Working on the inside

The piece below is something I wrote a little over a year ago. At the time I felt like it represented a real ‘happy ending’ point in my life, a reckoning with the issues I had while we were living in the UK that I had long kept fairly quiet about because of the shame I felt around them. Watching a friend endure something similar last fall somehow unlocked the words for me -- even though, until now, I haven’t shown them to anyone but that one person. 

Here it goes:

————

January 2018

People ask me a lot about what it was like living abroad. For a long time -- the whole time we were there -- I couldn’t answer that question honestly. I’ve had three major depressive periods in my life, each lasting about two years. The most recent one started when we moved to Scotland. That’s the one I’m going to talk about.

I didn’t really want to go there in the first place. When Eric decided to include the UK in his academic job search, as his postdoc appointment was coming to an end, we were thinking about Oxford or Cambridge. But he was job-hunting during the crash of 2008, and in the end, Dundee was the only place that made an offer. [Edit: I have been reminded that Eric actually had TWO other offers, but one was in a location we felt was too expensive to accept, and the other sounded, well, really a bit dull compared to moving to the UK when we'd been psyching ourselves up for months already. My memory was faulty here.] Our friends were so excited for the great adventure we were going to have. I had a year to convince myself that it would all turn out well. I made myself believe it would. But as our plane came in for landing at Heathrow on the morning of July 6th, 2010, as I watched the little gray rowhouses and the little European cars come into focus through the low gray clouds, it hit me with punishing clarity: this is an awful mistake.

In the weeks that followed I sank into depression. Our cost of living was much higher than we had expected, so we were suddenly poorer than we had been since we were first married -- the year I was a substitute and Eric was a first-year grad student. I wasn’t working. I didn’t know anyone. I was a newly pregnant stay-at-home-mom with a two-year-old, and all the community activities for little kids were on summer hiatus. I would take Owen to the playground hoping to wring ten minutes of chat out of some other random parents, hoping that maybe someone might even say, “hey, want to get a coffee after this?” But no one ever did. 

Every time I posted a picture on Facebook, my friends marveled at how lucky I was.

Scotland is truly beautiful, even the parts of it that aren’t listed as “scenic” in the travel guides. Dundee lies alongside the River Tay; the water lapped at a pebble beach less than a hundred yards from our door. I would go for walks along the shore, looking out at the green hills of Fife on the other side, the low sun casting light over the silver ripples. Broughty Ferry’s tiny medieval castle perched in the distance, and swans bobbed in the wavelets, and sometimes I even a caught a glimpse of dolphins in the water. So much beauty surrounded me, and all I could think was, at least five years before we can go home. 

And all it felt like was a prison.

I never stayed in bed all day or stopped showering or cut myself; I never even sought professional help. I was high-functioning. I took care of Owen and later Evie. I started to make a few acquaintances from the limited range that Owen’s playgroup offered. The first person I thought had become a real friend, the woman who took care of him the night Evie was born, ghosted after a year. 

For the next two years I kept up appearances, told people in both Scotland and America what I thought they wanted to hear, and fantasized relentlessly about driving to Edinburgh with the kids and jumping on the next plane back to my parents’ house. I think the only thing that kept me from doing it was the knowledge, deep down, that I could never be happy without Eric. I was certainly past caring about the impact it would have had on our credit cards.

There was no single turning point when everything got better. Owen started preschool and I came into contact with a wider circle of moms, some of whom even turned into friends, and that helped a bit. I found my way into the amateur theater group in Carnoustie, and that helped too. Eric used some of his connections at the university to get me a few-hours-a-week job, which grew into a half-time job, and that helped even more, both by providing an intellectual challenge and by making our financial state almost tolerable. Very gradually I came back to life. I started to enjoy things. As “the American mum” in a very small town where I volunteered at the kids’ school, met the same shopkeepers every day, and participated in the theater club, I began to feel like an acknowledged member of the community. But in 2015, when Eric was refused tenure, I couldn’t deny my inner surge of joy despite the accompanying guilt. This means we go home. We’ll have to go home. 

We can finally go home. 

A year later, we did. 

And it made me just as happy as I hoped it would.

______________

When I wrote that, I really believed that 2010-2013 might have been my last depressive episode, and all because I was no longer in that situation. The issues were over! We were back in the U.S.! We had money! I loved everything about my life, and I felt sure that I wouldn’t be facing that kind of trouble again. 

It was only a few months after I wrote the piece that I started to stumble again. As the next challenge arose, this one being a protracted job search that lasted from January to September, I again found myself trying to isolate myself emotionally from nearly everyone in my life. Throughout the spring and summer of 2018 I alternated between pretending I was fine and collapsing in tears. I was caught in the exact trap I had just been celebrating my escape from. 

