Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

A few years ago, my husband saved a man and his son from drowning in Lake Pend Oreille. Of a dozen people there that day, Steve & I were the only ones who saw they were in distress. By the time Steve got to them, everyone else had finally noticed, but the man had already gone under twice and was barely able to hold the little boy above water anymore. He slipped under a third time while Steve was swimming back with the boy. It would have been the last time if the grandmother—the only other person close enough to help at that point—hadn’t reached him and managed to hold him up until Steve came back for him. Even so, it was a very close call.

All year long, I have felt like that man, drowning in plain sight. In February, I snapped out of a particularly vicious bout of depression just in time for the Covid lockdown to hit and for two close friends to die within two weeks of each other*. As you can imagine, that sent my mental health into an immediate tailspin. I tried to reach out to several friends for help, but mostly got perfunctory responses in return because they were juggling their own problems due to the pandemic. Even though that wasn’t their fault, it left me to struggle with rejection and isolation on top of my grief. Suddenly, I found myself not just mourning Honey and Kim but dealing with old wounds surrounding my dad’s death and trauma from past abuse as well.

I started to spiral faster. My social anxiety skyrocketed, and I couldn’t tell anymore if I was responding to even the simplest situation in a normal or rational way. This led to a misunderstanding with a friend which exploded so spectacularly that I spent three straight weeks barely able to sleep or eat until this person’s final message plunged me straight into suicide.

I had tried to signal for help several more times during those three weeks, but the few people who noticed didn’t understand how bad things were, and the level of help I needed didn’t come through. So I smacked into rock bottom head-first. If Steve had not been in the room with me when I read that message, there is no doubt whatsoever that I would have walked immediately to the kitchen for the carving knife and ended everything there.

Since that day, I have been mostly silent about my problems even though the aftershocks have continued to ripple through my life. The person with whom I had the falling out was one of the friends I initially asked to keep an eye on me, so from that point on, reaching out to anyone felt like trying to sneak past some Indiana Jones-style deathtrap, always terrified that a single wrong move might trigger hidden blades that would slice me up. I eventually managed to tell a few people I was struggling, but I downplayed how bad it was, and I still haven’t told a single person the full extent of what I’m going through. Even what you’re reading now is a very stripped-down version.

Things are better now, but I still feel like I’m drowning more often than not. Grief heals slowly. Old wounds don’t scar over well once they’ve split open again. Suicidal thoughts and behavior hover like ghosts long after the initial craving for death passes. But even though it’s a struggle, my head is still above water. And even though no one swam out to bring me in to shore, that doesn’t mean I’ve been treading water alone all this time.

Here’s the thing: Steve didn’t rescue those people all by himself. Yes, they would have drowned if he hadn’t swum out there. But if the grandmother hadn’t managed to keep her son-in-law afloat while Steve got the boy, that man would have drowned. And when he finally did make it to shore, he still had a dangerous amount of water in his lungs. If someone else on the beach hadn’t called the paramedics, or if the paramedics hadn’t arrived so fast, he would have died anyway.

In the end, every little thing done by each person on that beach contributed to saving his life. I was the one who made Steve take his shoes off before he swam out there so they wouldn’t weigh him down. The boy’s mother was the one who made it to the buoys just in time to take her son so Steve could go back for her husband. The only other family there with kids were the ones who took the terrified boy off to the side and played with him so he wouldn’t distract the paramedics. The man who called the paramedics, the elderly woman who prayed, the girl who had extra towels ready to warm people up… Every little thing mattered, and it saved his life.

So yeah, I’ve been out here drowning all year long. But there have been people on the beach all this time, and every little thing they have done for me has kept me alive. And yes, I mean that quite literally. That day in June may have been the worst, but I have faced suicide many times since then, and many times it’s been a single act of kindness that’s kept me afloat a little longer.

And here’s something else I know: things won’t magically reset when the clock hits midnight tonight. Will I be thrilled to say goodbye to this horrific year? Hell yes! But tomorrow morning, the world will still be reeling from Covid and I’ll still be patching up the pieces of my heart. That’s just how it works. But I also know I wouldn’t be here to see 2021 at all if not for those who helped me in so many ways.

So as we close out 2020, I’d like to raise a toast to the people on the beach. Most of you didn’t realize you were throwing me lifelines because you didn’t even know I was drowning, but those lifelines did their job anyway. You’re the people who asked how I was doing when I couldn’t reach out on my own; who followed through with checking on me when I did ask for it; who said something kind and beautiful to/about me when I needed to hear it most; who offered me compassion and forgiveness when I screwed up; who did anything, no matter how small, to show me I was loved and valued even when I believed the world would be a much better place without me. All my love and gratitude to goes out to each of you on this final night of the year.

