For nearly an entire year I was depressed. I didn’t know that I was depressed until recently.
Last month I stepped onto a soccer field and I felt strong. I played well. When I stepped off the field, I was all better. I was happy, and realized in that moment that it had been a long time since I felt happy. In the weeks that followed I climbed a 14er, went for bike rides and hikes and played soccer with fervent joy. After a game I was out for beers with some of the team and we were relating how the game went to a player who had missed the game, but not the après beverages, and Kim said, “Maggie’s back!” And I know that I am.
I learned a lot about my self; about my self-image. I don’t primp and preen. It doesn’t take me an hour to figure out what I’m going to wear every morning. At the end of the day I really don’t need to know that I’m pretty or thin. What I need to know is that I am strong. I need to feel strong. When I feel strong, everything is okay. Everything works. When I feel weak, or broken, everything feels broken. Dialogue gets broken by my feelings of insecurity. Words get twisted and pop into painful versions of their previously innocent selves. Humor gets chipped and cracked until it looks more like nasty sarcasm; tenderness sounds like condescension. The wine spills, the glass breaks, and the spirit of joy drips to the floor and mingles with the dirt in puddles of muck.
Such was the view from behind my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for how completely this injury would cripple me. I wasn’t able to face how quickly and easily a break to my body broke everything else in my world. I hid it, even from myself. And that’s the part that scares me most; that I didn’t know I was down until I wasn’t anymore; that I somehow wasn’t strong enough to stare the real pain of the injury in the face. That I ran from it and hid from it, and only when it had gone did I come out to call it names behind it’s back.
I wonder, now, if feeling strong doesn’t blind me in a similar fashion. Do I see the world through rose-colored lenses? Do broken things seem to be made whole when the sense of them passes into my strong body? What else am I hiding from? Am I, in fact, not strong enough to look the real joys of my life in the face?
