I
It's been a hot summer.
Too hot. Irregularly, horribly hot. All summer I have sat and sweltered in a brick oven of an apartment, choking on heat. In the beginning I bought a freestanding air conditioner for the living room and hung heavy drapes across the scalloped edge of the wide arch into the dining room to contain the cooled air. For the first few weeks I hid in the living room with the blinds and curtains drawn, sitting directly in the chilled current, feeling through the walls the heat pressing down on the building, pushing into the darkened room, crowding up around the mechanically moving air, sucking at my breath the moment I stood from the couch. Even working its hardest the air conditioner could never bring the room below eighty. Eventually the dark tepidity depressed me and I dismantled the unit so that I could feel the sweat sheeting down my back in a space full of daylight and outside air.
Every summer gets hotter. Rage, so easy to come by these days no matter how often I conclude that this cistern has been tapped, this keg has been kicked, that my body cannot possibly contain one more flash of anger, flickers up with exhausting resilience when I imagine the millions of people slowly waking to the awareness that this heat is not normal, that the nicely mild winters they've enjoyed in recent years harbor this increasingly deadly flipside of a sinister coin whose existence they've stubbornly denied, and by the time they reluctantly conclude that it's possibly our fault and that we might consider doing something, it will be too late. It is already too late.
At least some days there's a breeze.
There's a breeze now, coming in from the balcony window, occasionally evaporating puffs of sweat from my soaked camisole, bringing a breath of relief. By this point in the summer I'm mostly acclimated, and only notice discomfort when I'm hungover or have company, another human body radiating its energy burnoff into the room. This, today, with open windows and a breeze stirring the thick air around the curtains with the scent of grilling meat and the chorus of cicadas rising and falling in waves, isn't too bad, if I don't think about the long-term implications of what it means.
II
My history of summer depression stretches further back than I can solidly place on a timeline. From my childhood I remember mostly exhilarated freedom, spending my days tearing around the backyard with my sister, or staying out of our parents' way on the enclosed front porch, building worlds of my design in which we were explorers, heroes, warriors, leaping into new worlds through the jets of the oscillating sprinkler with stick swords drawn against the blaze of unexpected dragons, constructing elaborate societies with our vast collection of plastic animals who were constantly electing leaders, negotiating alliances and carrying out expansive wars with the aid of spies, heroism and magic. (There was only one summer in which we played with dolls. Neither of us got much out of it beyond the creative excitement of drawing and cutting from index cards the toy baby-care items we couldn't afford in three dimensions. I have only just begun to realize the innate nonexistence of our maternal instincts, a nonexistence which we probably inherited from our parents; and to be, as I approach middle age, profoundly grateful for my unwitting escape from the culturally conditioned expectations of motherhood that I would have hated.) Childhood summers, broadly executed apart from parental supervision, were, on the whole, fun.
Then somewhere in the mistily remembered traumas of my adolescence the summer depression began. It carried into adulthood, incubated every year by the swampy humidity and fetid heat into a miasma of mildewed listlessness. In all my memories of the worst depressive phases of my life, it's summer.
This summer has been no exception.
It's different, though, this year. Not in affect or duration or severity, but in context. Possibly in purpose; I don't know. Time, and my own interpretation of the outcome, will answer that.
Nine months ago I exited my family. The break was instinctive, unplanned, a desperate, gasping retreat into solitude, a slamming shut on the airlock through which all my vitality was being sucked into space. I needed rest. I needed peace.
I had no thought of the split being anything but temporary.
