The first story I ever wrote was in the second grade, entitled Amy and the Tooth. It was the dramatic and detailed adventure of Amy, a girl who shrank down to the size of a peanut and befriended a lost tooth who possessed superhero-like qualities. Together they journeyed through drainpipes, battled rogue nail clippings, and encountered a variety of other bathroom sink horrors.
Now that I’m older (though not any less afraid of what is in my bathroom sink), my storytelling has shifted more towards reality, or at least my perceived reality. This isn’t because I don’t value fiction; in fact, I devour it ravenously (when I’m not drowning in social work texts). But as I push myself more and more to participate in the world, to move beyond patterns my brain has established while depressed and suicidal, telling my story has become a lifeline.
So much of the time I feel like a fish washed up on the beach, gills desperately opening and closing, trying to breath in an environment it wasn’t made for. Writing somehow fills my lungs, anchors me when I otherwise feel disconnected and unsure. It’s almost as if writing about my life makes it real.
Yesterday one of the women at the shelter where I’m working told me about her aunt who had recently passed away. She shared, misty eyed, that from the age of 17 until she died at 96, her aunt had written in a journal every day. Every day. Now, though she is gone, her stories are still here, her words concrete and present-living.
I don’t know how much I’m living right now; too often my thoughts and emotions hijack my brain and take it far away from where my body is breathing and moving. I’m overwhelmed, shrinking into myself. But if I keep writing, continue to tell my story, maybe the journey down the drainpipe won’t feel so frightening. And, for now, my words will do the living for me.
I think the act of living has always been a story for me. I can’t see the ocean without words cresting in my mind along with the tide, can’t feel the fur of my cats without adjectives coating my tongue. Words are the pictures, the taste, the meaning in everything.
And maybe this is why, at first, depression was so startlingly hard to bare; it enveloped all the words. Storytelling takes energy, vigor, light; without it, words dry up somewhere inside you without ever reaching the surface.
And perhaps this is why we still struggle so much with the concept of mental illness. If you have no language to describe what is going on within you, there is no way to communicate your pain to someone else. Words make things real. If the very disease that is gripping you removes them, what is left?
I remember an evening in the Emergency Room, checking in at the registration desk. I was crying, and when asked my reason for the visit, couldn’t think of anything to say. The receptionist kindly said, “I see; you’re sad.”
And that’s just it; depression is not sadness. I’m not sure how to describe it beyond that-what it’s not. But in some ways I’ve grown to see that as a gift.
One of the reasons I’m alive today is because someone believed in my light, saw the glimmer of my story even when my words had long been dormant. This person showed me how to be in this world in all the ways that depression is not.
She showed me it is possible to get out of bed on mornings when panic clogs your throat and it feels like all the awful possibilities are closing in on you. She showed me it is possible to dance in an emptying auditorium just because, for a moment, you feel giddy with joy. She showed me that you don’t have to settle for the status quo, that it is possible to innovate with fervent empathy. She showed me, through her own willingness, what it means to truly be yourself-something I had lost in hospital rooms and prescription bottles, and probably long before.
Depression is not dancing, not words. It is not connection, not light, not life. It chips away at who you are, piece by piece, like a strong wave pounding on a rock, until you are a grain of sand lost amidst millions of other grains. What a gift I have been given, to know that what it is not can prove a daily guide. That my story can continue through the pounding, even when words are harder to find in the swells. And what a gift that she, by shining her own blazing light, gave me back my own light, my own story.
I can feel it lately, though I don’t know how to describe it other than a deep internal rumbling, almost like hunger but thicker and complicated by a stew of emotions.
It started during my first graduate school class, when my professor told us that silence condones, that our voices as social workers are one of the most powerful tools in our possession, that words are a vehicle towards change.
It continued as my eyes were opened to the unearned privilege I’ve carried my entire life with complete unawareness, unawareness born because of that very privilege. It strengthened as I learned about our American system and how it is oppressive at it’s very core, how for the first 30 years of my life I have been quietly and passively walking on soil that is stained and stolen.
