Today Is My 39th Birthday

To think I wanted to miss it…

I was born on February 12th, 1981, in a Mexican border town.

I was lucky to be born in the middle of a huge cultural transition. The things I have gotten to see!

Prejudices being crushed. Long time barriers being demolished.

New challenges keep on arising, but I can see there are lots of people intent on not letting that happen.

And about my life?

For the most part, I followed the usual script: went to school, got good grades, graduated, did a major, got a job...

Later on, I became a teacher, got married, and had a kid.

It always amazes me how, when telling the story of our lives, we tend to simplify things, reduce them to their minimum expression.

It takes just a few sentences to summarize the story of someone’s life…but there’s so much missing.

Some goals never came to be. And there were shattered dreams, broken hearts, laughter, tears, lessons learned, moments of joy, and sadness.

Life is overwhelming.

During my early years, life was too much.

Depression and suicidal thoughts were a constant companion. It amazed me how I had the skill to go about my daily routines while the best methods to kill myself swirled around in my mind.

I won’t go into detail about the different strategies I concocted, but I did come up with a couple of designs that could work as long as I refined the details.

I wanted to make sure it would be fast and painless, and that no one else would get hurt. The fact that I live in a country where it is difficult to get a gun (unless you are a criminal) made that very difficult. Later on, when I became a mother and a teacher, I had to add “make it look like an accident” to the list. I didn’t want my son and students to know I had killed myself.

What message would that send?

At the time, these thoughts didn’t seem weird or out of place.

I would let whole days go by without showering or brushing my teeth. I would eat anything and everything in front of me. I would sit alone in a dark room for hours just…thinking.

None of this seemed strange to me. I was in a hole so deep I had forgotten there was a life to live.

Sometimes I listen to well-intentioned people talking about depression. “Ask for help,” they say.

It amuses me to hear that.

Ask for help? How, when I don’t even know I need it? How, when my own mind has convinced me that all hope is gone?

Have you ever heard of the difference between “Hollywood” drowning and actual drowning?

In movies, we see the drowning victim scream, wave her hands, ask for help.

In real life?

Drowning is a frighteningly quiet event. There’s no desperate call for help, there’s no arm-waving. There’s just a person struggling to stay afloat.

I won’t go so far as to say that’s how depression works on everybody, but that’s how it felt like to me.

Like drowning.

Asking for help? The few times I managed to do it, I got useful advice such as “you just need to appreciate what’s in front of you.” Or, “well, I think you are a great person anyway.” Or, my all-time favorite, “maybe you should just go ahead and kill yourself.”

I can see it is a damn miracle I’m still alive. While I was in the hole, I was unable to notice how deep it was. Now I look back at those days and shudder.

What was the thing that kept me alive?

I know some people might be expecting me to say: “Oh, it was motherhood! It was love! It was because of my students! It was X! It was Y!”

Well, yes, it was all of that. Except it wasn’t. The above things gave me an excuse not to kill myself. Don’t get me wrong, they are valuable in my life. But the actual reason runs deeper: it lives in my heart, in my essence, at the very core of my being.

I love life. My life. This silly, little, magnificent, glorious life of mine that still surprises me in every turn. It’s incredible the number of things I didn’t know about myself and that I’m only now beginning to understand.

But I love it.

So I forced myself to learn everything I could about depression. Then, I applied my discoveries: I changed my diet and my birth control method (did you know sugar and birth control pills can worsen depression in some people?), I started exercising, I tried to meditate…

That helped…but there was more I needed to do.

I needed to have difficult conversations with my husband, even though they could mean a separation would be on the horizon. I needed to deal with the ghosts of my childhood. To risk going back to writing, even when I felt completely inadequate. To accept my autism and my bisexuality.

All of this meant accepting me, surrendering, giving up my attempts to live a life that wasn’t mine.

How strange it was that, once I gave up the illusion of control, life opened up her arms and embraced me.

“Welcome home, my child”, she said.

And yes, every day more and more, this existence of mine feels like a place where I belong.

This is my life. And it is mine to cherish, to adore, to explore.

To do. To do. To do.

To live.

To journey towards the places my soul tells me I must go. To rejoice in the beauty all around me. The beauty I can find in the good and the bad, in the joy and the pain.

I can see now that I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to stop feeling. I tried to cancel down the hole in my life. Dying seemed like the only way to do it.

I pulled myself out of that hole. I did it, bit by bit, over many years.

And now I’m here.

I stand up tall, and I look down. I left many things down there, but I don’t kid myself. They will always belong to me: the self-doubt, the fear, the hate…

Those things will never entirely go away. They are mine.

I own them.

I carry them with me. But now they are tools I can handle, no longer chains that keep me in the hole.

I pulled myself out. And I’m still here. Alive.

Better than ever.

It took me 39 years, but now I see I was meant to live in all the gloriousness of it.

There are people around me, and I’m around them. I love them, and they love me. But that would mean nothing without the spark of life, without the knowledge that I own my existence, that it is my sacred duty to find out how far I can stretch my mind.

How far can I go?

How strong can I get to be?

I will find out.

I’m about to hit the big 4–0.

For most of society, this means it’s time for me to settle down and prepare to die.

Please!

I’m only getting started.

Where and how does this end?

I swear, in my own terms, in my own time, for the sake of my soul, I will find out.