III
There's always been a moment, with my abusers. It's not always precipitated by the same event. Sometimes the event is huge, extravagant, an emotional sonic boom. Sometimes it's small, something incomprehensibly, absurdly mundane, a tiny violation repeated for the ten thousand and tenth time. The day exactly six months after beginning to spend nearly every day with Andrew when, walking alone through the cavernous produce section of Meijer, I accepted that he was siphoning off my boundless emotional support with no intention of loving me. The ordinary morning at the office three or four or five weeks into increasing stretches of silence punctuated by increasingly stilted conversations with Dustin. The barely-dawn silence in Luke's shabby living room where I sat on the couch staring at the wall in the aftermath of the night I poured all the whiskey down the drain and he shouted at me and I threw a glass of water in his face and he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me but was too drunk to continue when I body-checked him backward with a snarled "get your FUCKING HANDS OFF ME." The couples' therapy appointment with Chris where I listened to him explain to the therapist that he really did in fact want to buy a house with me; he was only going to look at places by himself without telling me in order to scope out the market, and he hadn't really meant it when he told me the day before that he wanted to buy a house by himself and fill it with roommates and that after two years of dating he didn't know where that left me. The drive home to my new apartment where Steph was painting my living room, when Neil texted me "Glad you are good" after his carefully constructed cruelty of the afternoon.
It's not always the same event. But it's always the same moment. There's a click, somewhere deep in my being. A sudden shift from chaos into quiet. The emotional tumult shuts off like a radio. Everything stills, comes into focus, instantly, without fuss or fanfare or struggle. It's the internal experience of the eye doctor turning the phoropter in the cold silence of the exam room, and in that second the lines you've been straining to see snap into clarity.
Click. And in that suddenly painless quiet there is only one thought, one feeling that contains everything I am:
No.
Click.
No.
After that moment, nothing is ever the same.
IV
They never see it coming.
I do. I see it spilling over the horizon, low and black, like a line of stormclouds building over the flat scrublands of eastern Colorado. I deny it for as long as I can, then start to prepare as it sweeps toward me. With varying degrees of desperation, depending on how much I've loved them, I try to warn them. Try to impress upon them that they need to clean up their act if they want to keep me. They never listen longer than a day or two before falling back upon my overabundant forebearance. My skin prickles and my stomach churns in the relentlessly building pressure. The precipitating event never fails to happen. And from it, that breathless barometric hush.
Click. No. And then the break.
They never see it coming.
My parents didn't see it coming. And this time, neither did I. My mother had cancer, after all, from which she was successfully recovering, but still--it was
cancer. My father with his narcissistic uselessness was barely any help. My trauma-immobilized, psychologically unavailable sister was little better. My mother with her wide-eyed emotional greediness, even from three hundred miles away, depended heavily, daily, on me. All that year, through a breakup and a move to a new apartment and a promotion to a far more intensive position, I mechanically pushed through my life to care constantly for my mother, and my father, and my sister in the midst of my mother's illness. And all that year, a decade's worth of painfully constructed and ruthlessly maintained boundaries that minimized their abuse began to crumble under the strain of the old roles and the close contact.
The moment, when it happened, took me by surprise. Its precipitating event was neither large nor small. It was, more than anything, annoying. A passive-aggressive punishment for failing to be adequately theatrically supportive. A long text message from my mother containing the always unspoken expectation for me to fill my role in the family, to beg forgiveness for the sin of not sacrificing everything, and to give, give, give without reservation and without return.
It brought about the moment. The
click was less quiet, but the
no was resounding. Not fully comprehending what it was, I followed it anyway into a rest I badly needed. I told my parents I needed some time to myself. They ignored me. My mother invaded my clearly stated boundaries with escalating frequency. Gradually I snipped away at their avenues for contacting me. Text messaging was the first to go, then phone calls, then email, then Facebook. It took six months to recognize what had happened, to embrace the permanence of each instinctively and necessarily severed tie. To start, with my therapist's help, to sort through the love, and the grief, and the trauma, and the guilt, and the deep, life-changing liberation.
Sometimes the liberation is the worst and hardest part.
V
This year the summer depression is a little different. When it feels like anything, it feels like mourning, and it feels like rest. It feels like a liminality on the verge of something new. A convalescence. A hibernation.