It grew louder, more ferocious, when the majority of the academic community which so loudly touted social justice values went mute surrounding mental illness issues. It writhed with loneliness and fear when I was told not to speak of my own struggles, not to share my personal story, not to be who I am.
And it’s there now, this rumbling, as I write these words. I’ve cried over it, denied it, tried to throw it away. I don’t want the heaviness of caring so much.
But I do.
So I’m releasing that rumbling, turning it into a thunder clap, a roar. I don’t want to be a part of a world where so much is broken, so many differences are ostracized and demonized and oppressed. I don’t know what it’s like to be black, to be homeless, to be Native American, and I hope to continue in my learning about allieship, about ways in which I can be a part of empowering those communities, raising those valuable voices above the din of privilege.
I do know what it’s like to have a mental illness. And I’m finished walking the tightrope between silent safety and outright openness. In a year and a half I am going to be a social worker who has attempted suicide, has scars from self-harm, has been in a psychiatric hospital multiple times. And I’m going to be a damn good one.
And I’m allowing that rumble to guide me, that passion to drive me towards working for change. I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling, that words matter. Now my words will have rumbling behind them.
I was a fabulous teacher. If you’re thinking it sounds self-centered for me to state that, don’t worry-I’m thinking that too, and saying it anyways. I was a fabulous teacher. I was a fabulous teacher because I would have done the job for no money at all (and it’s a sad truth that many teachers would say the same and many make so little that it is virtually true). I was fabulous because many of the traits that make me Me are traits found in Fabulous Teachers I’ve worked with or had. Fabulous Teaching traits, and traits that I have when I am in my Sarahness. They are are these: I listen, and I allow people to come as they are. What makes it Truly Fabulous, though, is that those are two traits children naturally possess, in a way that is so beautifully raw because they aren’t aware that they possess them.
You might be thinking I’m crazy (and I don’t use that word lightly!); anyone who has taught preschool, or had a child, or known a 3 year-old, would have good evidence to say kids can’t listen to save their lives (and I don’t use that phrase lightly, either!). You need only watch 1 minute of a typical circle time to have concrete behavioral examples of how challenging it can be for young children to listen to each other. But what I know to be true is that it isn’t challenging at all, it just has to be worth it.
Humans, little and big, young and old, make change only when they are personally invested. The layers of that investment might be thick; someone’s reason to change might be that changing will ease the suffering of those they care about, thus easing their own suffering. “I’m not going to binge today because I know that when I binge, people I love worry more, and it helps me when I help others not worry.” Or the layers might be thinner, more obvious: “I feel less physical discomfort when I eat one cookie instead of three, so I’m only going to eat one right now.”
We call children under a certain age “ego-centric” because they are; they can’t imagine that the way they experience the world isn’t the way everyone else does. It’s something we try to teach out of them. But, ultimately, all humans are ego-centric, regardless of age. We all act only when it is worth it, on some level, to do so. We all struggle to see outside our own lens of experience. The problem is, we “adults” add layers of shame and guilt and fear onto this-we tell ourselves we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes, that acting for selfish reasons is selfish, and that selfish is bad. But ultimately, we are all always acting for selfish reasons, no matter what. Children just aren’t afraid to be blatantly selfish, until we show them that they should be. We do this out of love and a desire to protect them, but what we really do is protect them from being their True Selves, give them the message that showing up as you are is not always okay, especially if “as you are” is Intensely Intense.
I stumbled upon this clip from an old Sesame Street show the other day, and I think it is brilliant. It is brilliant because I remember watching it as a kid and seeing it as entertainment, and wanting to find some paperclips after the end of the episode. And it is brilliant because when I watch it now, I see something totally different. I see a little boy who is listening intently, and picking up cues, and becoming more and more confused because the experience he is having doesn’t match other experiences he’s had. People don’t usually express Sadness, Anger, and Happiness all within a 1 minute, 25 second span (when they do, we label it disordered). He, at the age of three, knows this, because he is unable to do what the puppet is asking him to do-show on his face what it looks like to be genuinely Sad or Angry or Happy. Because he’s not any of those things, he’s totally, legitimately, confused.
