On a Saturday evening, Sam drove me halfway to the psychiatric hospital. I looked out the window, wondering if all this was necessary. My psychiatrist had said I needed to check in if another round of medication failed, but I’d read all I could about the psych ward, and I didn’t want to go there any more than I wanted to go to anywhere lately. Still, I knew my resistance was more about identity: I didn’t want to be that girl, the one with suicidal depression. A visit to the psychiatric hospital? That didn’t happen to me.
Henrietta, our two-year-old, fell asleep in the back as we drove, and I felt a little better at the thought that she was probably asleep for the night. I convinced Sam that my afternoon of intense suicidal ideation had passed, and that we should turn around, get takeout, put Henrietta to bed, and watch a movie. When there’s something—anything at all—that sounds better than ceasing to exist, it feels like improvement.
It was as easy to dress Henrietta the next morning as I imagined it would be to dress a centipede. I felt heavy and slow, and her limbs were everywhere, flailing in protest of her church clothes. When I dropped her pair of polka-dot tights and let her go, she hid in her play tent, whimpering as if wounded.
As hard as it was to get Henrietta ready for church, I knew it would be harder to get myself ready—like dressing a giant amoeba full of wet cement. And I’d have to preen that amoeba while my brain berated me: What kind of pathetic human has to work up energy to brush her teeth? Right now, while looking for your shoes, you should think really hard about that blog post you read on organizing the perfect closet. Chocolate milk and a Pop-tart for breakfast? No wonder you’re miserably fat.
And even if it had somehow been easy to get ready, I didn’t want to go. As I shoved things into my Sunday bag, I wondered what the point was. I wondered how much I could stop doing and still consider myself Mormon. Mormonism seemed something one has to do, not just be, and I was doing very little of it. It wasn’t just church tasks I’d stopping “doing,” of course. I’d also stopped flossing. I’d stopped doing much of anything aside from trying to stay alive. This involved a lot of television, a lot of sleep, a good deal of chocolate, and very little else.
Months before, when I was supposed to be getting ready to attend a service obligation for the university where I taught, I sat on the edge of my bed staring at the wall instead. A half hour passed, my eyes unfocused, my mind sluggish and sad. I slid off the bed and knelt beside it, convinced I’d need divine help to get my act together and get out the door.
On my knees, my usual phrases slipped away and my prayer turned honest about how deep my depression had grown. And then I found myself asking God to let me die, asking him if I could die, if that would be okay. I told him I was sure he didn’t usually grant prayers to die, but maybe he could, just this once. I wept as I prayed. It felt like one of the most sincere prayers I’d ever uttered. I told him how miserable I was, how much I hated my life, and that I knew I shouldn’t hate it, but I did.
During a prayer: that was when I found out I was suicidal.
I stood up, got dressed, and attended the event. It was a poetry competition for high school students, and I was meant to judge as they recited original work. It seemed all of them had written poems about desperate sadness, about death, about wanting to kill themselves or friends who had done so. The poems and performances were maudlin and overdone, and I was ashamed at how they skewered my emotions. My pencil hovered over the judging sheets. I wasn’t sure how to be objective. I wished they would be quiet. I wished I hadn’t prayed.
Once my depression turned suicidal, the impulse surprised me by feeling less like the result of some emotion, and more like an emotion in and of itself. I didn’t want to die because I was sad; I simply wanted to die. It was an emotion that wouldn’t leave, and I found myself feeling it at the strangest moments: the instant my eyes opened in the morning, while I folded towels in front of the television, while I frosted Christmas cookies with Henrietta.
The only real “plan” I’d developed was to fall asleep forever, and I had handed over my medications to Sam to prevent that, so I felt safe enough. But there were afternoons I would rock back and forth in the winter dark of my bedroom, wishing to no longer exist. There were times while driving when I didn’t trust my hands on the wheel. There were times when my disease convinced me that an adult Henrietta would surely understand why I had done it, that ultimately she’d be glad that I’d been granted my longing to die.
