Who do I want to be

I sat in the armchair in my therapist's office, my hands in my lap. She read from the open binder in front of her on the table. 

"So. The next target on your map for this brown  is trouble setting up your teachers pay teachers store. Do you want to work through that one today?"

"Ha. Umm..yeah. We can work on that. That's ... Kind of an ongoing thing?"

"Oh? So" she glances down again, "you'd say that's a present target?"

"Yeah. Yeah I'd say."

Chasing gold stars. Beating failure to the punch. I think those are the only two modalities I've ever had. If I'm not going to be immediately successful, if I'm not going to be praised and appreciated and adored, I don't want to do it. If I'm not sure I'm going to be successful, I don't want to try. If I don't try, I don't fail.

Or I fail every time.

I've been trying.

I took classes. I learned power point. I learned Canva. I practiced. I revised. And I'm not succeeding. 

No gold stars.

 And I haven't quit yet.

Except for all the times I've quit.

But I've started again. I've tried. Trying is hard. Trying is scary. 

So now I'm sitting in this arm chair and tears are running down my face. The floodgates have opened and honestly everyone in the room is surprised that this is the thing that did it.

"I just ... Wanted to feel successful. Wanted to be good at something. I think I had unreasonable expectations for what this was going to do for me."

"I'm sure," she said, "that you've been successful at a lot of things if you think about it. I mean, look at your girls! You're raising these wonderful girls."

I pause, longer than I mean to. "But. They aren't me. And the older they get, the more obvious that becomes. They are their own people. Their accomplishments are theirs. And that's good, that's right. But I want something that's mine. And I know I .... Have. I have done things that I'm proud of. But. They're in the past. What now? What do I do now?"

"Well. Why don't we talk about that next time? Why don't you try some things, some hobbies, try to come up with some things you can feel successful at?"

Sure. By next week, why don't I try to come up with some things I can feel successful at. That's not what I've been trying to do for my entire adult life or anything. I'll just ... Get right on that.

So, dear reader, do you know? Who do I want to be when I grow up? 

Sad

 She sat in the chair across from me, looking down at her binder of notes open in her lap. "Can you rate your depression over the past week on a scale from 1-10?"

"3?"

She wrote it down before looking up at me.  "What ... What do you think is keeping your depression going? Because it seems like every week you have some. You're on medication for it, right?"

"...Yeah."

"Then why do you think it's never at a zero?"

I paused for a long time. We'd spent the previous half hour talking about my week, about how it had been hard. About my anxious 11 year old screaming every morning before school. About my perfectionist 9 year old crying for an hour instead of writing one page of a draft. About me trying a project that I thought would make me happy and realizing it wasn't what I hoped it would be. Why wasn't my depression at a zero?

"I think.... I think I'm just at a stage in my life that is full of a lot of drudgery and a lot of emotional labor, and not a lot of intellectual or creative stimulation. And I think that's really hard. And sometimes I get big ideas, like my blog or my teachers pay teachers stuff, that I think are going to just FIX IT. And then they don't. And it's disappointing. And if I wait until I WANT to do things like write, I'll be waiting forever. So I end up not doing the things that would make me happier."

"Oh. Okay." She flipped back through the binder. "You said before it's the weather. Do you think the weather contributes?"

Pause. "Yeah. Definitely the weather."

And. It was true. It was all true. It's the weather. It's the laundry. It's boredom. It's disappointment. It's emotional exhaustion from carrying the feelings of small people. It IS. 

BUT.

What I really wanted to say was, A zero?? What's a zero? What would it feel like to be at a zero on the depression scale. Would I even want that? Do I know anyone at a zero? Would I want to??

This morning, after fighting with my kids to get up and get dressed and get in the car, after sitting in two drop off lines, I switched on the We Can Do Hard things podcast. As one does.

And the episode was "Susan Cain on sadness as a superpower."

And I exhaled from somewhere deep in my body where I hadn't known I was holding my breath.

Susan Cain has a book out today called Bittersweet. A book about the beauty of melancholy. About being what Glennon Doyle calls midnight blue, about seeing what G calls brutiful.

And I thought, yes. Yes. This is who I am. I'm sad because I'm paying attention. I'm sad because it's brutiful. I'm sad and I'm okay with that. I'm sad and I can use that.

I'm not glorifying depression. When I'm at a 6 or 7, I need help. Real help. But I'm never going to be a 0 because that's just not who I am. I'm sad. And I'm grateful.