I think I’m depressed. Not, like, pandemic depressed. Not depressed for the moment or for the season. But rather, I think *depressed* is just sort of who I am as a person. I think I’m depressed, but I can’t be sure, because the therapist I started working with back in August does not diagnose patients over the teletherapy platform where we meet each week. Part of me wishes she would. Just say the word, you know? Call it what it is, call me what I am, so we can all move on with our days. I guess what I so desperately seek from her is a little bit of confirmation. I guess I’m looking for someone to tell me that I actually have a right to feel like such a piece of shit all the time.
She won’t diagnose me, but sometimes it feels like she’s leaving me little clues. Early in our time together I would occasionally share something that felt inconsequential, only to catch a glimmer of recognition in her eye that knocked me off my feet every time I clocked it. She once asked me a question about my childhood and I told her that I often had a hard time remembering large chunks of my young life, even during periods in time where it seemed like I was old enough that I probably should be able to recall. Upon hearing that she paused a pregnant pause, said “Ah,” and nodded her head along as I continued speaking. All the while I could hear her fingers clicking around on the keyboard while she added more than a couple words to her notes.
After we logged off that morning, I did a quick Google search for the terms ‘memory loss depression’ and that’s when I learned that a loss of memory, especially related to childhood events, is a common defense mechanism of the brain to protect itself from psychological harm when confronted with trauma. “Trauma” is a word that my therapist uses often. Meanwhile, “depression” is a word that she uses in our conversations almost never. I say ‘almost’ because one time she slipped while offering me some comforting words and changed course mid-sentence from “Well, that’s because you were depr—” to “That’s because you were, probably… struggling with some depression, at the time.” One thing I have noticed about her is that she chooses her words very carefully. And as a person who believes deeply in the power of language to shape reality, I respect this about her very much.
She once talked to me about PTSD, which confused me. I told her I didn’t think I had that. No one ever assaulted me, and I had never been to war or in any kind of horrific car accident, so I wasn’t really sure that I had trauma. She informed me that I did, in fact, have traumas, that all humans do, and then she said some other stuff, and somewhere in there dropped the words “child abuse” so casually that I almost didn’t even notice when she turned my whole world upside down.
Something that I have come to understand on a deeper level in the short time since I started seeing my therapist is the weight that our words carry. They can help us feel seen and understood. They can help us put a name to our pain. But they can also strike us like a sharp blow, and they have the power to cause great and lasting harm.
For the longest time, I didn’t feel that I had a right to my own sadness. As a child, grating words often spilled from the lips of the people who were meant to nurture me, and over time, I collected every single one of those words. I surrounded myself with them until they locked me inside a box of my own suffering, and then I devoured the messaging I received from others that taught me that the box I thought I had been trapped inside could not actually exist at all. I was made to believe that sticks and stones could break my bones, but words would never hurt me. In my case, however, I think they are the only thing that ever has.
These days, words help to pull me from the depths. The words my therapist offers me, the way she weaves them together, they help me to understand myself, and by extension, they help me begin to forgive myself. The words of life-long friends inside my inbox remind me that I am never alone. Words that stock my bookshelves help carry me away, and words scribbled across the pages of my journal give me permission to feel. I no longer collect the abusive words of others the way I used to. I don’t hold them so close anymore, and I try not to weave them into the fabric of the stories I tell myself about myself. These days, I prefer to stockpile affirmations. I jot them down everywhere that I can, I repeat them in my head over and over until I begin to believe them, and they fix my feet to the ground.
In our sessions, we use the word trauma. It is not the word I was looking for when I first signed up for this online therapy service, but it’s a word that’s granted me permission to acknowledge my pain and begin working to heal from it. I, like so many others, am in a dark space right now, but I’m beginning to learn that naming our demons does not make us weak, rather that it is an act from which we can derive much power. Words broke me once, but now, I believe they just might be the thing to save me.