a much more vice-like grip. I try to strip it away, but there is nothing to get hold of. My fingers slide through the suffocating pressure – small grains of pain are too insubstantial to grasp and deal with, but the very ease with which they slide away creates a pocket of empty space to suck at scrabbling fingers, always pulling down. It takes so much effort to struggle, and the effort only hastens the descent. It saps all energy and will to fight. It’s so much easier just to stop fighting. I know it will eventually crush me with its weight but the slow compression becomes almost like a tight bear hug. I am lulled by the promise of a final enfolding of sleep – so much preferable to the violence of lungs filling quickly with the sucking, pressing, all-surrounding pain that will win no matter what I do.
That post was the first time I shared publicly about the shadow seasons of my life, but the public conversation about mental illness happening at the time made me feel like it was important to do so. Plus the distance of those experiences made it easier.
It’s not so easy now. The quicksand isn’t a memory that I can flit in and out of with safety. Now it is a present reality, and that reality hurts.
It hurts in ways I can’t explain with a well-crafted metaphor, but it has to do with losing the spark of joy in my days, and watching myself fail to love and enjoy my family in one hundred ways, and trying to cram my pit of emptiness full of sugar (my mood altering drug of choice), and cringing from my reflection when that “medicine” only adds insulation around the outside and gives me something else to hate.
It’s innumerable little things that drain the color from my days and leave me so, so tired.
Tired.
And also scared.
Scared that I will never be free. Scared that I will hurt those I love the most. Scared that the whispers pulling me down into the pit are all true and I am just NOT ENOUGH to do or be the things that make it worth the struggle of escaping the quicksand.
And also scared to admit these fears, because then others might not trust me any more than I can trust myself.
It is one thing to share about past battles with depression. It is quite another to say that it is NOW. To express the pain and then just wait to hear what the response will be. To admit that I’m not handling everything and let that stand as the reality – no solutions, no plan, no control over this failure.
But I am admitting it. For at least three reasons.
First, the last time I wrote about this topic, I exhorted vulnerability. I preached that the only definitely “right” response to depression is to be present to it – to be honest about the experience from the inside, and to create safe space for that honesty from the outside. When I wrote that it felt like a lesson from experience to pass along to others, but now it feels like a challenge that I have to take up. If I don’t, I risk yet another layer of gravity to weigh me down – the shame of hypocrisy.
Second, my faith community is exploring the theme of “learning to walk in the dark” as we prepare for lent. As a church we are learning the value of the darkness that lets us see a light we cannot see in brilliance. This feels stunningly relevant to my current darkness – a divine disruption of my inner monologue of sticky, trapping lies that tell me my only options are to fight or to surrender. But maybe this is not actually a war. Maybe this is instead an opportunity for change. Maybe metamorphosis has to be painful to produce the butterfly. Maybe the quicksand is ripping away the scales that trap my wings. Any maybe one of those scales is the shame and silence in which I hide my imperfection.
Finally, I am blessed by real flesh and blood people who have opened their arms to my pain in the last few weeks. People who have not shrunk away from my confession, but instead responded with care and love. They are re-teaching me the power of weakness and reminding me that trust offers sweet rewards. And in my gratitude for these supports, I know not everyone who is caught in the quicksand has such hands reaching out for them. And for those who don’t, maybe even the words of a stranger can be a comfort and support. A promise that you are not alone.
I still hearing the dragging, sucking rattled of the quicksand.
It still terrifies me.
But I am doing more than listening.
I am also speaking.
I am speaking to know that my voice can be heard over the quicksand.
I am speaking because isolation only adds the weight of all the missing people to the forces pulling me down.
I am speaking because there is some mysterious anti-gravity in the most serious of words – a pull in the opposite direction – maybe even a lifeline to some other poor, lost soul caught in the quagmire.
Shall we pull each other out?
Faith, Family, & Focaccia 