So much of this felt oddly spiritual, as if the choice of whether or not to stay in this world was a sincere question I could seek guidance for, like it was a conundrum God could help me sort out. There were times when the way suicide occurred to me as a solution mimicked my experiences with personal revelation. And while I knew intellectually that killing myself was not a plan God would ever endorse, the disease made my longing so deep and so penetratingly emotional that I wasn’t always entirely sure.
I went through my most depressed days without praying at all. Once I’d begged God to kill me, prayer felt dangerous and strange. Participating in an act designed to mix my compromised human brain with the power of divinity was either terrifying or meaningless, and meaninglessness was more comfortable. If praying was to be done, it seemed wise to leave it up to people who were in their right minds.
But it was more than prayer that grew spiritually complicated: my depression demanded a complete reimagining of my relationship to Mormonism. What I had loved about my faith turned sour or menacing. The gospel’s cheerful cry for self-improvement boiled in the brutal voice of my head. Belonging to a church community meant a parade of excruciating social interaction. Complicated doctrine was beyond my sluggish brain’s powers, and words like “hope” and “faith” and “love” were one-dimensional answers to questions I’d never been so naïve to ask. The righteous decisions made in scripture stories baffled me, and my eternal existence was a disappointing prospect. I was going through as many motions as I could bear to, but the range of bearable motion was getting smaller.
Somehow I wrestled Henrietta and myself into a presentable condition, and we left for church. As I walked out the door, Sam asked, nervously, “Are you sure you can handle her? You know how she runs in the parking lot.”
I gave him a withering look, and he said, gently, “You seem pretty out of it. What if she gets away from you?”
We were very late by the time we left, and I felt embarrassed as we walked up to the building. I hated myself for never making it on time. Sacrament meeting was last, so I dropped Henrietta off at Nursery, and the woman who met me at the door said, “Henrietta! We’re so glad you made it today!” I took this as a reference to my inactivity.
It was ward conference that Sunday, so I found all the adults in the chapel, and the pews were full. Too anxious to sit with anyone, I sat in the front row, far from the two members of the stake presidency who were tag-teaming the lesson.
The one standing said, “We can all do more than we’re doing.” Wrapping up his section of the lesson, he spoke slowly and loudly. He seemed like he wanted to either cry or shout, but hadn’t yet decided which. “God expects us to serve him with all of our might, mind, and strength! None of us are doing enough.” He closed in the name of Jesus Christ.
I folded my arms and stared at the floor. I felt anxious and lonely up on the front pew, and I wished for the kind of lesson that says God loves us unconditionally, no matter how little we manage to do or how poorly we manage to love him. And then I scolded myself, “Not every message can pat you on the head.”
The other stake presidency member got up. He talked about sadness as a tool of Satan, and what we ought to do when we felt down. He asked the class to share how they pick themselves up and do better. Listening to hymns in the car, they said. Writing in a gratitude journal. Prayer, scripture study, genealogy, fasting, temple attendance, on and on—a list of tools that felt like hammers in my skull. I couldn’t seem to get my hands on anything on that list.
Between meetings, I waited where I was, longing for someone to come talk to me, and terrified that they might. I knew I should probably get up and connect with someone, that it might help me to say something—anything—out loud and remember what eye contact felt like, but by then I was almost in an alternate reality. If I got up and walked to the other side of the room, I literally wasn’t confident I’d be visible.
When it was time for sacrament meeting, Henrietta worked her way through my bag of tricks in record time. She ate her squeezable applesauce, didn’t want to color, and had no interest in the sandwich bag full of plastic dinosaurs I’d packed.
“Go?” she asked. “See Daddy?”
I gathered up her toys, and we sat in the foyer where I could listen until I took the sacrament. I still knew the motions. I knew to stay until the sacrament was over, even though Henrietta was throwing herself against the glass side doors, begging to leave.
In the chapel, they called out the names of the people who held important ward callings and I heard it over the speaker system and raised my right hand to sustain them, practicing the reflex even though no one could see me do it. I knew so few of the names. I took the bread, then the water. We left.
