Dear Reader,
It’s been a while hasn’t it? I started this particular piece in 23 Sep 2018, and only managed to finish it in March 2021. Years have gone by and while I’ve been continuing to meet people, have conversations about self harm and mental health, I haven’t had the energy or mental framework to process them. In 2019 I had to haul my life across the Atlantic (dramatic but true), coming to terms with the fact that there just wasn’t a place for me in America at the time. Unable to secure a work visa, I returned to a now foreign home, Singapore. I felt very lost the months prior to the move, and to some extent I still feel lost. In 2020, the world experienced a global pandemic, and at the time of writing is still reeling from its effects. Maybe I’m just trying to make excuses for why I’ve allowed my art practice to fall by the wayside — I know I shouldn’t have to, but I do anyway. As I poured more of myself into this project, I also felt a growing responsibility to the people who volunteer to be a part of it — to be able to handle their stories with tenderness and respect — this led me to pursue a Masters of Counselling which I started at the end of 2020 so I can develop the skills I need to do right by the stories entrusted to me.
Courtney with her dog Bella
This letter is based on a conversation I had with a dear friend Courtney in September 2018. As I listened to the recording of our conversation, worries and concerns about my productivity as an artist melted away. I found my heart rate settling. Courtney often has that effect on people — she’s a calming presence wrapped in a fiery love for all things human. So, here we go, to Courtney and her experience — someone I love and miss terribly.
Content warning: Suicidal Ideation, death, alcoholism
The following excerpts have been edited to flow in a single narrative. It is still Courtney’s voice and she has vetted the following document and approved that she is being accurately represented.
It’s the 23rd of September, 2018 in a bar in Chicago.
We sit across from each other under the dimmed lights as she begins to tell me her story.
Courtney
I’ve always been really scared of depression —
to clarify, I don’t mean I’m scared of people with depression, but that I’m scared of inheriting it.When I was eleven, my mom was diagnosed as bipolar and it totally flipped our world around. She had symptoms much earlier than that, like really intense high and lows, and we’ve always had this beast in our house that we all had to deal with, just that now it was given a name.
I have always been more sensitive than most when it came to experiencing seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in the winter, but my mental health issues never got in the way of life. Everything changed when I stepped out of Ministry and chose to leave SAIC and Inter-varsity (A Christian Campus Ministry). That broke my heart a thousand different ways. It felt like dreams of mine had died, like my identity no longer existed, or that I had made the tragic mistake of putting too much of my identity into my work, losing a sense of self along the way. All of a sudden, I didn’t have a vision for the future — for next week, next month, next year… Because that was my dream, and now it’s dead, and I’m still alive, and I’m not sure why.
So three months passed. It was about three months of grieving that I wasn’t recognising properly, and I didn’t name it, so I didn’t walk through it in a healthy way. After all it was just a job. Someone else had suggested to me that I might be depressed, but I brushed it off. I told myself that I’m just in transition, and that I’m not actually depressed. I can’t be.
The next six months was just this process of trying to figure things out, moving forward, recognising there was still some underlying pain, giving myself room to hope that it was temporary. It took me nine months to realise that what had caused my depression was grief. It hit me like a revelation. I was grieving the loss of a dream, of a job that I really loved, I was grieving the loss of a role that I thought fit me perfectly. Grief compacted together and caused my depression. Naturally, I thought, “Great, so all I need to do is let myself grieve and I’ll move past this.”
‘What did these nine months look like for you?’