John John does, in this brief clip, what I know kids to be innately capable of, when given the chance and motivated by their own desires: He listens, and he allows space for this puppet to come exactly as he is-Sad, Angry, Happy. He does this naturally, despite his own confusion. He teaches me more about emotion regulation and non-judgment than the adult human behind the puppet.
So, in my cyclical, long-threaded way, I’m back to this: I was a fabulous teacher. Because I didn’t teach at all. Because I recognized, early on, that kids are the true teachers. I got the privilege of observing them closely, of watching and listening and describing their journey as they made messes, literally and figuratively, and figured out entirely on their own how to clean them up. And because I got to do that, I also got to listen to them, when they needed it, and to always make sure to tell them that it is okay to come as you are. In telling them that, I was telling myself. My human selfishness was that, in telling an intensely sad child that it is okay to cry and be intensely sad, I was telling myself that, too. In writing these words I’m telling myself that right now. And isn’t that what fabulous teaching is all about?
I’ve written about thesamedifferent all my life, dancing around the concept by using Words like Change and Stagnation and Light and Dark. A superhero and cherished friend of mine calls it “showing up differently” and “rising up” and using one’s authentic Voice. Another superherofriend calls it using skills and Living Your Truth, based on an amazing book we both read. Yet another superhero I’ve been lucky enough to know calls it “living my Sarahness.”
Today, in this moment, thesamedifferent means I am living in my Sarahness. I’m also starting to recognize the smallest of ways I’ve been the true Sarah all along, shine the light a little through that darkness. That’s where the different comes in. I’m the same as I’ve always been, and entirely different all at once-thesamedifferent.
It’s thesamedifferent that I’m using my own Word to explain my current internal experience, not the words of anyone else. It’s thesamedifferent that I’m using my own wild, trembling Voice to share this Word. It’s thesamedifferent that last night, the night before my final Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills group, I chose not to use skills, and instead used old behaviors to cope with overwhelm and panicjoy. It’s thesamedifferent because, instead of wallowing in the shame of my choice, I’m holding my choice up to the light, and telling myself it makes sense, that it’s okay, and that I can make the choice to never do it again. And it’s thesamedifferent that now I’m able to speak those dialectics to myself.
Yet another superherofriend of mine was fabulous at shining the light on my natural ability to understand dialectics at a time when I wasn’t able to. He gave me many gifts, in the form of True Words, as have all the superherofriends I’ve mentioned. What unites those superherofriends, in my mind, in this moment, is that they live thesamedifferently in their various ways every. single. day. They use the very skills they teach, though not all of them would call them skills or DBT, and they show up as their authentic selves even when it fills them with panicjoy. It’s thesamedifferent that I can thank them, and the various providers and group members I’ve been lucky enough to share a little of this journey with, without giving up any of my Sarahness. Because, in this moment, I am thesamedifferent.
This is all about Light and Dark. This is all about Starstuff- the gaps that allow light to shine through. This is all about Words. This is my Journey. This is my beginning, again, until my next beginning. This is my weapon against the “old tug at my ankles” that Mary Oliver writes of. This is my reminder to myself of myself.
“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable…I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world” -Walt Whitman
This is my barbaric yawp. This is me using my wild, trembling voice. This is me saving myself through metaphor, through storytelling, through the lovely, messy vine-tangle of Words. This is me returning to a Truth of mine that has been buried underneath hospital gauze and Labels and Intense Sensitivity.
“Everybody will get their wants, when they heartily want.”
-Santosh Kawlar
This is my Hearty Wants List. This is my road map to my Essence, my Self undistilled. This is my declaration of my Sarahness. This is my Opposite Action to shame.
“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to… to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.” -Emily Dickinson
This is my Manifesto. And that is this:
I want to find my Phosphorescence, my marine Glow that penetrates even the blackest of Darks, my Light Within, and hold it tight, and let it shine inwardly so that it may reflect out into the world.
"Still, a great deal of light falls on everything" 