Magic Moments: Learning to Dance with Depression by Colleen Kavanaugh.

What did you think of Shannon’s story last week? Did you get a better understanding of how someone close to you in a similar situation might be feeling? Or did you see bits of yourself in her story, perhaps the ways you talk to yourself?

If anything, I hope it made you think. Those statistics were pretty crazy, were they not? And the sad thing is, the more I pay attention to how women as a whole greet or comment to each other, I am blown away by how it’s almost ALWAYS centered around weight/appearance.

“look at you! so skiiiiinnnnnny! skinny mini! you’re so tiny!” blah blah blah.

And in response, those comments often instantly being turned down and shot down with more weight/image comments like:

“OMG stop. no, i’m not. i feel bloated. i gained like 9 pounds over vacation.” blah blah blah.

Can we, as women, change the way talk to each other, and about ourselves, please? And maybe, instead, comment on how brilliant she is or the amazing friend/mother/sister that you see in her.

Media (and social media) has a lot to do with it, but I think the larger shift is how we talk to ourselves, our friends, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters and our neighbors.

Ladies, it’s time to shift our conversations around something other than surface chatter. Try it for me this week, and see if you notice a positive shift. Mmk? K. 🙂

Moving on…

This week, as we continue to shed light on Mental Health Awareness, we are side-stepping anxiety, and diving straight into the depths of depression. Yup. We are going in, y’all. No more dancing around the uncomfortable topics because health, to me, encompasses more than just the body by what we eat and how we move. It’s the body, mind, and soul. And you can’t have optimal health as a human being without all three.

To all you food + fitness junkies… chew on that for a second, would ya? #kthx

Where were we? Oh yes, this week’s mental health guest post. I can’t wait to share the words, wisdom + wit of one of my most trusted friends, Colleen Kavanaugh. In her podcast, The After Life, she often speaks on soul things, and as you listen, you’ll begin to notice her big, soft, and oh so beautiful heart. I hope after you read her story, you’ll take a moment and check it out. She’s doing pretty amazing work over there.

Colleen and I first met via our Mastermind Group via one of Jess Lively‘s courses. Six of us from across the world, signing up in seek of direction for our own pivotal, personal journeys, which in turn blossomed into an opportunity to grow, support, challenge and love one another in ways I never imagined. What started as a weekly short-term commitment, turned into a set of lifelong friendships, now still chatting weekly, 3 years strong!

Some people scoff at the idea of meeting “real ” friends through the Internet. It’s true, you can’t beat the 1-1, face-to-face kind of friendships we are used to. We are social, community-focused beings. (Yes, that includes us introverts, too.) But it’s cool how the Internet DOES in fact, bring people together and provides a like-minded community that is more readily available at your fingertips. Literally.

And fun fact: Colleen and I have actually met up in LA to geek out + gawk over Rob Bell together, and she’s visited me in ATX, right around the time of our move a year ago! Now it’s our turn to make our way up to the North East and join her for some pizza + late night dancing. Girl after my own heart. 

Who says Internet friends can’t be real friends?

Here’s Colleen.

 

MAGIC MOMENTS

You know that magic moment when you are with a friend, and you share a secret feeling you’ve been having? That one feeling you’ve, until this moment, kept protected like a treasure, only it’s not a treasure? It’s something you’ve hidden away in shame because surely if anyone else knew it, you’d never be able to see them again without running in the opposite direction?

Yeah. THAT one.

You share THAT one, and the friend pauses, and you silently gasp and hold down a regurgitation of regret, and the friend says, “I can’t believe you just said that.”

And then she continues.

“I feel the same way.”

Then, in your relief you keep going further into sharing and then she shares back, and you share, and she shares, and before your very eyes your friendship grows deeper and expands to fill a space you previously were unaware of existing.

That’s a magic moment.

I want to share a secret with you about these magic moments. They aren’t magic. They are everywhere, in all the moments. All that is needed to find them is to listen.

Connection and community happen when we can slow down, check our agenda at the door and show up in service to the person we stand before. When we quiet the chatter of our thoughts and needs, we create space for something larger to enter.

Not without irony, this largeness entered my life when I was mentally and physically at my smallest. Allow me to create between us a virtual magic moment.

HER STORY

For the story I’d like to share with you, I need to bring you back to the time in my life when, if I ate an entire stick of gum during the day it would have been a feast. I simply couldn’t eat. For weeks and weeks and weeks.

At the time, I couldn’t have told you why this was happening, but I could tell you I couldn’t control it. Perhaps the more honest thing to admit was I could control it. It was the only thing I could control, the not eating.