Not eating enough, not sleeping enough. Another thing was the drinking. Alcoholism runs high in my family, and I have a lot of rules about how I drink, where I drink, making sure not to drink by myself, not drinking without eating, not drinking when I am already down. Those are my rules. Which basically allowed me to create healthy context for drinking, just as a means of prevention, because alcoholism was a really big thing in my family. And so all those rules went out the window. I was drinking by myself, drinking too much, I wasn’t eating, drinking everyday when I was down. There was no joy. I wasn’t allowing myself to experience the joy of the everyday. I wasn’t sure how. Which is very unlike what I typically do — I’m a very optimistic and hopeful person, and I’m naturally inclined towards seeing, recognising, and experiencing joy and hope. There was just this lack of hope and focus. I couldn’t follow through on commitments, like doing my laundry, or keeping my room clean, or just like taking a shower. They weren’t just everyday chores anymore, they were these monumental hurdles and excruciatingly hard tasks. These everyday activities — laundry, dishes, getting in the shower, picking up your clothes, etc. — now they were painful. I didn’t know how to engage. Everyday was boring, meaningless, I felt like I was just going through the motions without caring about any of it. I’m a nanny and an artist. I’m responsible for another life and helping raise a strong healthy human being, and typically, I light up around children, but during that period it was as if I couldn’t care less. To be clear, the children in my care didn’t suffer, I still went through all the motions, but I couldn’t have cared less, and that’s not like me.
I can attest to that
Courtney is like cinnamon in the winter
She’s warm like a sunbeam.
‘I’m so sorry that you were having a hard time.’
Fast forward a week and a half, it was just a really bad day, I was just … torn up. Because I had named grief as the source of my depression, recognised what was at the source of my grief, and yet I still couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t get better. I know it had only been like ten days since my huge revelation, but I felt I wasn’t far enough along in my recovery to satisfy myself. I spent the day praying, meditating, and thinking. Went down by the lake to journal. It didn’t make me feel better, it didn’t do anything. Then I got a parking ticket for expired plates, and that was just so devastating. When you’re already down, a snowball can feel like an avalanche.
I was driving back from the lake and I remember thinking, how do I exit out of this world and cause the smallest amount of pain possible to the people I’m leaving behind. Like, is there a way to take poison and make it look like an accident. Is there some noble cause I can die for that everyone will be okay with. I had enough self awareness to recognise that suicide is not…. I mean, if I committed suicide, it would be so hurtful to others, and I just was so others-oriented that it wasn’t really a viable option. But there’s gotta be a way to die, there’s gotta be a way to just… stop this, without causing that much hurt.
It was somewhere in the middle of this train of thoughts that I almost slam my brakes on the highway, because it just hit me that I was actually trying to figure out a way to kill myself. And I just went… oh my goodness. And that was enough. There just isn’t a way to just exit life intentionally that isn’t going to hurt people the way I’ve experienced hurt. I’m not a crusader, there isn’t some war I can go and lay down my life for — I was called to bigger things.
Taking a moment to interrupt this recollection to say that I empathise with feeling dissatisfied at my pace of healing and growth, and that it’s important to give yourself that grace. Some things can’t be rushed, no matter how much we’d like them to be over. Loss is the deprivation of anything that meant something which was once available to you. Dr. Benoliel defined grief beautifully as the ‘total organismic response of a human being to the loss of a significant relationship (Birenbaum et al.,1992)’, and that can be a relationship towards anything — in Courtney’s case, it was what she believed was her life’s purpose.
Courtney
That really shook me up. It was the lowest I had been in ages. I want to not feel like this, I need to stop hurting, there’s gotta be a way out, there’s got to be a way I can physically remove myself from this, and I was trying to find a way to do that with the least amount of damage to people I cared about.
So that evening, I messaged my friend and said, I’ll take that cat.
Courtney & Hiccup
She laughed at my puzzled expression.
You probably need some context. A few days prior to that low point, I had been offered a kitten. This is the story of how I got Hiccup. I already had Toothless (my current cat) — Yes, both are referencing the How to Train a Dragon series. Somebody had found him at the airport and posted his picture on facebook.
I commented something like “Omg he’s so precious!!!”
My friend messaged me back, ‘I’m pretty sure this is your cat, the universe wants you to have him.’
“I don’t know about that,” I replied, “I already have a cat, and a dog, I think I’m okay.”
But that night I called her and said I’m picking up that cat.
