I’ve lived with persistent depressive disorder (better known as high-functioning depression) for the better part of the last 3 years. But at some point this year, I felt I’d lost the high-functioning part, and I find that I am struggling to just wake up every day. This blog is my attempt to find the space to keep going; to find the firm(er) ground that will allow me to take one step at a time and hopefully help anyone else out there struggling with the same thing.
In the summer of 2022, a friend recommended I read Conversations on Love, an exploration of love, what it means to have it, to want it, and to lose it, in its many forms. My friend recommended it because she knew I was in the throes of the most painful breakup I’ve experienced and was struggling to find reprieve, but as I tore through the book, grief-stricken and tearful, it was not the reflections on romantic love in the book that hit the hardest. No, my truest epiphany was on what it meant to search for love at all. One contributor wrote, “I wondered if the ugliest shade of unhappiness comes, not directly from what you lack, but from wanting a different life to the one you’re living. Perhaps that feeling is not a state of longing after all, but a way of seeing.”
I realized, reading words that seemed to hit home more profoundly than anything I’d heard for years, that my grief over the loss of this one relationship was undergirded by bitterness at the sense of a loss far deeper that would color a wave of depression I’m still fighting to swim through. I realized that somewhere along the way, I had veered off track from a life I’d imagined I would live, and now I carried a body weakened by a million (sometimes little) moments of rejection and disappointment. My latest romantic rejection, was simply a breaking point. One day, I’ll write about what it means to hit this point and how injuries or betrayals that might seem imminently survivable can become so damaging, but here, I want to talk about how I’d come to be at the precipice of this breaking point.
As I read these reflections on the nature of love and longing, I began to realize that what I’d lost, slowly and almost imperceptibly over time, was a belief in the very potential of love. I was no longer seduced by the romance of what I like to think of as the radical possibility of love. After all, what can you call it but romantic when you believe that the collective force of being vulnerable with other people is enough to build forms of love so powerful that they can literally change the world. And what can you call it but radical, when you believe that the community love builds is something that we will into being, and nurture into enduring?
I have always felt that the circumstances of my family life did not support the capacity I had to pour into intimate love. As a child I wished for closer and more gentle kin ties, and in moments of mourning this life I did not have, I would lament that I had so much love to give and nowhere to put it. However, as I grew into adulthood and into the autonomy to choose who to love and how to love them, I found that there were so many different forms of love that could in effect, fill this void. As a community organizer, I learned that a deep love for your chosen home could ignite powerful connections and drive change that inspires a true love of life itself. I built relationships based on naked vulnerability that taught me that friendship could be a big and powerful form of love. And as I poured into so many different forms of love, I did indeed find a healthy and nurturing version of the much vaunted romantic love with someone I am no longer with but who remains my mental model for what being loved well is.
But then life happened and I moved cities and stopped organizing, friends who had become family moved or partnered up or re-evaluated the role that friendship played in their lives, breakups happened. Slowly I began to lose the ties to the many big loves I’d felt and instead, once more started to feel the divides between the types of love one can generally expect - platonic, familial, romantic - and the hierarchy that conventionally exists among them, as well as a sense of a loss of access to this bigger and more expansive form of love. As often happens with transitions in life, I didn’t notice how many of these things were changing, and I didn’t notice that I had stopped pouring energy into building multiple loves. Before I knew it, I had once more began to circle around the refrain from my childhood, “I have so much love to give, and nowhere to give it.”
In the past few months, my return to this view on love - as a thing I have been deprived off, as existing within a life I am not living - has been the triggering thought for my worst depressive spirals. I do not want to keep feeling like this. I want to starting seeing differently and once more finding the scaffolding for a life I want to be living.
As an important caveat, I do not think depression is just or even mostly about feeling a lack of love — in fact, for many people one of the most painful things about depression can be feeling hopeless in spite of seeing an abundance of love in your own life. However, in my story, I have realized that my capacity to survive is rooted in my ability to love in this broad sense of the word; to love, paraphrasing bell hooks, in a way that can feed your soul and grow your spirit. This sort of love is integral to fighting through not only my personal depression, but also to finding the power to wade through the grim and exhausting structures of a violent world that often compound and complicate the individual burdens we carry.
I am starting this blog and offering it as a space to dream up multiple loves once more, as a tool for my own healing and an invitation to other people looking for a rudder. I hope that exploring multiple forms of love can offer a new foundation for anyone here looking for firmer ground to walk on.
“I am starting this blog and offering it as a space to reconnect to this love, and to dream up multiple loves once more, as a tool for my own healing and an invitation to other people looking for a rudder”
Love to see this! I have found that writing openly about our own journeys and the messy truths of lives to be powerfully connective, both to my own truth and the resonance in others. Excited to hear your voice and follow along in your journey. ❤️❤️❤️