I was twenty years old and living on my own in Boston attending college when depression decided to make itself my best friend. I had no say in the relationship and never knew its name until speaking with one of my professors.

But, before that conversation with the professor with the unabashedly luxurious and long gray hair whose spirit I admired, I knew I was stuck but unsure on what. Nothing felt right, I was in over my head with an ill-fitting romantic relationship, and some other family things from which I had spent my lifetime running away from were breathing down my neck.

Finally exhausted by my running-induced malaise, I made an appointment with my much-admired professor. What she noticed from the conversation was not what I was saying but how I was saying it. I was thinking about everything happening to me. “I think…”, “I think…”,  “I think…”, was the only way I could speak. Until she asked me gently, “Colleen, how do you feel?”

The question hung in the air like a soap bubble that was destined to pop. How did I feel? I wondered what language she was suddenly speaking as I attempted to form the words to answer this foreign sounding question.

“I, I feel…” and no other words came.

Racing through my chest, up from the bottom of myself was a tsunami of tears that drowned any access to previously known vocabulary. That one sentence, with a mere four words, was the key that opened the gate of my just a moment ago restricted humanity and memory. The opening of this gate enabled the release of two decades worth of stuffed down, misunderstood, never before dealt with, unprocessed emotion.

As the appointment ended, I was tasked with collecting all of my pent up emotions that had just poured through my eyes. I somehow needed to squeeze out the door with these soggy things hanging out of my backpack, juggling extraneous ones in my arms, and fumble back into a now newly emotionally cluttered life. And once I made it back to my own Emotional Hoarder’s Headquarters, I was instructed by my professor to make an appointment with the school’s psychologist who, unbeknownst to her, would within fifteen minutes of speaking to me prescribe the new drug of the moment, Prozac. Fifteen minutes. It takes me longer to get through the security line at the airport than it was to be handed a bottle of pills. How did I get here and how did I get here this fast? In an instant my life was taking off in a new direction.

UNPACKING FEELINGS

The problem with some items we own, especially emotions, once we take them out of their packaging to look at them, it’s impossible to ever put them back.

The clutter of my feelings was an unwelcomed burden I would carry with me for the next two years as I tried everything I could to corral and organize them. Rather than using containers or file folders, I tried cleaning my newly messed up house with pills in the form of anti-depressants, not eating, partying, dancing, and a too infrequently seen psychotherapist. Adding these items to the mess of my depression was doing nothing to serve me other than allowing myself to ignore myself.

Why was being ignored such a safe and familiar feeling? This question would take me some time to answer.

The month after taking my newly prescribed pills from the initial speed-counseling session on campus, I returned home from school to tell my mother what had happened during the months I was away. I brought along pieces of what I had been unable to fit into the containers of prescription bottles, hangovers, and high heels. I was hoping she would show me where to place these uncontained items called feelings.

I was deeply dismayed to be met with the instantaneous realization she was wholly unable to give me what she did not have in her possession.

Instead, she handed me an, “I’ve never given you anything to be sad about. Come on; this is not my fault. Everyone always blames the mother.”

Huh? All I shared was how bad I was feeling in all of my lonesome and aloneness. Not a syllable of blame was contributed. I was unable at the time to see her response for what it was, her inability to see me outside herself and her refusal to acknowledge feelings. I learned all my feeling-less thinking from someone, after all.

Back to school I flew and would continually try to break through to my mother during wasted hours in phone calls of conversations that circled around nothingness. All I wanted was some sort of hug, physical or verbal, telling me I would be okay. Instead, I only heard how this was not her fault and to go shopping and cheer up already.

Shopping? How was a new sweater going to warm my broken and cluttered soul? If I could have fast-forwarded two decades into our collective futures, I would have known this advice to be the only advice for self-preservation she was able to share with me.

Twenty years later I would be excavating her attempts at purchased happiness as I was tasked with the emptying of her physically hoarded up home. The waves of her depressions shopped out of her in unfathomable collections of bargain basemented insignificant emptiness. The soul was hollow, but the house was full. After she died, I had to dry up the flood that she spent her life drowning under; this was the parting gift of her newly departedness.

LEARNING TO LIVE WITH DEPRESSION

These end-caps of the discovery and the historic understanding of my physiological makeup obscure the other depressions in the middle. The severe post-partum that made me fearful of ever having a second child, the mid-marriage bottoming out due to living with a person whose afflictions I am too polite to confess, and the post caring for a dying mother and father crash. I was warned about them all.

