It’s been two months since I’ve come out of my longest depressive episode yet. For six months, from Thanksgiving 2021 until mid-May 2022, I felt half alive. I’ve had minor depressive episodes for the last 16 years, but most would last a couple of weeks at most. Never six months.
My husband wisely pointed out that it may have been brought on by delayed grief. A year prior, we left Los Angeles after 10 years to move to Minneapolis. It was a return for me, the place I had envisioned as my future for the entirety of that decade in the sun. But because we moved mid-pandemic, the loss didn’t feel as acute as it may have otherwise. The city was not open to us to explore as it would have been, we were seeing our friends hardly ever, if at all. In most ways, our life in Minneapolis acted the same as our life in LA; we FaceTimed our friends, we ordered in food from restaurants, we watched Netflix. Additionally, we had the element of novelty and adventure on our side. There were new walks to take, new streets to navigate, old friends to reconnect with. But a year after our arrival, when I laid out the Thanksgiving meal for just Michael and I, I was hit with overwhelming sadness. For the previous five or six years, I had hosted Thanksgiving for 10-15 of our closest friends, and here we were, just us, alone and wishing we were with those we loved and missed most.
The grief didn’t lift. The loneliness felt physical. I have wonderful friends in the Twin Cities who welcomed Michael and I into their lives, invited us to meet all of their friends, fed us, literally clothed us for the winter. I would not have survived without them. But the sense of loss was heavy. People noticed, they listened, and took me out for fun times, and let me talk about it when I was ready. It was such a gift.
Finally, in May, there was a turning point. Maybe it was the spring, maybe it was the increase in lake walks, but one day I realized I hadn’t felt sad in about two weeks. And the part that felt almost unbelievable to me, was that not only did I not feel sad, I felt energized. I went outside every day, I did yoga in my living room every day, I cooked elaborate meals. The strangest thing of all, though, was that I felt creative in a way I’d not felt for at least five years.
I started to get the idea that I might want to write again. It’s something I used to do, and always felt guilt around for not doing enough of it. (Enough for who?) But what if, I thought, I just did it because I liked it? What if it didn’t have to be A Thing? No one was putting pressure on me; any guilt I felt was entirely self-induced. What if I could use writing as simply another expression of my energy and creativity, in the same way cooking and yoga was?
I began getting little signs that my thoughts were moving in the right direction. I thought of a name. My weekly horoscopes (lol, I know) would often mention new creative pursuits and an expansion of the self. And one night I had a dream. I woke up, fully knowing that the dream was confirming the direction I was heading in, that this revitalized creative expression would only grow and expand in ways I couldn’t imagine at the time. That was the clincher for me.
A notoriously private person when it comes to sharing personal plans (an essay for another time), I finally told Michael what I had decided on doing, and then a week later, a couple of my closest friends. Normally this kind of sharing would then fill me with dread afterwards- now I have expectations to live up to!- but I felt calm, peaceful. I had come into this realization that it wasn’t about what anyone else thought I was doing, but about how I felt simply doing this thing again, this private love that I had kept as a tiny flicker in my heart all these years. I had been going about it all wrong, when I was doing it for others. Now, I’m doing it for myself.
And so here we are. A newsletter! Never ever did I think I would do this. I think mostly I’m surprised at how natural it feels. A part of me is awake again, looking around in wonder thinking, “I know this place. And I remember loving it here.”
CURRENTLY…
listening to this song by MUNA. The lyrics so perfectly reflect this phase I’m in right now. “Yeah I like telling stories, but I don’t have to write them in ink. I can still change the end. At least, I’m the kind of girl who thinks I can.”
I often get ideas of how to use my creativity but never follow through with them. Often because I feel guilty for spending my time/energy/sources for something that can't be monetized. A silly though, I know....fucking capitalism.
Thank you for the reminder that creativity can be just for ourselves; that the purpose of creativity can simply be to be creative.