If from this savage place thou wouldst escape...

“Thee it behooves another path to take,” he said as he beheld me weeping, “if from this savage place thou wouldst escape.”

I can’t help but feel like I’m in that savage place.

The quote is an interpretation from the first Canto of Dante’s Inferno. An epic poem I read the summer before my senior year of high school that I fell madly in love with. Maybe it was the elements of fantasy, the carefully constructed allegory, or perhaps just the fact that I could relate. Regardless, it struck me so much I decided to ink it on my arm, permanently.

At the start of the poem, Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest, unsure of how he got there. All he knows is that he has strayed from the right path and he is scared. As he works his way through the forest, he comes to the base of a mountain, atop which he can see the light of salvation. Filled with hope where once there was despair, Dante attempts to climb the mountain. Unfortunately for him there are three beasts on the mountainside that prevent his climb, one of whom is described as a she-beast, but who I prefer to think of as a she-wolf (in the closet) because that Shakira song is forever stuck in my head.

Dante nearly feints, something he does about a million times more throughout the poem begging the question of whether he needs to get his blood pressure checked or not, and ultimately, he starts to cry, overwhelmed by the situation at hand.

It is then that he meets his eventual guide, Virgil who delivers the quote from above. For Dante, “another path” just so happens to be the path that leads directly through each layer of hell, into the mouth of Satan himself, out of the anus of Satan himself, through the terraces of purgatory, and ultimately the spheres of Heaven. So just a very casual sort of journey, ya know?

So yea, if I had to make an analogy, I’d say I’m in the forest right about now. I’ve been here before, many times. We all have our own version of the forest, what it represents, and how we wind up there. But here I am, again.

I think one of the reasons I have always identified with Dante’s journey is that it starts with him sort of “coming to” so to speak as he realizes he is in the forest, with no clear idea as to how long he had strayed from the path in order to wind up there.

My experience with depression has always been this way. Depression is tricky and it looks different for everyone. Yes, there are big moments that can land us in the proverbial dark forest – the loss of a loved one, a break up, losing a job, etc. But more often than not, at least for me, I find that I too wander off the path, distracted by this, that, or the other, only to look up and suddenly realize that I’ve wandered. Over the years, I’ve started to be able to identify these distracting behaviors as they are happening, but sometimes I still choose to utilize them.

For me, this always starts with emotional numbing. For those of you who know me, despite attempting to come off as emotionally balanced, I’m not. I am FULL the fuck up of feelings that come oozing out of me at every moment of every day. I am “in my feelings” like all the time - also, Keke, do you love me? But I digress. I say this so you’ll understand that I become overwhelmed by my emotions pretty easily and fairly often. While I can parse through them, and I have strategies to handle things, I often find myself fighting to bring my emotions down to a manageable state.

Once again, in big moments, we all understand this – it’s calming your nerves before a big performance, roping in your anger while in the middle of an argument, breathing deeply to reduce the panic in an emergency situation. I have these strategies too, sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. For me, however, the danger lies on either end of the emotional spectrum. There are the traumas too large to tackle and on the other hand, the smaller, minute scenarios that I feel I can just brush past. The problem, of course, is that those little moments are tied to bigger ones – and those to ones larger still. Does that make sense? I may think it’s okay to just brush off someone bailing on plans because it’s not a big deal, but when I do it enough and it triggers the much larger fear of abandonment, well, we have a problem.

And so for me, it starts small. I find myself bombarded my small scenarios where I can choose to emotionally engage, but I don’t. I brush them off. I bury my feelings. I avoid them for fear that they connect to something larger, something I really can’t handle and I just push it down and away.

This is how I start to wander into the woods. Over time, the emotions start to overflow and as they do, I start to become more and more afraid of unleashing the larger, root issue, and so I start to push more down. All the while, in each moment that I choose to not engage, my fear of my emotions grows stronger, and my ability to successfully utilize the strategies I have learned to manage my emotions wanes.

And so, I numb, I suppress, I avoid and then one day, I look up, and there I am, back in the woods. Nowadays this realization comes with a wave of guilt and shame because I’ve been here before. I promised I wouldn’t go back. I spent a lot of time, money, and energy learning strategies and building resources so that I would never have to go back. And yet, here I am.

Depression is a tricky little shit like that. And the trouble is that by the time I find myself in the forest, I’ve succumbed to fear and anxiety in such a way that I don’t feel like I have the energy to get out. All my strategies and resources feel useless. Even if they don’t, I don’t feel like I have the clarity of energy to utilize them.