Slowly I'm emerging from the stupor. Even in this horrible heat, I'm blinking my way into a space where I can breathe. I can clean my house again. I can sleep. I can cook and play music. I can enjoy things. My nightmares are fewer, and characterized more and more by my dream-self's empowerment to lash out against the monsters that have always pursued me. I'm even able to win some of the time. My trauma is being incorporated into different kinds of spaces. My brain is fighting back.
My emotional bandwidth is broadening. I can care about some people again, and I can choose which people to care about, and when, and to what extent. I can care for myself in ways I didn't know I knew.
The pain is still surprising, some days. So is my new ability to sit with it for as long as it needs to stay. Before, I had to muscle it back under to keep caring for the people who continued to hurt me. Now, I can let it be, with no borders but my own wellbeing. The freedom both grounds and dislocates me.
I'm too tired for joy yet. More days are painful than aren't. A lifetime of chronic trauma boils and bubbles up to the surface, as fresh as when I first sustained it. I am overwhelmed by the simplicity of being able to accept that I am damaged, and that some of that damage will never heal; that there is neither shame nor failure in either of those things; and that I will still go on to live a good, rich, fulfilling life with wholesome, healthy, happy relationships. None of those things cancel each other out.
I am profoundly lonely. Old and new friendships take the edge off, but there is a yawning emptiness in my ribcage where my sense of belonging used to be. Making a homespace inside myself for me and only me feels strange, alien, a little bit lacking. Better, though, than what I had before.
VI
For the last ten years I have read almost entirely nonfiction. It was a marked break from my childhood, from my adolescence and young adulthood, when story enveloped and sustained me, taught me, bolstered my resilience, and gave me friends. I've spent ten years puzzling over why new stories no longer interested me. The timeline of events had to be significant somehow: Ten years ago I collapsed into debilitating depression and moved back to my hometown and in with my parents; then gradually gained new mental health and lost my faith; then embarked on and ended a series of intimate relationships with terrible men, during the course of which I moved to Detroit to begin life on my own terms and changed careers several times before landing in my current (and increasingly amazing and self-determined) position. At some point in that time span, I stopped reading fiction. Unable to take in enough learning, I devoured books about science and history and reasoning, articles on neuroscience and psychology and politics, soaking up everything I had been forbidden to learn before at a terrifying rate, and to a terrifying depth. It was intoxicating. But I shied away from new encounters with fiction. While I still enjoyed rereading favorite novels, like semiannual visits with old friends, I couldn't bring myself to broach unfamiliar stories. Even new television shows and movies I could only approach occasionally, and with caution.
In ten years I have never been able to decide whether I've lost something, or gained something, or simply evolved into something new. I've felt sad, but resigned. I've thought of myself as a nonfiction person.
And then a week ago I didn't feel like picking up the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that I'm halfway through, or the survey of human history that I started, or the new speculation about the extinction of the dinosaurs that came out last year, or the critical evaluation of sexism within science that had just arrived in the mail. Nor did I want to keep rereading Robin McKinley's
Rose Daughter, beloved as it is. I felt restless, lonely. Hungry.
It's been ten years of evolution. Ten years of cataclysmic internal change, ten years of seismic upheaval to the core of my sense of self.
And now something new is happening. I don't know where it's leading or what its outcome will be. But I do know that it's happening, and it's new, and I will go along with it because painful as my many transitions have been, they have brought me farther than I had ever conceived toward something like wholeness.
So last week as I stared at Wilder's biography lying unopened in my hands, bewildered by my sudden and utter disinterest in opening to the place marked by its dust cover, acutely aware of the intensity of my loneliness, of my revulsion toward this internal barenness--even in that moment, after all the change of the last year, of the last decade, I was still surprised as I felt something shift in my stomach. A quiet
click.
Was this
no? or
yes? Maybe it was both.
I put down the biography. I spoke aloud to no one, with a passion I haven't heard in years: I want
stories. I want
friends.
In the baking heat of a fevered planet's northern summer, in a loneliness both very old and entirely new, for the first time in ten years I went and found a novel I'd never read before.
Something broke inside me, or broke open.
I started reading fiction.
