Witness, A Guest Blog on Depression by @Streetlights94 via @RachelintheOC

Please welcome my very special guest Christina from Streetlights Imagination. She’s one of the first fast friends I made on Twitter over three years ago, is a terrific writer, and is determined to take me to Vegas (I’ve never been!). She also promises to come cook for me (given that she’s one determined woman, I’m sure it will happen soon).

She shares a compelling story today about families and depression and I’m honored to host her. 

Witness

 

I never smiled as a baby.  At least, that’s what my sister says.  Only my brother could coax a laugh out of me.  It was as if I somehow knew that smiles and laughter were foreigners in that house, and they’d much rather reserve space in their passports.

 

It is not as if my childhood home was a horrible one.  I was not abused.  Nor was I neglected.  On the contrary, I was well taken care of and provided for.  It was a beautiful home in an almost-perfect neighborhood.  My mother stayed at home to rear us and I, being the youngest, had her to myself the longest.  My father worked hard to enable our lifestyle.  We had a gardener and a pool man.  There was a beautiful front yard with a magnolia tree that gifted us with enormous flowers.  I miss the night-blooming jasmine.  I went to excellent schools, had the right clothes, and we were a nice family.

 

Only, it’s hard to maintain perfection in an imperfect world.  My brother and sister and I are all quite far apart in age, and I was left alone there in that lovely house.  A silent house.  A house where I never heard my mother laughing.  I don’t have any memories of my mother laughing.  Not one.  I don’t have any memories of my mother smiling.  Not a real, genuine smile.  My mother has a “show smile” – it never meets her eyes.

 

What I do remember is my mother always staring into the television with a blank look on her face.  I remember her snapping at me whenever I asked her a question more than once because she hadn’t heard me the first time.  I remember her constantly telling me “It hurts to be beautiful” if I complained while she pulled at my hair as she rolled it in curlers.  It seemed no matter how hard I tried to make her happy, the unhappier she was.

 

I didn’t know what depression was as a child.  I didn’t know that it would cause a mother to constantly ask her little girl questions like, “Am I fatter than that woman [gesturing to a stranger]?”  I did know that I couldn’t win no matter how I answered.   I didn’t know that depression could make a person feel chronic pain or take away emotions except anger.  I do now, but I didn’t then.

 

All I did know was to keep quiet.  There was no laughter in my home, but there was a helluva lot of fighting.  Late at night when my father came home the fighting would start.  I would sink myself deep into my covers with pillows over my ears to drown it out, but I could always hear it.  It would start as contentious mumbling and then start peaking in shouts.  Like thunder, it would roll through the halls, doors would slam, dishes would settle loudly onto the counters.  And then? Nothing.  Silence so palpable the fighting would almost seem better.  The television would turn on, volume loud, and I would hold my breath until I fell asleep.  Tears were optional.

 

The next morning it would be as if nothing had happened and it was if my father didn’t even exist.  Gone by the time I woke up, he didn’t return from work until long after I had gone to sleep.  He only existed to me as a shouting voice.  It wasn’t until I was a little older that I realized he didn’t even live with us; he lived at my grandparents’ house.  In the mornings, though, my mother was back.  Her silence would have returned, the firmness around her mouth, her readiness to pick a fight with me – I wouldn’t have recognized her in any other way.

 

I grew up awkward with emotion.  Compliments were like so many boxes in my arms and I couldn’t walk with them smoothly.  I didn’t know how to laugh out loud and I didn’t like smiling.  All of these made me feel conspicuous when they came easily to others.  It was as if I were in chronic puberty – which would be hell, by the way, if it were possible.

 

Even when I moved away from home at 19 years old to live with my sister, I remained “old.”  She constantly reminded me to “just smile.”  My sister would wake me up in the middle of the night to watch Baywatch because she was positive a shark would eat someone that night, and who would hold her hand?  Or, she’d wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “We never talk anymore, why won’t you talk to me?”  It was always something in the middle of the night, never at a reasonable time of night, and I had an early class.  But it was good for me.

 

Slowly, I found my laugh and my smile.  Later, as a teacher and a mother I grew more confident in them.  How could I not?  As a teacher I had a student eat my plant.  How could I not laugh or smile?  As a mother, I have insisted my children would know my laughter every day and see me smile constantly.

 

And my mother?  She still doesn’t smile or laugh.  But I have learned that I cannot be responsible for these things.  She owns her behaviors just as I own mine, and I will not place the burden on my children as she did to me.  My happiness thrives and there will not be a day that goes by when my kids will not be witnesses to it.

 

 

“Let it always be known that I chose joy over despair, family over the world, and to fight when it mattered. Welcome to me.  I give a damn.”

— Streetlights Imagination

 

Please leave comments or questions to her piece below, and share your own experiences with depression. The more we discuss it, the better it is for all of us.

 

Follow Streetlights on Twitter at @Streetlights94 or Facebook at the same.

 

(On a completely different note, please check out the last two Forbes articles by David Vinjamuri, NYU prof, branding expert, and published author — check out his books here — who quotes me in one (see page two) and refers to me in another as a successful indie author (page 6). I’m truly honored.)

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