I Want to Live

After decades of battling depression, I finally want to embrace life. But is it too late?

Trigger alert: This article includes discussions of depression and suicide.

I learned to question my existence early in life, I’m sorry to say. It wasn’t suicidal thoughts — just a deep wondering if something was wrong with me, if I was in the right place, the right time, the right family.

I was a deeply sensitive and empathetic child who picked up other people’s emotions, pains, and fears so easily. I noticed things most other kids didn’t notice. I often tried to take on other people’s emotional burdens. And I was always trying to fix everything.

I took on my mother’s depression and my father’s anxiety as my own, absorbing it like a sponge. I wondered if I, as the first child of my parents’ union, was to blame for the fact that my father never saw his children from his previous marriage — did I steal him away from them? And I emotionally sparred with my volatile mother, always feeling victimized by the violence of her anger and frustration.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it okay for me to be here?

I didn’t graduate to suicidal thoughts until I was 14. By then, I had endured so much trauma at the hands of school bullies. My family’s issues were heading in a dangerous direction. I was isolated and my depression and anxiety were off the charts.

Instinctively, I knew I couldn’t fix anything that was happening around me. So I found a new way to cope: by focusing all my energy onto my body. I was already two years into eating disorders and compulsive exercising. I’d become blinded by my body dysmorphic disorder, though I didn’t yet know that.

In my mind, if I could just lose weight, keep my nails long and neatly painted, and somehow make myself pretty, everything would be okay. Life would get better and I’d be able to justify my existence.

But all too often, my hope of achieving physical perfection dissipated into suicidal spirals. I would draw self-portraits in my journals — hugely overweight, hair sticking up all over, stubby nails, pimply skin. Then I would scribble violently over these drawings, a demonstration of the hatred I felt toward myself. I would write: Please kill me. I’m disgusting. I’m hideous. I don’t deserve to live.

It seems strange to say that the worst of my depression surfaced after my parents divorced when I was a grown woman in her thirties. Though it makes sense to the people close to my family. Our dysfunction had reached a pinnacle by then and my mother’s emotional violence and manipulation were out of control. Add to that the fact that I was in a dead-end relationship that I was too scared to leave and it was the perfect recipe for wanting to end my life.

And I came all too close to doing just that on more than one occasion.

It is hard for me to look back on my life and say that it was anything less than privileged. I’m a white American who grew up in an upper middle class household and I had a relatively good childhood. Do I have the right to say that I was miserable throughout two-thirds of my life? That on most days, had there been a stop on this bus, I would have gladly disembarked?

Only after 40 did I start to unearth the optimistic, sunny California girl that I remember from my youth. Only then did suicidal thoughts stop being my default. Only then did I realize how much I wanted to live.

I want to live.

Facing an unknown health problem that could eventually reveal itself to be a life-threatening disease over these past two years has made me examine my past quite a bit. Sometimes I wonder: Did I create this? I wanted so badly to throw my life away so many times. Did I disrespect this privilege of being alive just enough to lose it?

I want to cry when I think of how violently I hated myself as a teenager. How utterly unfair to think of that gentle, scared, traumatized, confused young woman trying so hard to get through a day facing not only what was going on in the world around her but having to listen to the nonstop violence of self-hatred that she pointed at her own head.

I wish I could go back and put my arms around her. I wish I could protect her, somehow.

I want to cry when I think of that same young woman stumbling through her twenties, so determined to exert some control over her life that she would exercise for six hours a day, then bake a pan of brownies and eat them all in one sitting.

More than anything, I want to cry for the woman in her thirties who felt so alone with the man she thought she would marry, who knew she wasn’t going to get to have the family she wanted so badly, who couldn’t handle the emotional toxicity of her parents’ divorce, and who laid on the floor of her closet, holding a loaded gun in her hand for hours.

I’m sorry, I want to say to every iteration of these past Yaels. Nothing was wrong with you. It was the shit happening around you. You were never given the tools to deal with it. Hell, you were never even taught that it was okay to call out these problems. You only knew how to blame yourself.

I’m sorry, Yael.

I’m sorry, body.

I’m sorry, soul.

I didn’t mean to spend all these years acting as though my life was so inconsequential. I didn’t mean to throw it all away. I was wrong.

I want to live.

I want to see my nieces and nephews grow up. What will Ben and I do on my 50th birthday — which will be his 20th birthday? How will we celebrate? Will he tower over me even more than he already does?

Will Finn indeed become a paleontologist? Will Kai keep his hair long? Will Brynn earn a black belt? Will Keira have twenty suitors bringing her flowers? Will Felix become a teacher someday, like I think he will? Will Mabel earn a Pulitzer, an Oscar, a Grammy?

And Alex. I need at least a million more cuddles with Alex. I want to see his future, to stand beside him as he continues his medical journey.

I want to spend more time with the people I love. I cannot leave them. Not yet.

I want to save the world. I have so many plans to make beautiful things — books and paintings and projects. I want to help women speak up for themselves; I want to create things that encourage compassion and kindness; I want to be a voice for change. And goddammit, I want to see a woman elected as president.

I want to have sex. Lots and lots of sex. I want to check everything off my sexual bucket list and add even more to it. I want to connect with someone as deeply as I possibly can, with the benefit of all the shame I have shed in the past five years. I want to experience true empowerment in the bedroom.

I want to get to the point where I can let go of the family trauma that I carry within me. I want to know what it feels like to have that darkness and shame leave my heart and soul for good. I want the weight of it off my shoulders and I want to never have to pick it up again.

I want to see more sunrises and sunsets. More days in the garden. More sitting on the ground in the hot June sun, eating strawberries right off the plant.

I have novels to write. I have love to give. I have transformations to complete.

I take it all back. All those times I wished it was gone, all those days I wished I could leave. I take it back.

I want to stay.

I want to live.

© Yael Wolfe 2020