My First Dark Night of the Soul

On January 1^st, 2012, I wrote this in my journal:

“I almost want to lash out, to name someone who has made me feel hopeless or inadequate and somehow manage to spit venom in their face with my final breath.

But there’s no use. I know there is no one to hurt, no one to blame more than myself.”

Then I locked myself in the bathroom, and raked a razor across my wrist.

But the blade was blunt. I failed to even seriously injure myself. I threw the razor in the bathtub, collapsed on my bed, and cried for the rest of the afternoon.

The first psychologist I tried to see kept asking, “Well, what happened? What happened to make you feel this way? Was it your sister getting engaged? Did a boyfriend break up with you? Do you have an eating disorder? What happened?”

I don’t know. I can come up with a thousand reasons and none at all. At the time, it felt like I had always been falling. All my memories were filtered through a glass of despair.

It’s been eight years, but it’s still hard to talk about it. It’s hard to go back to those journal entries and see the depths of my despair. Reading the things that I wrote, I remember the sheer agony of my self-hatred all too well. I felt incapable of joy, and I believed that if I had any sort of future then it wasn’t worth fighting for.

My family moved from Michigan to Texas when I was just eighteen months ago. I was raised by two married and fervently prayerful parents in a loving church home, but I was a lonely child who made few friends and I longed for validation from others. I idolized love and pinned for a relationship, but never got the attention I craved from the opposite sex. I felt like an alien: unwanted, unlovable, and ugly.

Throughout my childhood, my dream was to be an independent film producer. I loved to tell stories and let my imagination run rampant. Every summer I went to film camp and I wrestled my way into the local highschool's communications magnet. Upon graduation I made one college application an arts school. Less than a month after I walked the stage, I started classes for a major in Digital Film and Media Production.

But it was there that my life took a dark turn.

Once upon a time, I posed for pictures. I volunteered myself as talent when our communications team had no one else. I preferred being behind the camera, but I didn’t mind being in front of it. I didn’t really understand why anyone said that they hated seeing themselves on film, I was just fine with it.

Then one day I was editing one of my videos and noticed how round and distorted my face looked. The longer I watched, the more imperfections leaped out at me: the weakness of my jawline, the curved hump of my nose, the ragged texture of my eyebrows. Then I grew annoyed at my own mannerisms, appalled by the sound of my own voice.

I slammed my laptop shut and took off running, putting More Beautiful You by Johnny Diaz on replay in my ears.

But I sat down to edit an hour later and felt even worse.

Now I flinched whenever my face appeared on the screen. I cowered away from pictures. The collage of photographs that I’d taped to the edges of my desk mocked me until I tore them all down. But the mirror leered at me every morning. Fantasies of self-mutilation invaded my mind and at night I dreamed of an endless hall of mirrors where each reflection was more gruesome then the last.

I remember April of 2011, I was driving home from the library and it hit me that I was about to turn twenty. All my insecurities came out raging out. I had never been in a relationship or even been on a date. I felt alienated and isolated at my school, and I questioned whether or not I even wanted to pursue filmmaking.

I buckled over the steering wheel and cried.

Birthdays are still a sore spot for me. I dread them.

When I got home, I swallowed up my tears, put on my brave face and acted like I was okay. I did that for months. Drive to school, do my classwork like a machine, cry all through the drive home, and clean myself up before I walked in the door. At night I tossed and turned, hours stretching on and on through the night until the night was gone and I was forced to face the world again with less energy, less confidence, and less hope.

Anxiety would rend my stomach to shreds before classes, to the point where I ran to the bathroom to throw up multiple times while I was on campus. When the lights in the classroom dimmed, I cried silent tears. My appetite was gone. Food felt like sand in my mouth and eating became a chore I had to force myself to do. Some mornings it took every ounce of my willpower just to get out of bed. My only solace was in sleep, and even there the nightmares taunted me.

I felt alone, and God felt out of reach.

My family did eventually notice, even though I tried so hard to hide it. At first Mom told me it was just my period. Dad told me to keep doing all the things I was supposed to be doing and it would eventually go away.

It didn’t go away, it got worse.

Somehow I had it in my head that I had to punish myself for not being the woman I wanted to be. I remember slamming the heel of my shoe into my forearm until I felt as though my bones would snap. With fisted hands, I beat my temples until spots swam across my eyes. I pounded my thighs while I was driving, all the while screaming at myself, “You’re hideous. You’re stupid. You’re useless. And you know this. You have always known this!”

