I want to tell you about the numbed state of shock.
I want to tell you about the fear. I was afraid of everything.
I want to tell you about the exhaustion.
I imagine it would have been like an addict who looked in the mirror and finally saw their sickened, sallow face and gaunt eyes.
In the Stages of Grief, this is the Shock and Denial stage. Disbelief overcomes you and you can’t fathom the world around you, just how bad things have been, it’s like you finally have the light turned on in a dark cell and you see… you finally see that you’ve been in a cell. Truth and reality flood you and you can’t go back.
This is rock bottom.
You feel overwhelmed. Hopeless. Broken.
People talk to you about “getting out” and “getting better.”
But the fear, the shock, the depression is overwhelming. You feel like all the world is on your shoulders and there is no hope.
You realize that you have a mental illness. And in that instant, you stop trusting your judgement. This was the moment that changed the game. When I stopped trusting “my” perspective and judgement, and started questioning everything I thought and believed.
It’s like waking up and realizing that the painting you’ve been living in wasn’t a realistic depiction of truth or life. It was Dali’s surreal paintings you were looking at. And everything you thought you knew about right and wrong, fear and love, pain, death, comfort, reality… all of it was wrong.
You try to recall a memory, any memory that you can access that shows you what other dreams and reality could be. But the joy and happiness they talk to you about… love and kindness is bull shit.
I told them this.
“What you are talking to me about is all unicorns and rainbows. You are asking me to believe in unicorns and rainbows.”
I cried all the time. I was broken and beaten and battered.
I was hopeless and lost.
I no longer had my dissociation to run to.
All I had was my present moment. Me. A little girl, frail and weak and belonging nowhere.
It was Imagination that pulled me from this feeble place of loss and despair.
It was Imagination that gave me hope that I could turn my life around.
Imagination gave me a heading. A light in the dark. A beacon that called to me.
It was Imagination that fueled me with purpose and determination.
I was crying to my son’s therapist. The depression was at its worst that day. And my son’s therapist would not have it. She was determined to get through to me that day.
With conviction, she said, “One day, you will hear a dog bark. And you will hear just a dog barking.”
“One day, you will hear a firework go off and it will just be a firework.”
“One day, you will hear a car back fire and it will just be a car back firing.”
She said it with such belief and determination that I could see it. I imagined it. I saw it.
And then, just like that, I had hope enough to belief just a little bit.
Today, I was inside a dressing room. I hadn’t even noticed that the door was from floor to ceiling and it locked. Five years ago, I would not have been able to step into that little room. My claustrophobia would have turned out and left me paralyzed. But today, this day, it was just a dressing room.
I smiled to myself.
She was right. Unicorns and rainbows are real.