I'm Alive, Motherfucker

On black holes, life jackets, and pink elephants.

Falling, for me, happens slowly. More whispers when I first open my eyes, a slowness to my movements, a quicker tempo to my thoughts and emotions. Things I want to do yet don’t do and things I don’t want to do but do anyway, like writing or meditating or not meditating or not taking care of the little things that comprise something more. I don’t know if the falling began last Monday or last Friday. Maybe the falling is a never-ending series of fallings and risings, and I should stop trying to measure them.

I will keep trying, though.

I spent over nine hours reading on Sunday and five on Monday. I could not bring myself to do the things I usually enjoy doing, like writing or speaking or doing my work. Falling takes me by surprise like that, in the way of a frog sitting in a pot while the water slowly comes to a rolling boil. One minute, I’m sitting there, enjoying the warmth; the next minute, I’m dead. Metaphorically or spiritually—something dies or is burned away in the falling—or I’m just being hyperbolic. I am unsure if the falling is me falling into something that other people simply don’t contain or if it is the casting off of something others consistently have.

Do other people have life jackets? Or do they just not hold a raging storm within them? I don’t say this to mean other people do not suffer or that you don’t suffer as much as I do. Some of us, though, are pulled under more easily. I wonder whether the water is higher or if our life jackets just suck.

Because depression does that. Depression messes with me; it tells me everyone has this roiling storm inside them. I’m simply not a strong enough swimmer. Then it tells me I wouldn’t drown if my life jacket was better, as it pokes holes in all my floatation devices. Many people have written about depression and probably written it better than I ever can, but I’ll give it a go.

Depression is an ouroboros, consuming itself—a closed circuit unwilling to break—that, when I fall, I arrive in the center of. The center is witnessing, fighting, listening, and white-flag-waving. I am the center, and I am in the center.

Depression tells me, “You’re a loser. You’re not even writing, and you said you were going to write, so why don’t you get up and write.”

So, I get up to write this or something else, and as I make my way through the rough draft, it says, “No, this is terrible. You should stop. No one gives a shit, anyway.”

I’ve learned over the years that I cannot out-logic the depression because there is no logic and there are no rules. As soon as I get close to ‘winning,’ it turns everything upside down.

---

There’s the boring cliché of write what you know, and in the last week, it’s seemed like all I know is sadness and an abiding, formless grief that has too many words and no words at all. Yet I also know joy. Reminding myself of that knowing is a claim that takes effort. I am just enough on the other side of falling today to remember that both can exist within me.

Why do I write? Because I need to take what’s inside and simplify it into black and white, let it become small and simple into marks on paper. In my head, these thoughts are a massive, looming force of nature; on paper, they can be what they are: thoughts and words that mean nothing.

How often do I have to think, “I am not my thoughts,” before I believe it? I’ve lost count. I don’t recommend you try to count, either.

This week, I planned to write about connecting with my Inner Child. I wrote and typed it up but couldn’t get myself to post. Writing about self-compassion from the depths of despair feels disingenuous; I don’t want to be someone who shares advice I won’t even take for myself. Writing this seemed like a bathing in self-pity, while the other seemed like an exercise in falseness.

So I chose to write this one.

Do you ever grapple with the line between self-reflection and self-absorption?

I do, a lot, and those of you reading this who know me in real life have probably thought of me as more self-absorbed than self-reflective a few (or many) times.

That I am too absorbed by myself.

That I am ‘self’ absorbed.

I agree with you; I am self-absorbed. It is the pink elephant dilemma.

“Stop thinking about yourself,” I think, only to slide into the rabbit hole of thinking about why I can’t stop thinking about myself.

Don’t think about a pink elephant.

I conjure up variations. The elephant is blue; the elephant is miniature; there is the trunk; what if the elephant were surrounded by clouds and rainbows?

It’s still a pink fucking elephant. Elephant, elephant, elephant.

Me in all my absorption.

---

There’s another way I’ve imagined depression in the last week.

Depression fucking sucks. That’s it. Depression turns me into a black, empty hole devoid of light. I am a vacuum pulling life around me into a void of dust and sand and dog fur. I didn’t get to choose this. I don’t know whether I hate myself or I hate it, or it just hates me, or whether I am it or it is something else: life jackets or raging waters.

I am twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight. It’s been two years since I last got drunk or did hard drugs, a handful more since I last made myself sick. I’ve been off anti-depressants since November 2022, and depression still says I’ve accomplished nothing because “other people are achieving much more interesting things than just not dying.”

Depression says I will never be anything; it says hideous, awful things so loudly and with such conviction that there is no room for me. I cease to exist in the black hole, wondering whether I am the black hole or if I am observing the black hole. Wondering where it begins and where I end and if any of it will ever mean anything one day. I am so afraid that I will never not be the black hole or the observer of it.

Because this is the thing about black holes: they collapse time and space so acutely and so entirely that life itself becomes its antithesis—the not thing is the only thing left.

Falling is when I begin to feel like I am not the thing.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

This is the thing about black holes. They are devastating and abrupt. Energy withdrawing into itself. They are things that consume themselves.