I stared at my eyes in the rearview mirror and thought they looked like monstrous black holes. The skin on my cheeks was pitted, blistered, and raw. Dark circles shadowed under my eyes.

“You should have just killed yourself when you were thirteen.”  I said over and over again for months.

I could no longer muster up the energy to go to church. Scriptures that used to give me hope felt empty. I couldn’t even pray.

All the while, my Mom prayed for me. She tried get me to go on walks with her. She stroked my hair and held my hands still when I tried to break my own jaw.

“I want my daughter back.” I remember her crying one day.

“I hate your daughter.” I spat back. “Your daughter is worthless.”

Sometimes she got me to see hope for an afternoon. I would daydream of a better me, a better future. I got lost in the fantasy until I realized that I was alone, in the dark, in my own bed, and tomorrow would not be that dream I wished it would be.

I wrote long, sad tirades in my journals.

Stop telling yourself fairy tales, Allison. You are as ordinary and as unremarkable as you think you are.

Exams passed and the grades came back in. I’d flunked a class for the first time in my life. I lay on the bathroom floor for hours and sobbed. Christmas came, and Christmas went. I lay on the couch in silence while Mom whispered on the telephone.

I spiraled further and further into darkness until finally the clock struck midnight and I decided I couldn’t face the New Year.

But I didn’t die.

I’d tried to see two different counselors, and had come out of both appointments feeling even worse than before. I refused to try seeing another one. A week after my suicide attempt, after much begging, pleading, and praying, my Mom convinced me to go to our family doctor.

I was hoping he’d just refer me to another counselor because the thought of winding up in the psych ward, the looney bin, the asylum, (*ahem* The Behavioral and Mental Health Center) scared me to death.

He listened to me as I explained how I felt with the same patience and warmth he’d used since I was a child. He told me he thought the fastest way for me to get help would be to go to the hospital ER and ask for a referral. So Mom took me over there.

Well, as it turns out, he tricked me. They sent me straight to the psyche ward.

A social worker led me to a door that loomed tall and wide like the door to an ancient tomb. Two nurses strip-searched me before I was allowed to enter. The air conditioner rumbled like a freight train all night long. But something began to shift in my head. I listened to the nurses and the counselors as they tried to speak hope into my darkness. I found myself laughing with fellow patients as we braided each other’s hair and talked about what we missed at home. In the courtyard, we sang Amazing Grace.

And while that was far from the end of the depression, it was the turning point. I spent a week in inpatient care and several months in outpatient care. I dropped out of the arts school and enrolled in community college courses. From there, I began to hope again.

And I need you to understand something. I am not free of the darkness. I have not conquered it. It's been eight years and it's still so hard to talk about because I have not escaped this monster yet.

So many good things have happened in the eight years since I tried to take my life. I finally finally at the age of 25, went on my first date. (It was awful) I got into my first short-lived relationship. I saw my first publication at my school's literary magazine and I won an award for my writing. I made great, wonderful friends. I graduated college. I found an amazing church and more great friends. But some nights I lie awake and think it isn't enough. I'm still so, so far from the woman I wanted to be when I was twenty.

And of course, my diagnosis did not stay just major depression. It got worse. Since May of 2016 I have suffered three psychotic breaks with reality.

I have been fighting this battle so long that sometimes I feel like it is inevitable that one day I will lose. 

But I’m often reminded of my favorite verse, Ecclesiastes 3:11, “For he has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what he has done from beginning to end.”

In The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis, the angel says to his charge, “That is what mortals misunderstand.  They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

And so I have this mantra that I repeat during the worst hours of loneliness, the darkest parts of the depression, and the most hopeless sleepless nights.

Joy is coming back.

One day, Joy will cover over all the anguish and the pain of the past. Joy will curl up with me in my childhood bed and catch all the tears I used to cry. Joy will fill that ache beneath my heart, and shield me from the cutting words of the girls who I thought of as my friends. Joy will drive away the racing destructive thoughts that plagued my mind at the very onset of the depression, and Joy will strengthen all the shaky steps I have taken towards recovery. Joy will heal all the blisters of my yesterdays and turn them into gold. Diamonds will be rising from the ashes.

One day. Someday. Sometimes I think I can catch glimpses of it. Sometimes I think I can see with stunning, breathtaking clarity, how in the light of eternity, pain is not just a small fading mark in the distance but part of the victorious triumph of Joy.