Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Way Out

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I’ve been feeling really bitter lately.

I’ve been feeling this way ever since I visited Arizona and saw all the wonderful things my friends have been up to. I saw my boyfriend excelling in summer school, I saw one of my best friends on her way to the study-abroad program of her life, and of course, every single one of my friends had stellar GPAs.

Yes, it seems like everyone else is doing something great and worthwhile with their summer, except me. And I can’t tell you how sad and pathetic that makes me feel.

But there’s another emotion in there that I wasn’t expecting. Anger. I’m angry! I am actually angry at my circumstances, full of energy for the first time in years, and ready to go and do and learn. That’s how I know I’m getting better.

I will be completely frank with you. Sophomore year, for me, was a bust. My grades were dismal, my health even worse. Unfortunately I wasn’t sick with anything awe-inspiring and likely to garner sympathy and understanding. I was simply depressed.

Ah, depression. Something I have far too much experience with, both in myself and in others, and something that 90% of this blog is about. I’ve had to tell my boyfriend this, I’ve had to tell my parents, I even had to tell Dean Hutch and my major advisor, that depression is a real thing, and no, I’m not taking these pills for fun, and no, I am not doing this for attention, and no, I am not lazy, I literally, physically cannot get out of bed.

One time I screamed and dropped something when someone startled me, and when they started laughing, I burst into tears. Another time, when a friend of mine briefly lost his temper, I spent the next three hours huddled in my bed, shaking. I slept all day and took my meals upstairs so I wouldn’t have to socialize. And then, sometime around my twentieth birthday, I realized this isn’t normal. Or healthy. I guess I’d kind of just been waiting for things to get better, but my GPA was in danger and my life was on the line and nothing had gotten any better at all. So I went to the doctor, like I should have done last August.

It took a few weeks for the new drugs to kick in enough that I had the energy to pay attention in class. It took even longer for my mood to level out sufficiently enough for me to stop crying in public.

And tonight, a full two months after I began taking the new medicine, I was faced with a simply awful situation, one that would normally have made me sad for a week. But tonight I became angry instead. Angry at the unfairness of the situation. Angry at the person who caused it. I had stopped feeling helpless and started feeling righteous.

3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-ketoamphetamine (bupropion for short) is the fourth most commonly prescribed antidepressant in the United States. Opponents of antidepressants will say that they provide a “false happiness” or “chemical high” and don’t fix the underlying problem, to which I have two rebuttals:

  • Depression is a chemical illness. You wouldn’t say a person with Addison’s had “false hormones”. That makes about as much sense as calling someone with well-controlled depression “falsely happy”; i.e. none.
  • Why don’t you go tell someone who has no energy to move or even eat that “it’s all in your head! You just need some counseling!” and tell me how well that works out for you. Antidepressants get you out of bed. They make you able to eat, bathe, and work. They get you out of that dark scary place where even the basics of living are pointless and too difficult. Counseling is like the icing on a cupcake. It’s nice to have and all, but antidepressants make you able to go to counseling.

Having the capacity for anger and the ability to aspire to anything beyond simply surviving is new to me and quite frankly I don’t know what to do with this newfound energy. I’ve thrown myself into writing, crafting, learning biochem, and working online. I am learning to eat better and take care of my body and especially to be more understanding and polite towards my friends. You could describe me during my months-long illness with a lot of words and one of them would most definitely be needy.

Every day now, when I wake up, I tell myself that I am smart and good and getting stronger every day. I printed out a list of my accomplishments and put it on my nightstand so I can look at it when I’m feeling sad. I know that I had a bad year last year but I also know that things will get better, and they already are.

You know what I did this summer? I got my dreams back.

And I really don’t think that’s pathetic at all.

The Broken Flowerpot

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It’s another vaguely inspirational post from your favorite amateur blogger!  Yay!