I don’t know why that was my response to feeling like I had to exit from the world, but I knew it was the most approachable anchor to life that I could grasp at that point in time. In those low moments, I didn’t know how to reach out to friends and family, but saving and giving some helpless creature a home was the most accessible anchor to my desire to live, and to be healthy, and to be whole again — by nurturing and feeding another. Taking care of others is a baseline of mine, and nurturing others is a core belief. I couldn’t rise up to take care of myself , I couldn’t hurt myself or drink to get over it, and I couldn’t really invest in friendships or relationships in that moment, but I could drive 6 hours to pick up a kitten and bring him to his forever home. And that was enough of an anchor point to help me move forward.
And that’s what happened. I just kept moving forward, I just kept showing up for work, which meant getting dressed, and showering a few times a week, eating 2 to 3 times a day, and slowly making appointments, and social engagements, and just trusting healing was going to come, and it did. But I had to get a cat.
29 Mar 2019, 6 months later
‘How have you been since adopting Hiccup?’
Really really good. The summer I got hiccup was probably the lowest I’ve ever been, and the healing process has been gruelling and slow, like constantly uphill, but I’m moving forward. Just recently I had a conversation that spun me a dazzling 180 degrees and launched me into a whole other world of health and healing. It had a lot to do with naming serious truths about myself and my identity. Now I feel like I can just let myself be, myself is good, I am good as I am. The last few months have been the healthiest, most emotionally stable in the past 4 or 5 years. I was rejecting myself based on ideas of what I thought I should be, or what I thought a good christian was, or how I should exist, how I should suffer pain or deal with pain. These beliefs were causing me to reject myself, and it all came to a head when I quit Inter-varsity, and that intricate framework of identity that I had been building for years crumbled, and I crumbled with it. Because that was it, that was everything, the perfect box. It was how I was going to be this idea of a good christian, and how I was going to be this idea of a loving person. A giant wave crushing down on intricate sandcastles that I thought were going to be sturdier than that.
For more than a decade or longer, I was under this notion that I was only innately good if I could check these boxes, if I was doing these things, and being an artist never fit into that. I always worked to get it to fit but it never did. Which is problematic because I’ve always wanted to be an artist, and that’s okay, and I don’t have to doubt it based on this notion of what it means to be a good christian or person. Since then it’s been a lot of stepping into that reality and letting it breathe. A lot of internal growth that I’m trying to give myself space to manifest outwardly. In the past when I’ve had a bad day or I’m feeling apathetic it could send me spiralling, and it could happen for any reason, like I’m feeling sad because I’m single, or sad because I’m bored, or sad because I feel like I’m not making enough, and I don’t know what else to do but watch TV until I’m ready to go to bed. But recently, I’m accepting that all of that is okay, because tomorrow is a new day, and the spiral just stops there. Instead of casting judgement calls on my identity because I’m sad, or because I think I’m no good, it just stopped. It was like something has broken off me, and gears shifted and started working. It has also been a mindfulness, to partner with … I don’t know — whatever that good work is inside, and partner with it, and bolster it.
It’s okay that my gifts don’t fit into these boxes that I’ve built. It’s okay that my dreams don’t look like wise game plans for my life. That’s okay. As long as I stand on foundational truths for myself, I’ve managed to stop the lies before I tumble down, and now I’m standing on something sturdier than I was before.
Thank you for your time and energy (to both my readers and to Courtney). Self-harm is a shapeshifter that can take many forms. It can be as simple as a deliberate lack of attention towards the general needs of your body, or the breaking of rules around alcohol you’ve developed due to family history — thankfully for Courtney, she had a Hiccup for her life’s hiccup.
Sincerely,
Jogoh & Courtney
References:
Birenbaum, L. K., Cowles, K. V., Rodgers, B. L., & Benollel, J. Q. (1992). Definitions of grief. Research in Nursing & Health, 15(4), 319–320. https://doi.org/10.1002/nur.4770150411