When I got home, Sam told me that he’d been on the phone with the suicide prevention hotline and several other organizations, trying to research our best options. If church hadn’t lifted me, it had at least sort of numbed me. I took a long nap, woke up and watched TV. I felt okay. Numb was better than frantically suicidal.
A month or so after ward conference, a new set of medications kicked in and the depression had cleared some. I felt, abruptly, like I was done with all of it, like there was no real reason to go back to church. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t in rebellion. And I wasn’t a complete nonbeliever; I just felt nothing about it. Given that I had not found church meaningful or useful in the darkest stretch of my life thus far, I wasn’t sure what I was doing there anymore. I was tired of working so hard to stay, tired of forcing myself to remain in the middle of it when I hadn’t really wanted to be there for years.
This ramped up around Valentine’s Day, and I talked to Sam about it over a fancy dinner—an appetizer of Cornish game hens drizzled in smoked honey. I was sad about leaving the Church, worried about how to tell my family, but I also couldn’t help feeling relief. I could finally give it up and walk away. Sam isn’t a member, so I knew it would make things simpler in our marriage, if nothing else.
The decision seemed so clear, so logical, so reasoned and natural, but I woke up Sunday morning feeling obliged to go to church after all, so I decided to give myself one more day.
The Relief Society lesson was in progress when I got there. The chalkboard and table were decorated with hearts and roses for Valentine’s Day, and I stood at the back, unsure of where to sit. A woman I didn’t know touched my elbow and said, “Here, sit by us,” and guided me to a seat in her row.
The teacher had written on the chalkboard: “The root of happiness is gratitude,” and I almost got up and left. But I stayed, and sat there quietly. I could almost still feel that woman’s touch on my elbow, and I felt stunned by the fact that she’d asked me to sit near her. It felt like a miracle of kindness.
And then a larger sort of miracle occurred. I don’t know if it was a chemical or spiritual shift, and maybe the distinction doesn’t matter, but somehow as I continued listening, all my feelings about church shifted. I soaked up the lesson like I’d been starved, and my interaction with the gospel focused on the most basic concepts, the ones I’d trained myself to gloss over in favor of more meaty doctrines. It wasn’t really a renewed intellectual engagement that brought me back to the fold. It was part medication, part human touch at the right moment, but also what felt like new ears for some of the most abstract words I can think of, phrases I’d heard so many times that I’d stopped listening. But suddenly I heard them again. Hope. Faith. Charity. Love.
I had been empty, hollowed out by my disease. But somehow my emptiness made me new and ready to start at the beginning. Sitting in the cushy red Relief Society chairs, I could hardly contain my joy.
Hope, I thought to myself. How could I have failed to realize how badly I needed hope? I knew I’d been hopeless: why had it never occurred to me that the solution was hope itself? I’d given up on repairing my connection to church through all the usual channels, but these words, which had been so contracted and flat, opened out below me, and I felt like I could finally relax, like I could stay and everything else might follow.
I once had a doctor show me the brain scan of a depressed person next to the scan of someone who wasn’t depressed, and the contrast made me weep. Next to the brain of a depressed person, the normal scan is bright; there’s so much yellow and red and green, layered bright colors that seem on the move, even in a still image.
And next to it, the depressed brain is dark. There are a few patches of yellow, but mostly it looks like someone forgot to finish coloring it in. Looking at those images made my condition real in a way it had not been before. I missed all of my brightness.
Church seemed to have so little to offer when my brain was that dark and it’s possible we don’t yet know how to apply the gospel to serious mental illness. Spirituality and mental illness can both be so isolatingly ineffable that it can be hard to sort out anything with certainty.
Truthfully, I feel like I got lucky. Luck, with a dash of grace. I went through the minimum motions until the medication brightened my brain. A woman I didn’t know felt inclined to touch my elbow. And when I was ready, I felt words enter my mind like tiny streams of yellow light.