*I have since discovered that it was actually two months. Grief impacted my ability to think so powerfully that I have very few memories of that time–my brain simply erased most of it, leaving me with the impression that only two weeks had passed between their deaths.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Image by Love Art. Live Art. from Pixabay

For someone who struggles with so much pain on a daily basis, I’ve been lucky. Unlike so many people who suffer from invisible illnesses, I have the full understanding and support of my friends and family. No one ever makes me feel guilty for not joining them at an event, and no one has ever said insensitive things that belittle my experiences. Of course, there are still the weird looks I get from strangers on the rare occasions I feel good enough to go out, as if carrying a stack of pillows into a restaurant or having to stand in the back for part of a movie is some egregious act of social rebellion.

But as wonderful and supportive as my friends and family are, they don’t know the full extent of what I go through. For the most part, they see me only on the good days, and even then for just a few hours at a time. The most they see of my pain are the special pillows and chairs I use, the pills I take, the times I have to lie down or leave early.

They don’t see what happens when I get home, how I scream bloody murder when my husband rubs arnica and epsom salt oil into all my locked-up muscles in an attempt to relieve the pain that is always, always the price of doing anything other than lying on the sofa. They don’t see me when the pain is so bad, so far beyond the help of traditional and holistic treatment, that I literally do not leave the sofa at all, not even for a glass of water. The weeks when even reading a book or watching TV hurt because the book is suddenly too heavy and the slight angle of my head to see the TV tugs at my neck and shoulder muscles in all the wrong ways.

My menorrhagia is even more invisible. I never talk about it with anyone except in the most general terms, so the only person who sees the toll it takes is my husband. He’s the one who has to clean up the trail of blood in the hallway while I’m sobbing in the shower at 3 in the morning, watching the blood pour and pour out of my body endlessly. The weeks where I sleep only in brief snatches because every fifteen minutes, like clockwork, another clot sends me running to the bathroom praying that I get there before bleeding all over everything again–and most of the time, I don’t make it even though I’m wearing six pads and the bathroom is less than a dozen steps away.

And then there are the things that are truly invisible, the things that even my husband doesn’t see. Because of my pain, we don’t share a bed on a regular basis, so he’s not there to see how many nights I cry myself to sleep, the anguished prayers for healing and the fights with God about whether or not my life has any meaning.

In 2012, when I spent most of the year struggling with suicidal thoughts, my husband only knew that I was more miserable than usual because my pain levels had increased dramatically. He was actually in the house at the time I came closest to killing myself, completely unaware that in the room above him, his wife was sobbing out every dark and desperate thing in her heart with a knife in her hands.

This is chronic illness: a constant battle with endless layers, and each time you peel back a layer, there are fewer and fewer people who have any visibility into what it truly means. My pain is almost completely invisible to a stranger–I’m only thirty-six, and other than being a bit overweight, I look like I’m in reasonable health. The pillows I cart around, the frequency with which I have to adjust my seat, how I sometimes need to stand or sit when it’s not appropriate… These things draw some attention, but they don’t reveal the anguish caused by simple, everyday activities.

To my friends and family, it means I cancel plans, tire easily when I do show up, and almost always go home early. My husband sees more than anyone else: the days when the slightest movement makes me howl in agony; the ordinary tasks I cannot do for myself, like putting on socks and shoes; the hours I spend in the bathroom swearing that if I had a scalpel, I’d dig my damn uterus out myself. But even he doesn’t see everything. A large part of this fight will always be invisible, because no one who has not lived through it can truly understand it. Even those with similar conditions have their own battles to fight, their own unique array of symptoms and internal struggles.

In such circumstances, it’s easy to believe that we are completely alone with our pain, but I have come to believe that the opposite is true. The day I almost committed suicide, the day when I was the most alone, what kept me alive was not the encouragement of a loved one or a counselor: it was an unexpected gift from the world.

It was a snowy day in February, and yet there was a flock of a hundred robins in my backyard that morning. More robins than I had ever seen in my life, months before they should have returned from their winter migration, and every last one of them was singing as the snow came down. And that was what made me put the knife down: that God had brought the very birds which are a universal symbol of hope and rebirth to me at exactly the right time, and in such overwhelming numbers that I could not possibly have ignored them.

I’ve seen this other times, too. Huge, vibrant double rainbows in the sky on the day I buried a beloved pet, the golden harvest moon cresting the horizon right in front of me on a drive home when the pain was so bad I could barely breathe. Small blessings shining out of even the darkest times, messages of hope to tell us we are never truly alone.

~With thanks to Debi, whose own writing helped me understand what was in my heart this week.
#ThisIsChronicIllness  #InvisibleIllnessAwarenessWeek

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain