Quieter Voices

More of the same

I am going to try something different.

I mean right now. As I sit at my gate at the far end of terminal C in Newark airport, sip a lukewarm coconut water, and type. Soon I will board a flight to Denver where I will watch a person I love dearly marry a person they love dearly. My friends and I will grin and dance before mountains soaked in orange light. We will be giddy from the contact high of love.

This is the first of several weddings I will fly to this summer. I know that I have been depressed this year because until very recently these weddings have felt primarily like to do list items. Like flights to be booked, dresses in specific colors to be found, purchased, tried on, returned, refound, repurchased, etc. I ordered one dress, butter yellow, during a Black Friday sale back in November and I know that I’ve been depressed this year because when I couldn’t return it I didn’t even donate it or try to sell it, I just threw it away.

I feel like we are sometimes fed the narrative that artists make their best work in their darkest times. That depression can breed proximity to something elemental like truth. I can not explain how much I do not relate to this. My experience of depression has been the inverse of proximity. It has been distance. Depression is an unrelenting buzz, a blanket of fog, a multi-sensation layer between myself and how I most want and love to be in the world. It is distance from the truest voice in my head, from the version of myself that is open, exfoliated, able to hear and feel and trust and write.

These past few months I have felt so much distance. From myself, but also from my mama. In the first year after she died, I felt her presence in small but persistent synchronicities. Each time I stepped onto a subway platform, my train would just arrive. I’d whisper, thanks mama, every time. I had this sense that I was lucky, that I was being held by something big and unknowable, winked at by some elemental force in the universe. I felt my mama’s presence like a guide.

I’m not sure exactly what happened but I know that I started to slip, further and further from the portal to clarity that loss provides. In the mornings, I’d rise to an early alarm, shower, dress, walk to the subway. Sometimes I’d step onto the platform and have to wait eight minutes and sometimes my train would just be there but the important part is that when it was there, I didn’t say thank you. At work, I felt growing and parallel senses of overwhelm and discontentment. I felt the ache of energy expended on things I did not love at the expense of the things that I do. I finished my work days so depleted that everything else became a grueling effort. The to do list on the notes app on my phone expanded as more and more of my life moved from exciting to obligatory. I thought of close friends’ weddings and I could not imagine the orange light flooding the face of the mountain, or the feel of wind against skin when dancing outside, I could think only of the return label I’d have to find a printer for when my third butter yellow dress didn’t fit.

The thing about the distance that occurs during depression is that it can make it so hard to hear (and trust) the voice telling you that something is wrong. I relentlessly questioned and then ignored the voice that told me I did not have to feel this way, that I had agency, that I could make a change. In a state of distress my instinct is to cling to that which is known, to cower behind the false sense of security and control that maintaining the status quo claims to provide. I spent months bound to that fucking to do list. Every day I made a list of the friends that I loved and was dreading having to text back. I ached for my mama in a way that felt new and unbearable. I cried for her daily. I felt my distance from her growing not just temporally but spiritually. For the first time since she died I couldn’t feel her winking at me. I can’t explain why but that loss was the worst kind.

I wish I could tell you that I woke up one morning and was brave. That I woke up one morning and the weather was perfect and my subway was timely and I whispered thanks to my mama and could hear the sound of myself in my head. I wish I could tell you that I woke up and listened. That my voice told me to do something different, so I did. But change is so rarely epiphanic. And what actually happened was so much more vain. What actually happened is that my hair started falling out.

I am embarrassingly attached to my hair. Like cry every time I get a haircut, even if it’s a half inch trim, attached to my hair. We won’t spend too long on that one because it is exactly as weird and neurotic as it sounds, but let’s just say that if there was any single thing my body could do to make me believe that something was wrong, it would be to make my hair fall out. The grammar in that sentence is intentional. I believe that my body knows things, often, if not always, before my mind. I believe that my body works hard to send signals to my mind and that one of the distances that grows during depression is the distance between the two. This means that the body of a depressed mind has to work even harder to make itself known.

My hair fell out in handfuls. Mostly in the shower. I held my breath and spread its broken strands on the ceramic tiles of the wall. Thin lines, cracks in the tile, clumps. Handful after handful. Within a few weeks the entire bottom layer of my hair was gone. I stood under beating water and stared at the shapes my broken hair formed.

Sometimes, deciding to do something different requires that the existing discomfort of remaining the same feel markedly worse than the imagined discomfort of changing. It seems so dumb that my hair was this tipping point, but in many ways, it was. I decided to take a leave from work.

My leave began one week ago and my decision to take it feels both small and monumental, as I imagine any single step towards personal change probably does. The decision to change something in and of itself feels freeing, but I still hear conflicting voices and it still feels hard to distill my way down to the truest one.

There is a voice that tells me that distance from the portal that loss opens is inevitable. That we aren’t meant to live so close to the edge. This voice tells me that everyone has to wait for the subway, that’s just what people do, and when we don’t, it’s not the universe winking, it’s the pre-determined schedule of the MTA. This voice tells me that people have jobs for things like money and health insurance, that passion is something to be fit around pragmatism, that that’s just the way life is.

But there is another voice. She’s quiet, but I’m working so hard to hear her. She tells me that once you’ve touched the portal you’d be fucking crazy not to try to live your life as close to it as you can. She tells me to be brave enough to be happy. To trust my body, to shiver in wonder in the face of writing, dancing, sex. This quieter voice rode the subway to Newark airport today and her train was right on time and when she transferred to NJ Transit she had a conversation with a stranger that was lovely and it didn’t feel obligatory, it felt exactly like what her mama would have done. This voice wants to dance in the mountains, to hug her friends tightly, to throw her head back in the sun.

When I first started this Substack, I started it because there was a voice inside me that told me I wasn’t a writer, that I wasn’t good enough or experienced enough, or knowledgable enough to claim that title as my own. But there was another, quieter voice, who said fuck that and told me that nothing had ever felt as good or true as writing did.

I’ve boarded my flight to Denver. I’m in a middle seat because I won’t admit that basic economy isn’t worth it. The woman in the window seat beside me sees me typing this and asks if I’m a writer. I even don’t hesitate. Yes, I tell her, I am. What I’m saying is, it worked.

When I sat down to write this, I thought I was going to say that I wanted to try using my Substack for something different. That I wanted to use it to document my time away from work, my time attempting to close all this distance. But as I’m writing, as the sky goes from yellow to navy outside my seatmates window, I’m realizing that’s exactly what I’ve used my Substack for before. This has always been a space to reach out to the version of myself that I so badly want to believe in, to record, strengthen, and amplify her voice until it’s loud enough to really hear. That voice is my mama, my body, the portal, the unknowable forces that wink on the subway, that shower mountains in color, strangers in chatter, friendships in glitter, words in meaning — I am going to do everything I can to write my way there.

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I wrote this on the way to the wedding and am sharing it on the way back.

As I reread before posting, I am struck that the quieter voice knew just what to expect out of the weekend. My jaw hurts from grinning, my feet from dancing, I am awash in colors, giddy from the contact high of love.