Asking for Help
With my favorite seasons finally descending upon the city and a full moon providing me with some extremely disconcerting dreams, no time feels more apt than now to write something that will make everyone worried about me!
In case you missed it, I’m currently in the throes of what could be liberally referred to as a “messy break-up.” This might be surprising because my brand is very “I hate labels so much I won’t even call myself a vegetarian” and “dating is just another institution of the cisheterocapitalist patriarchy in which I refuse to participate.” I also, famously, loathe talking about my feelings, so I keep my intimate relationships on the relative down-low as to avoid this very scenario where I have to explain why a certain someone will no longer be joining me in attendance at various events.
Not to mention, I don’t get dumped—I’m a fucking catch and a half.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night to a 5-paragraph essay of a text from the guy I’d been seeing for nearly a year. He had been wanting to tell me for a while that he had started seeing someone else, but he still wanted to be friends. He had already told his new girlfriend that she would have to be okay with me being in his life because I was still his best friend. He understood that this might be weird for me and that I might be mad. I told him to go fuck himself.
[Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” plays loudly in the background]
Now, trying to stagger my way through this emotional upheaval I’m realizing there’s nothing I’ve gone through that could have prepared me for something like this. The first “relationship” I ever ended had an alarmingly clean break. The guy I was head-over-heels for drunkenly pinned me to a couch and punched me in the face at a party. Shocked, I immediately fled. I left my shoes and my phone at the house my friends had rented for the weekend’s festivities, and I tried to drive home. I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car, and sobbed as I safely completed my journey.
I told my mom half of the story, and I was obviously emotionally distraught enough about the whole situation that my drunken transgressions were promptly forgiven (plus, I’m an only-child, so punishment has never really been a thing in my household). My face was so swollen and bruised that my mom was worried I had gotten in a car accident. I told her I must’ve fallen, but not to worry because the car was fine.
I eventually recovered my shoes and my phone. He texted me to say he couldn’t exactly remember what had happened, but wanted to make sure I was okay. I said I was fine, but that we were over. He said that made sense. What did I tell you? A clean break!
Now, I’m no stranger to mental anguish, but usually the call is coming from inside the house. I’ve written at length about my adventures with depression, especially re my closer encounters with suicide. What makes depression such a tough beast to tackle is that the experience can be so impossible to unravel for another person to understand. Language is a deeply imperfect medium for trying to grapple with the fuzzy, intangible world of headspace and emotions—how can you ask for help with a problem when you don’t even know how to begin putting it into words? There’s talk of a voice inside of your head, but how do you get rid of that voice when you realize it’s your own?
I’m blessed to be surrounded by incredible friends, even though one of the lies my brain tells me is that no one actually likes me and that my friends all secretly hate me but they’re involved in an elaborate conspiracy where they only spend time with me because they’re afraid that if they didn’t I’d feel bad (I’ve been told “no one is that nice”). It has been almost refreshing to be able to pin-point an exact reason for feeling a certain type of way. In explaining the foul circumstances of my relationship coming to an end, I’ve been met with an almost violent amount of support. Group chats of friends from college roasted this dude into oblivion with such reckless abandon that I laughed myself hoarse, my beloved podcast cohost came to my apartment way too late at night to watch shitty television (ahem, The Masked Singer) and offer a literal shoulder to cry on, another friend drove from New York to visit my humble Cambridge abode for a weekend and to go to spin classes/drink fancy beer/take me to finally go get an industrial piercing, an older coworker of mine wordlessly bought me a very nice bottle of Scotch, and the list could go on and on.
The point I’m trying to make here is that through all of this I’ve learned an important lesson: when I start to feel like I’m being buried by negative emotions, I can ask for help.
I’ve always been an advocate of asking for help when it comes to struggling with mental health, but I’ve also always been a hypocrite. When it comes to actually putting that advice into practice, I’m always confronted with fear that everyone will think I’m weak, fear that no one will want to be my friend once they know what I’m really like, fear that whomever I reach out to will think I’m so beyond help that they’ll have me institutionalized. And I know that sounds crazy and irrational, and that’s because it is. When I start to lose my grip on the reigns of my depression, rational thought goes out the window faster than I can quote my favorite works from David Foster Wallace. Using this experience to teach myself that those fears are completely unfounded has been nothing short of monumental.
To be fair, it’s much easier to articulate the obviously painful “I just learned the guy who I’ve been planning all kinds of fun fall activities with has been boning a 21-year old for the last two months” than the more abstract and troubling “I’ve convinced myself that I am ruining not only my own life, but also the lives of everyone around me, and therefore it’s in all of our best interests if I eliminate myself from the universe.” Having received such loving support with regard to the former, I’m hopeful that the next time I find myself brushing with the latter I will be able to reach out for help before I get completely consumed by the horrors inside my own head.
Jury’s still out on if I prefer sudden catastrophic sadness that I can easily label to the ambiguous existential sadness I get to feel all the time as a Depressed Person™, but now I can say with confidence that I prefer leaning on the beautifully kind people I get to call my friends to trudging through life’s torment alone.
“Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.”