It’s incredible to me now, a year later, that I could have thought I had reached the endpoint, that I never understood that changing the external situation was only a temporary fix. 

I spent my whole life learning how to recognize my emotional storms when they were coming. It’s like being prepared for a natural disaster: Learn to read the early warning signs, lay in supplies, and know that it will end eventually. I got better at it over the decades, enough to recognize the characteristic waves of shame and anxiety as they started and to accept them, knowing that I would survive the next few hours of extravagantly vicious self-talk — tear-stained and exhausted afterwards, but still alive. I never believed for a moment that it was possible to gain control over the storm. You don’t tell a hurricane “hey, why don’t you just not?” and expect it to listen. 

Did I ever hear the message that I could learn to think differently? Duh. Of course. I just knew that I knew better than everyone else. Having been praised for intelligence throughout my life, I had no trouble believing in my own superior understanding. (I can have imposter syndrome regarding every other aspect of my existence, but I set aside whole swathes of psychology and philosophy as ‘whatever, not applicable to me’ here. Irony.) Besides, it wasn’t like I was suicidal or self-harming. I was sure it would be considered excessive, even self-indulgent, to look for help when I was so clearly able to function without it. And as I already knew how to weather the storms, what else was there to learn, anyway?

Around the end of August 2018, though, I more or less broke down. I had become so anxious I had to leave the kids’ school orientation events early, wearing sunglasses to hide the tears. The thought of introducing myself to people was making me panic and I had no idea how I would make it through a job interview if I got one. Eric would call to me from the kitchen— to ask me for help salting a roast, say, or to bring up a new roll of paper towels from the basement — and I would freak out: “What is it? What did I do wrong? I’m sorry!” Finally, after telling a select few friends that I was going to do it — for support, but also so that I couldn’t back out — I talked to a professional about my mental health for the first time in my life. My greatest fear going into it was rejection. I was terribly afraid they would say I wasn’t unwell enough to merit help. 

Of course it wasn’t nearly as scary as I’d expected; one of the side benefits of anxiety is that almost nothing ever is. I had a few sessions of therapy and then decided I could continue working on my own. I had landed my new job at that point, and the scheduling involved seemed likely to cause more stress than it solved. I promised to reevaluate that decision if I started to go downhill again, and I started reading about and practicing mindfulness. 

It all sounds really anticlimactic, but here’s the thing: One, I finally recognized that I needed to change on the inside, not just improve conditions on the outside. Two, I realized that it was as legitimate to need a small amount of help as it is to need a lot. After all those periods in my life of toughing it out (maybe as much as eight years altogether), I finally understood that you don’t have to be at rock bottom before you’re allowed to ask for care. I’m not a severe clinical depression case, and it’s still okay to try to get better anyway. 

The two most helpful tools I’ve been using, both of which I would previously have thought were hopelessly corny and naive, are the app Headspace and Brene Brown’s book The Gift of Imperfection. My copy of the latter now has notes scribbled in almost every bit of white space. What they have in common is the underlying idea that we can actually change how we think. I know that probably sounds obvious to a lot of people, but I had been rejecting it out of hand for my whole life because that’s how smart I am. But I felt like I was out of options, and I had to take a leap of faith that maybe, with practice, I could change. With my typical pessimism, I figured it would be months, or maybe even years, before I saw any progress.

It took about three weeks.

The first time it happened, I had forgotten to give the kids money for pizza day at school, leaving them with only a snack for lunch. I had already apologized profusely, and they had said it was all okay and that they forgave me. So naturally I was preparing to dive into a giant cavern of mommy guilt and stay there for several hours. And just as I was starting to fall into it, part of my mind said, “hey, you know, we could just not do this, instead.” And... I didn’t. It felt strange but good. A week or so later, an awkward social interaction woke up the inner bitch voice. Do you know her? The one who starts every sentence with “let’s be honest?” “Let’s be honest, you’re not really very good at people skills.” “Let’s be honest, empathy isn’t your strong suit.” And instead of listening, and giving in, and letting myself drown in that malice, I thought, “Those thoughts don’t represent reality, and you know it, and we don’t have to do this.” And it stopped. 

Three weeks of daily practice, and I had started to change a thirty-year behavior pattern. It felt like developing superpowers. It still does.

Ironically, now I find that I have to practice the skill of breaking a shame spiral on an entirely new subject. I have to forgive myself for all the time I wasted. I spent the first half of my life believing that I was helpless to stop the storms, too smart to fall for hope, and insufficiently broken to ask for aid. Now I know that so much more was within reach the whole time, and I was the only one standing in my way.