I do not let happinesses’ warm fingers caress my face like sunlight. I do not let it unthaw my soul. I trained myself long ago to believe that happiness will always be taken away one day. Too much happiness means a lot of pain is looming in the background.
The TV show This is Us, has an episode in which Randal says that the need to meet his birth-parents is like a constant ringing in his ears. Sometimes it’s quieter and sometimes it’s louder but it is always there. I have swaddled this metaphor and held it close to my heart because it encapsulates so much of what I feel. Through every fun conversation, behind every smile and vibrating in my mind amidst every giggle is the thought that I will be unhappy again. That black hole of nothingness and numbness will swallow me up once more. It has come to the point that happiness feels like a tease. It’s like a joke played on myself by depression. “Here feel something” it smirks, a frozen wasteland, letting me taste sunlight, only to wrap me and suffocate me in its cold embrace once more.
Happiness terrifies me. It begs me to trust it. It tempts me with its warmth and comfort. It tries to befriend me but I cannot take its hand.
I came to a point in my life where I gave up on trying to be happy for other people. I gave my family a glimpse into what I felt on the inside. The energy it took to keep up my facade, had escaped me. I sat on the couch for hours, not moving, staring, unresponsive as if I was brain-dead. I did this for days at a time. Moving from one place to the other just staring–not faking smiles or interest when it wasn’t there.
I had told my parents previously that I needed help. After years of silence. After years of both of us ignoring an obviously critical problem I asked for help. They completely ignored me. I don’t mean they brushed me off and told me I was fine. I don’t mean they mocked me. I don’t mean they said I just wanted attention. I mean they said nothing. As if I’d imagined myself speaking they responded with silence. I said it again: “I think I have depression. I need help.” As if they hadn’t heard me they began a new conversation with each other. I cried silently for the rest of the hour and a half drive home and neither of them said a word to me.
Once my mom got to see how little I could really care about my relationships, conversation, life, work, sleep, being awake, anything… and once she realized how much of my life I faked, she quickly went from ignoring my cry for help to believing I was not sane.
After I dropped out of university and lived at home unemployed barely ever leaving my house, my mom and I ran into the mother of one of my old friends. She asked me how I was and my mother witnessed me smile and laugh and charm her into believing my life was fantastic, I’d made amazing choices, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve never seen my mom look so scared. I think she finally realized how good I’d become at faking it. It: wanting to exist. I think she finally started asking herself the right questions: ‘How long has my daughter been fooling me? Why would she hide her true feeling from me for so long?’
I went to a counsellor a few years ago, after my family Doctor’s intern tried to send me to a hospital. I told the counsellor: “I don’t believe anyone is happy.”
From there, I was sent to a Psychologist. I waited for 30 minutes past my designated appointment time, in a room with people I deemed crazy and thought, am I one of them? After speaking to me for 2 minutes I was diagnosed: Bipolar Disorder. He added the medication to my antidepressants and sent me home.
Albion Falls, Hamilton Ontario
My mother had emailed our Doctor to tell him I’d had a manic episode. I’d gone from hours and days of sitting on the couch staring, unresponsive at the wall, to cleaning the house, making strange jokes, and being filled with unexplained energy. I hadn’t explained it for a reason.
In a house of contained emotions, stifled sexuality, and painted on perfection, I’d discovered release. I had to keep it quiet to keep it safe.
As a 20 year old woman who’d been ‘outed’ to her Family Doctor, as a psycho, I felt betrayed once more by my mother. Creating mountains out of mole hills was her way of ‘showing she cared’ but it made me want to drag those mountains on top of myself.
“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move”
Absently Searching 