Winter Inside the Nervous System

How depression rewrites reality — and how connection interrupts it

… “A hush and a hum is coming from the radiator in the kitchen. Birds swoop and land on my little balcony, eating the seeds I left for them the day before, after the snow. Last night it rained. The yellow, tan, and brown seeds now blend in with the wood on the balcony floor. The backdrop forest still lies beneath blankets of snow several feet deep from storms and blizzards that occurred earlier this year.

It's been a cold, long winter.

I'm inside, cozy under a royal blue blanket — my mind the Queen of Ice. There's a stone-cold frozen wrapped up with me. It's the death of all I'd hoped I was, not what I'd become, but rather who I was.

I used to think I was someone worth loving.

I find it so unfair I have to keep living. I'm not allowed to die. I've been fighting for the sake of my kids, most profoundly for my son, since he was 4 years old. In July, he'll be 18. My daughter has cancer; she needs me after her surgery. So I lay here, wrapped in warmth, listening to nothing but silence and the crows' cries outside my window, wishing I could be dead.” ….

These are the meanderings of my mind force-fed abuse, apathy and abandonment. It’s what the Polyvagal Theory would call a “dorsal state”. I am underwater, and I’m not a fish. I’m a person who needs connection — who needs witness.

My therapist said I am a good person. (Hearing that from her means a lot to me.) I fear that everyone hates me, (she tells me it’s not true), but some days it still feels like it. How is a person like myself supposed to fit in or even be understood by others? I want to die. I miss my mom. I wish someone truly loved me.

Sometimes being in these mental states can cloud my judgment. Oftentimes, feeling depressed leads me to think I’m a burden. Maybe it’s not that I’m a burden but rather that I just need more support in times of crisis, in times of anything really, because of the severity of what I carry.

I sit with these thoughts and continue watching the birds. Then I notice the lily my son bought for me for Valentine’s Day. Not roses, because he knows I hate them. Not cactuses because, same. No, he bought me a lush green and white lily plant to remind me I'm loved.

Sometimes the white of winter lays across the landscape of our minds making us believe things that aren't true. Because underneath the snow there's life waiting to come alive again. And underneath my pain, there is joy waiting to spring forth at just the right moment.

With love, light and always a little sass!

~Amy