Rock bottom's upside

Another weekend of 'why not'

Today’s accompanying tune: “Freedom” by Beyoncé

Well, why not?

It’s a phrase I’ve turned into something of a mantra so far this year. Help a friend out with her shop while she’s out of town? Why not. Go on a trip with a dozen strangers to a country where I barely speak the language? Bring it on. Meet a photographer and neighbor I’ve looked up to for many fire seasons now? Let’s do it. Take the risk, make the jump, climb the mountain? Yes, yes, yes.

Maybe for you these aren’t big feats, barely register even as a set of accomplishments. If that’s you, know that I am happy for you but entirely cannot relate. In another lifetime, it wouldn’t have been for me either. The lifetime where I kept a corporate job, continued living in a city and striving for everything. The one where I called complete strangers and launched into a multitude of questions designed to make them say something, anything, interesting. The life where I don’t leave my home state, the one that is decidedly comfortable yet dull. In that life, there isn’t the illusion of “why not,” because I am doing everything, always. Doing whatever I could, whatever I thought I had to, to stay alive.

In this lifetime, though, things are a bit different. I’ve gone through phased retreats, long months of near-solitude where my primary interactions are with my dogs. Anxiety, my ever-present and loathed life companion, has a bit to do with it, of course, but the main culprit is my unending desire to be inside my own head, always and all at once. I adhere to the belief that, if I can just get a minute of quiet, I can follow the threads of my thoughts all the way to their knotted ends, working out the kinks along the way towards becoming the person I think I should be, one day, eventually.

I was one of those people that, at first, was okay during the initial stages of lockdowns during the early days of COVID-19 — I was perfectly content to hide away from the world, work through my own deep-buried issues, ready to emerge from my cocoon a brighter, better, more self-assured self. But in the absence of life, anxiety festered. I worked too much, a distraction from the gnawing pit of my stomach that assured me that, all of this, all of life, would not be okay. Things were very much not okay, and there was no way to know if they would be again. I joined Zoom sessions with my therapist, insisting that I was holding up even better than I could have imagined, only to experience the longest, harshest bout of insomnia I’ve ever had. The story I was telling, that I was perfectly content hiding myself from the world, hiding the world from myself, fracturing with every hour that passed under the soft glow of city street lights reflecting on my apartment ceiling. Even as restrictions eased and I slowly ventured back out into the world, into other people’s three-dimensional lives, I hesitated. We’d all been through so much, and I’d emerged from the ashes of our shared reality with a steady job, no major loss among friends or family, and a bottomless pit of despair that could only threaten to swallow me whole, if I let it. All things considered, I was perfectly fine. I couldn’t complain. I also still couldn’t sleep.

I watched soothing videos of professional carpet cleaners, wishing for them to soap and scrub my mind as thoroughly as they did the woven fibers. I devoured short videos of disembodied hands paint rudimentary scene scapes meant to convey the grandiosity of the northern lights or a spectacular sunset but really meant only that the details of the scene in light were swallowed in black acrylic paint. I repeatedly listen to three albums, front to back, every night, hoping to be lulled into oblivion with a mountain song, a cardigan, a rumbling crescendo. I doomscrolled. I worked. I didn’t say a word to anyone, convinced that my anxiety had simply morphed into a new beast, one that brought out pigment under my eyes and brewed coffee after coffee. Who was I to complain? I was fine.

Years went by, my fight or flight reduced simply to grin and bear it. Grin and bear the horror, the atrocities, the injustices, the microcosm of the hell I inhabited. I started running, I moved. I changed jobs. I got another dog. Anything to feel anything. I had retreated so far into myself, so far inside my own head, that my ability to reemerge was akin to digging myself out of a cave piled high with boulders. If I didn’t know who I was, after all of this, what about the people that did know me, the ones that I still talked to, the ones going through their own labyrinths with just enough energy to poke their heads out and assure me they, too, were fine.

I only allowed myself to reemerge earlier this year, truly emerge the way I thought I could back in March 2020, after almost a year of unemployment, the chance to wipe every slate clean, unknot every thread, a Herculean task until it just, wasn’t. Something had shifted — where anxiety had gnawed holes in my gut were now small seeds, infinitesimally small but there nonetheless, of hope. Of life. Of a life more full of hope and joy than rotted by anxiety. Maybe my brain was just too tired after all these years of being all grip. Maybe I stopped caring. Maybe I had an epiphany in the night to make sense of all that I’d seen in the early hours of the morning. Maybe I had simply decided that something had to give, and so, it did. I’ll never know what pushed me off the ledge I’d been clinging to for dear life, but I know now what it feels like to fly.

At the end of my threads, I found why not. I found the well of anxiety drained, the seeds sprouting into something new. I found what some might call rock bottom, but I prefer to call my roots. The source of growth, nourishment, of life. Tangled up with the rocks, but resilient enough to endure the harshest conditions, the deepest winters. The force that asked “why not,” over and over again until I couldn’t ignore it any more. The one without fear, without anxiety. The one that wanted to become a reliable friend, someone who was committed but fun even after you got to know her. It embraced the quirks, the threads of thought that held the deepest purchase in the ground but were maybe a funny shape or were obsessed with weather. Whatever it was, was whatever I was. In them, I was. With them, I swung into a new me, one that will never be complete, a journey never finished, but one that’s fun because it’s the one full of why not.

Here’s to hitting the bottom and still remembering to come up for air.

- Megan