The first too-infrequently seen psychotherapist let me know, by way of prediction, that I would forever be prone to this new friend of depression visiting me again and again, and the more I kicked it out, the more it might want to come in. And so, I prepared to barricade my windows and doors to block reentry. I can feel it coming now, even before I hear it knocking on the door and throwing rocks at my windows.

 

The knocks and the rocks can appear to sound and look like the following:

• A need to stay in bed, or, the inability to get up and begin the day. If making it out of bed has been achieved there is a quick and untimely need for napping.
• A failure of my taste buds, or, the loss of pleasure from my favorite activity of eating.
• Wanting to stay home, or, not wanting to be seen this way in front of friends, or, wanting to go out but then talking myself out of it.
• The feeling of something indescribable looming, or, the vacancy of feel-good hormones in my cerebral cortex.
• Wishing for a magic pill to make it all better.

I kick the unwelcomed friend of depression from my front door and chase it down the road with the following:

• Exercise. I hate exercise. But I hate depression more.
• Eating whole foods. Filling up on all things from nature helps get me on track and gives my body a healthy boost.
• Seltzer. Or any other non-alcoholic beverage I can ask for to be served on the rocks. Alcohol being a depressant doesn’t need to be layered into a newly breaking depression. One depressive feeling at a time is always enough.
• Mind over matter. I’ll be damned if I allow another depression to descend and so I do everything in my power to force it out of me and get mad enough to do everything I know I need to without haste or excuses.
• Hormone tracking. I map out the next several months and chart my moods. Are some days better than others? Is there a timely trend that indicates my feminine hormones are at play? It can be a clue in a healthful direction.
• Writing. Taking time to reflect on how I feel and journal is both calming and insightful.
• Friends. Letting a handful of close friends know I could use some looking in on during this time helps prevent me from isolating myself and wallowing in the trap of self-pity.
• Therapy session… or two, or three or more. Sitting with a mental health professional who is trained to notice the signs of clinical depression helps me feel I have no chance of jumping into the deep end of depression. They will catch me before I can even change into my bathing suit.

 

IN DECADES OF RETROSPECT

I believe depression is like the flu. It is a physical circumstance happening in your body. There are a few things you can do in the hope of lessening the symptoms; you can allow it to pass through your body, you can be as good to yourself as you are able, you can seek medications from a doctor. It can be a bad cold or just a cold. Or you can be one of those people who “always” get the flu.

I consider myself to be a someone who “always” gets depression. The tricky part is there is no depression season when I can see everyone me around getting sick. It’s an individual season that occurs with no seasonal schedule. But I’ve learned to feel this version of a cold coming on and jump to keeping it at bay.

When I was 20 years old, I had to counterintuitively learn the person who I thought was best able to help me, my mother, was not, due to her own set of unique experiences and understanding of herself. It was when I listened to how I felt and made the appointment to speak with a trusted professor that a chain of dominoes was set into motion allowing me to access professionals who were trained to assist me. To this day I believe in seeking outside counsel from experts for health, financial, legal, and spiritual reasons.

Knowing after one bout of depression I statistically could expect a reoccurrence allowed me to be more vigilant for its next appearance. I now know my soil more intimately, and this knowledge allows me to plant what I know can grow and what garden pests I need to work hard to prevent getting close to my sprouting, growing, and flowering soul.

A word on acceptance concerning my sharing I get mad enough not to let depression overtake me. This technique is individualized to how I need to motivate myself into action. It may not be your way. I have needed to accept the fact depression happens to me. In that acceptance, I no longer have a luxury of pretending it might not be happening. The healthy part of me is now strong enough to stand up to the weaker part and do what it knows from experience to beat this illness back into the shadows. You will learn which tricks work for you.

I realize depression is a chemical reaction to many forces coalescing at once. There is little we can do to prevent “catching” depression, to use the cold analogy. However, there are things we can do to make its stay as short as possible and even reverse its destructive path. This is why nutrition and exercise are such important factors in maintaining optimal health.

So now here I am, having written and re-written this blog post and am moments away from submitting it for publication. I’ll wait in a state of emotional regurgitation wondering if I should have just kept this part of myself hidden.

Did you nod along yes to anything you just read? Did the thought of total understanding run across your head? Might you pass this along to a friend?

If you did or will, I’d genuinely love to know that together, as strangers, we created a magic moment. Don’t be too shy to reach out and give me a holler. Thank you for being here to listen.

And the next time you sit with a friend, consider being like my professor and stop to listen. Your friend could be talking but only in your quiet will you create the space to hear what her soul is saying. This is especially true if the friend is you.

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