Secret Warriors
Just staying alive can be a full time job.
The recent deaths remind us— this month is hard on the brain.
Maybe you wake in the morning with the sense that you are deep deep underwater and you’ll never make it to the surface in time— to shower, to say hello, to brush your teeth, even just to stand.
Maybe you wake at 3 am with the night terrors and that feeling of profound loneliness. Like an astronaut untethered from the station, flying off into space.
Maybe you wake in that even more terrifying place, the place beyond all feeling. Where even water tastes like metal. Even sunlight is cool. Even the sky is pale. Even the smells of evening, of cut grass and barbecues, and the laughter of the neighbor’s children seems to bubble up from a world you can’t touch. A world behind glass that it seems you’ll never touch again.
A world where everyone else is somehow at home, and where somehow you are not.
***
So tonight, if you can, take that pillbox from the shelf. Lift the S for Saturday.
Don’t look at the other letters, the M the T the W. The things the world expects of you. Just today is good enough.
You don’t believe it. I never do. That it does pass. More than anything, this is a waiting game.
Every single time I have to learn it again, not to struggle against it.
Like a rip tide, it’s better not to fight the current. Better to float until the current slows, and then to swim in slowly at an angle toward the shore. But I always start out swimming hard.
Living with an illness of the brain takes the most delicate balance of courage and surrender.
Some days, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to what is happening. I always think, depression isn’t that hard for a minute or two. So sometimes I live in those increments.
The rip tide isn’t so bad for a few minutes when you relax into it, trusting it will loosen its grip in time and you will make your way back. You will make your way back.
***
If only we could see, above each passing stranger, the story of their very private choice each day to keep on living. If only we could stop, and hug each other on the street, in the aisles of the grocery store late at night. Secret warriors.
In those moments of utter staggering loneliness, remember, there are many of us on that same side of the glass with you.
I see you. The courage it takes to keep breathing, one breath, and then another and another. Please, keep doing it. One minute at a time.
I would do anything to save your life. I know you would do anything to save mine.
But what I’ve learned is that in the end, there is only one life we can save. If we both do that, then the outcome is the same. So let’s save our own lives with the passion we feel for the lives of others. It is hard to do.
Every year I go back to the words of Mary Oliver and I hold them close, “determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save.”