the deep well

This is the well-worn path between our house and our neighbor’s house. And still, sometimes I forget that I am part of a community. Sometimes, I forget that I am loved unconditionally by my family. Sometimes, I forget that our small trials are not the end of all things. Sometimes, I forget that I have something to offer in this world that can be such a damned overwhelming place to live in.

The forgetting is usually fleeting, but there have been a few times I’ve fallen in the well. I haven’t stayed terribly long there, compared to some, but I know its darkness, and the trip to the bottom comes without warning. In the well, you don’t see the hands reaching down, and you don’t hear the faint, distant voices that float down to you from the top. In the pitch-black at the bottom of the well, you are utterly alone, and there is no hope for a way out.

I had written a looooong post about how my stone cold sober, always and forever unintentionally Straight Edge self could also get sucked into the abyss, repeatedly since I was a teenager, and how it’s terrifying until you don’t even care that the dark is scary, and how shitty I think it is to use words like “selfish” when describing victims of suicide (victims, yes…and if you use the word “selfish” or “cowardly,” please read this), and about how I once did my art thesis on depression and eating disorders and no one commented but to say “nice work” except for one of my instructors who opened up about his wife and her similar experiences because people are afraid to look the Darkness in the eye and to really talk about it. But, I erased it.

Instead, I’ll just say that I only wish that every time it happened to me, I came through with a “fear-proof exoskeleton”:

From: Hyperbole and a Half, Adventures in Depression

I’d like to think it’s not a sugar high, and that perhaps I could encourage exoskeletal growth with goat kefir smoothies and time spent in the garden.

Peace.

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