I have no clue if any of this is true scientifically, but I don’t care about science; I care about metaphor. What I know is the ache and the ending that is not ending.

Depression says, “I’ll never leave you alone.”

It also says, “I would leave you alone if only you were good enough. If only you were stronger, smarter, more important, and less you, then I could leave you alone. I’m here because you aren’t enough to keep me away.”

These are all lies. A lie said enough times becomes more than a truth; a lie told hundreds of thousands of times becomes reality itself.

This is why I write about these things because words can only ever be approximations. Still, approximations are enough to unwind from the untruth I’ve heard enough times to start believing is reality. I write to see that these are words so I know that other words are possible. I write to remember that I am neither the black hole nor the observer.

I am the writer taking something outside of me and turning it into a black hole, into metaphor and fiction and not reality. It only mildly eases the pain but brings back control, letting me construct something from the void that is not a void. Words tame this thing through their inability to contain the thing they approximate.

Depression asks me to take it so seriously. It is so violently real yet entirely made up.

---

Yet I continue. I continue because not to continue goes against who I am beyond this bitter consumptive sadness—there is strength in going beyond the approximation—so I know there is a me who is not the blackness, not the observer of the blackness, and not even the writer of the blackness. Somewhere in here is another “I” who says, “fuck it, none of this is real,” and laughs, walking outside of my head. Outside of the absorption of my ‘self.’

When the dark absence consumes me, I struggle to imagine even beginning to know what the meaning is.

I use gentleness, meditations, thoughtfulness, and pink elephants. I haven’t tried just fighting back. I’m mixing metaphors to slam the door on the black hole and shut my eyes to the observing.

On the other side of falling is knowing the black hole still exists somewhere. My not seeing it is either proof of its inevitable return or proof that it’s all fiction. I don’t know. All of this has to mean something.

As I did the dishes this morning, I listened to a podcast. The host was interviewing a man about suffering. This guy pursues suffering: seven- and ten-day total darkness retreats, super marathons in unbearable heat or frigid cold, soon to traverse seventeen hundred miles of Antarctica. Alone. Pulling a 400-pound sled. In pure white nothingness. Did I mention alone?

This guy walks toward the black hole. Lives for it. Embraces it. He loves it because he knows that on the other side of suffering is non-suffering. And on the other side of that, for him, is transcendence.

Transcending the self.

Listening to someone who has embraced the thing I’m constantly finding out how to move away from, surprisingly, does not piss me off. It gives me hope. This man walks out into the wilderness—the literal wilderness—to conquer what’s within him. It gives me hope because it provides a way for all this to mean something.

On Akshay’s website, it reads:

We cannot know power without pain.
We cannot know strength without struggle.
We cannot know courage without fear.

On the other side of falling is realizing you got the fuck back up.

On the other side of the black hole is realizing you lived through the darkness and came back into existing.

I write this to realize that this is why I must write—not to immerse myself in suffering but to make sense of its senselessness—so that I could contain it enough to look it in the eye and say,

“I’m alive, motherfucker.”

I didn’t know where this essay was going when I started piling together paragraphs from my journals in the last week. I had no idea where I was going with this essay until ten sentences ago.

Because this is why I write and this is why I live.

To find something in the suffering that expands beyond suffering. To fall so I can get back up. Depression speaks to me in whispers and roars, and each day I can do just enough not to listen is a day to know I went to the edge and made it back. I make it back because of people who love me, who are willing to sit with me in my self-absorption long enough for it to turn into self-reflection. I make it back because I love myself enough to do the next thing, even when it seems like hope is gone and there’s no possible way to take another step.

There are so many ways to look at suffering. Suffering within, suffering we don’t get to choose, suffering we impose upon ourselves, suffering that’s invisible and illusory, suffering that’s tangible and breaks us.

I was driving home yesterday evening, feeling myself take small steps back from the fall that had overcome me this weekend. (There are many reasons why the falling began last week, but these are for another time.) Where I live, it’s both easy and painful to live in the suffering of depression. The wild rising mountain ranges next to the freeway can be a reminder of my smallness and a reminder of my smallness. My smallness is a profound or a terrible thing.

Last night, my smallness was a profound thing. I felt something unlocking in my body imperceptibly. I cling to the releasing, hoping it will never end even as I know my attachment to it, my desperate wish that I will never fall again may become my second dart later. Yet, for just those few minutes, I knew something was changing. I noticed it, and I was deeply grateful. On the other side of suffering is gratitude.

I may never stop being or observing the black hole, needing a life jacket, or obsessing about pink elephants. But there will be small moments when I find out who I am beneath the darkness and who I am despite it.

I make my way up the road, looking up at the shadowed cliffs that have been here since before I was born and will be here long after; I drive through the tunnel, coming out the other side to drive down the valley toward home.

There is stillness, just for now. It will return, and there will be more pink elephants.

But for now?

I’m alive, motherfucker. I’m alive.

Photo by Martin David on Unsplash