Anyway, last fall I went with a few members of the Social Concerns committee to Bo’s Place, a nonprofit located in the Greater Houston area dedicated to helping children who have just lost a loved one.  As I lost two of my grandparents before I was ten, I can tell you that children have a really, really hard time grasping the concept of death (heck, even a lot of older people do.)  They find it hard to comprehend that things will never be the same, because their sibling/parent/pet/etc. isn’t coming back.  And when they do realize that, they face quite a large existential crisis.  They don’t understand how things can be okay if they won’t be the same.

To the end of helping children cope with such a large change in their lives, the staff at Bo’s Place implement many different arts and crafts activities.  One of them is the broken flowerpot.  You start with a regular flowerpot …

(I wanted to put a visual in this post, but I figure most of you already know what a flowerpot looks like.  So, to make this picture interesting, I chose one with kittens, because Internet + kittens = happy.)

You can even paint the flowerpot in any design you wish.  I guess a lot of the kids at Bo’s painted their families the way they remembered them, dead person and all.

Then you drop the flowerpot.  Just smash it on the floor as hard as you can.  In fact, the mere act of destruction can often be therapeutic.  Dropping the flowerpot symbolizes a catastrophic event that triggers shock and grief.

And then (this is the hard part) you glue the pot back together.  Using an infinite amount of patience to pick every shard up off the floor, you have to carefully reconstruct the pot like a 3-D puzzle (personally, I never liked those things) and glue it together, waiting for the glue to dry in between adding pieces.

What you have left after all of this is … a thing.  It’s not the same, since there are bound to be pieces that were lost, and it is hard to glue everything perfectly back in place.  But it still functions as a flowerpot and the random cracks and holes add a certain abstract beauty.  If I were prone to pushing visualizations over the top, I would add that the cracks allow the ~light~ to shine through.

But leaving purple prose and religious metaphors aside for now, I really liked the idea of the broken flowerpot.  It stuck with me after we left Bo’s Place and all the way through winter break.  In fact, I tried halfheartedly to find a terra-cotta pot over winter break, but, oddly enough, December is not a good time to look for gardening supplies.

January was Tu B’Shvat and the Hillel kids painted flowerpots.  With one thing and another, one ended up in the floor common room and was left after school ended and most of the college went home.  I went out to the common room one night and scavenged around for leftover things that were going to be thrown out and came back with a red silk tie, a surge protector, some Christmas tree lights, and the flowerpot.

(I still have all of those things, in case they are yours.)

Gluing the flowerpot back together after I had smashed it was difficult.  I even went to Michael’s to pick up some special pottery glue.  During my first few attempts, the pieces kept falling apart until I was ready to cry with frustration, but I finally figured out that gluing the rim together first, then resting it on my desk so it provided a solid base to work up from, helped me work faster.  When I finished the reconstruction process, I was left with … a thing.  Okay, so some of the pieces didn’t fit perfectly together, and the glue was quite visible.  It wasn’t fine art by any means, but neither was the thing it was supposed to represent.

I’ve had my heart, my body, and my dreams broken a million and one times.  In that, I am no one special.  Each time, I felt like I’d been pushed all the way down to the bottom of Mt. Everest, and each time it grew harder to start the climb back up.  In more relevant terms, I felt like Humpty Dumpty after he got pushed off the wall.

(Random mindblowing fact: the rhyme never mentioned that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.)

What makes me, and you, and everyone else capable of going on after a huge catastrophe is glue, which can be family, friends, pets, career, volunteer work, or school.  The “glue” in this example is anything that holds your life together and gives your existence meaning while you go about trying to patch said existence up.  It fills in the empty parts that you thought would stay empty and makes you structurally sound.

The lowest point of healing has got to be when you realize that nothing will ever be the same and that the whole point of healing is to learn to cope with the new normal, with forever having that phantom pain, with carrying this burden of unfamiliarity.

It’s not the same thing.  But it’s a thing.  It works, and in the right light, it can even be beautiful.

Here’s to all my fellow broken flowerpots.  May you find the right glue to help yourself be strong.

Thanks to J.L. for leaving your flowerpot behind.  You can have it back if you want, but it might not be … the same.  O_O