Over the last few weeks, Black South Africans have collectively mourned the deaths of Anele Tembe, Phumlani Pikoli, and Lufuno Mavhunga. Three names out of the 23 recorded suicides that take place daily in this country. With the pandemic shifting the ways we engage, it has been hard to stay in touch with family and friends and even harder to stay aware of how our people are really doing. The whole world is going through it, and any feelings of helplessness and despair have undoubtedly been exacerbated by Covid-19. Check-in on your loud friends, your strong friends, your shy friends.
We need each other now more than ever.
Growing up, I was the bubbly sibling who made my mother pay for dance and modelling classes to name a few. My siblings were consequently relegated to stopping and starting the tape recorder whilst I practiced another dance routine, and were forced to listen to my many Christina Aguilera renditions.
My poor family had their hands full when it came to me. I required a lot of attention, nonetheless, they understood that as much as I appeared confident, I needed a great deal of care. I, too, had various shades and displayed contradicting moods and sensitivities.
In my former years when I had more friends, I was one of the fun ones or perhaps funny ones. I filled dull moments with energy and thrived in making those around me laugh, at times to my detriment. And to those I was not comfortable being loud and funny around, I offered my spontaneity- always up for anything! I was the friend you did not have to persuade to go for a drink; always ready to play wing woman, the girl everybody knew yet knew no one. I took my heels off in the club when my favourite Calvin Harris song played, folded my legs in that fancy restaurant chair, and sang out loud in public spaces. I did what I wanted when I wanted.
For many years, my happy-go-lucky traits afforded me easy friendships and even easier engagements. Having tried my hand at most things as a child and coming from a family of 7 kids, each with different personalities and interests, I could always relate to or comment on something. I bonded with new acquaintances over a shared interest, political view, or great lyric- finding humour in difficult situations and leveraging my quirks for a shared laugh.
Thinking back, I can't quite trace when inside Whitney came out to the masses- I sometimes wish I had saved her for myself or at least for the people who understood that she wasn’t only that or always that.
Nostalgia Ultra
After years of pouring myself (unprovoked) into friendships and relationships, I did not have the sum and substance of myself that I needed when life threw me some real curveballs. My mid-twenties were met with all kinds of rejection, disappointment and disillusionment. So in the moments when I needed my energy and psychological resilience the most, I didn’t have the capacity or ability to carry, never-mind pull myself together.
My unraveling looked like alcohol dependency, excessive weight gain, and chronic anxiety- causing me to break out into hives every few weeks. With everything I was experiencing and trying to hold together, I could no longer maintain the carefree exterior I was so well-known for. Friends misunderstood my withdrawal and disinterest for self-absorption, my resting-b**ch face went up a notch offending everyone in its wake and my very apparent consumption simply became insufferable.
I moved back home to my mother’s house seeking rest, healing, and recovery. But alone and a shell of a person, with no friends and nothing to keep me occupied, my thoughts and memories rapidly became my biggest enemy. Instead of getting better, things only got worse.
Rose in the Dark
In the beginning, my depression did not feel like what it was. I would wake up hopeful and in an all right mood, but something as small as a song, news headline or image would send me down a rabbit hole of dark emotions. I would start to very vividly recollect the names I had been called, how so-and-so treated me, the rumour that boy I rejected spread, that inappropriate text from that executive, flashbacks of that drunken night I’d buried deep down in my memory. I then would sit with those feelings and unpack how each experience had affected me.
Having nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to call, it became pretty evident that the only way out of this burrow was through it. I resolved to process every memory as it came, no matter how painful, and do the work necessary to help me digest any residual emotions.
I’d like to say this process brought me immediate healing, but in truth, it opened up wounds I did not even realise were there. For 2 more years, I found myself trapped in my own kind of Inception- getting little to no sleep, with my thoughts on a constant loop, much like Frank Ocean on Seigfried- feeling everything but brave.
Depression does not always present as not being able to get out of bed in the morning, and it certainly isn't just weak people moping around. It‘s a constant battle between the state of being and the state of mind, where one's reality and perceptions begin to fade into one another. So consumed in things past, I couldn't see my present place in the world and did not see how or when things could change. Although there were some great days and I had amazing people in my life, in my mind the bad always seemed to outweigh the good.
Assume Form
Author, David Foster Wallace said, “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s the terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
Doing life is tricky enough without the endless comparison, competition, and expectation that social media places on us- inundating us with everyone else’s achievements, joys, hurts, and failures. Just getting through your day can feel like a new level on Minesweeper, and living well has become a discipline rather than an existential presupposition. With this in mind, would we all please be a little kinder and gentler with one another. Let us move through life with a conscious sensitivity to and consideration for each other's minds and hearts. May we listen more intently and pay some mind, loving each other enough to step out of our comfort zones to reach the other.
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