While things seem pretty grim, there is hope. Especially having been here before, there is at least a semblance of an understanding as to how I can get myself out. This time, however, I know things will be different. In the past, I relied on medication to help give me the boost I needed. Medication helped me reclaim a sense of agency while balancing my mood, so that I could again successfully utilize the strategies and resources I have.

Unfortunately, medication and I do not mix well. I have tried a number of different anti-depressants, all of which came with side-effects too intense to allow for long-term usage. After ending my latest round of medication earlier this years and experiencing extreme withdrawal for about 3 weeks, I made a promise that I wouldn’t use any ever again. Extreme, I know, but I felt committed to managing my depression without pharmaceutical intervention.

But here’s my problem – I always want to take the easy way out. I always want the quickest solution. I struggle with the tension that comes from waiting for something to be resolved. Be it an argument, a work project, a reply to a text message. I’m impatient, and if I’m being honest, I’m terrified of the grey space between the beginning and the end of tension. I can’t stand it. Part of why I became so manic in the early years of treating my chronic pain was because I kept running into dead-ends and I had no vision for when or how anything would pan out. I refused to surrender to uncertainty, and I continue to do that still.

So, here I am, in the forest. If I’m being honest, I’ve been here for a while. It started with work. Our organization is growing rapidly, programs are developing faster than they should, and more and more responsibility is being placed on fewer and fewer people. I love what I do. I believe in my work. And so I dove in, put my head down, pushed forward. I worked extra hours, said yes to Saturday testing events, agreed to push forward with new programs. And along the way, I lost the joy that comes with what I do. I lost sight of why I do the work and for whom. I failed to put up appropriate boundaries so that I could protect myself from burnout. All of this triggered the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed with no idea how to fix things.

Of course, the stress, anxiety, and extra physical labor of work started to affect my body. I noticed months ago that my daily pain had increased. The amount of time I could spend standing during the workday was decreasing. Increasingly, I would leave each day or event more worn out and more and with more tension that usual. Now, just being in my office, I can feel my muscles tighten. This all, in turn, triggered the familiar fear that my body is getting worse, that the inevitable slide into regression has started and that I can expect nothing but more pain. And of course, the familiar pang of othering and isolation that comes with being disabled. When my pain is at its worst is when I feel most disconnected from the people and world around me and something as simple as a friend’s social media pictures from their European vacation become a bitter reminder of all that I can’t do because of my disability – of the life I may never have.

And then, of course, this all trickled into my personal life. I stopped going out. With the extra hours and the extra impact on my body, I often find myself too tired or in too much pain to want to do things outside of work. And so I saw my friends less, which triggered the fear that I haven’t done enough to truly build a life here, that save for a select few, I am mostly alone.

And then the nail in the coffin came with the ending of my relationship, the full details of which I am not going to share. What I will say is that it was by far the healthiest relationship I have ever been in and has, if nothing else, affirmed that kind men do, in fact, exist, no matter how scarce they seem. And so with the end of that relationship comes about a billion triggers. Up come the insecurities of dating while disabled, the fear of falling back into the pattern of choosing abusive and/or unhealthy relationships, the questions of self-worth, the terror of wondering whether you’ve made a terrible mistake or not, and ultimately, the core belief that you are, indeed, unlovable, flawed beyond repair, unworthy of the connection you seek.

I’ll point out now that while all these thoughts and feelings have been triggered, and while I know that I am in the forest, I am at least in a place in life where I can put some logic on things. I can identify, for the most part, how I wound up here. I can logically understand, to an extent, that the thoughts and feelings that are keeping me here and making me feel like I’m lost are illogical and can be brought to reason. I logically know that I won’t be in the forest forever. I logically know that there is a way out and I have some semblance of what that way out looks like.

Unfortunately, the path out of the forest isn’t the path I want to take. It’s the one I feel incapable of taking. Logically, I know I’m not incapable, but emotionally, I’m not there yet. I always look for the quickest, most effective, and least burdensome way out. But in this case, the only true way out is through.

Sociologists and therapists call this “leaning in to the discomfort”. I recently asked my therapist if instead of leaning in, would it be alright if I maybe sort of just flopped down on top of the discomfort? Maybe kicked and screamed and cried a little? Seems to me like it would achieve the same goal. She laughed, but did not agree.

I know the way out of the forest is through hell. But that’s scary! Even though this is a loose metaphor, it’s still hell, ya know? For me, the hell I have to face is the system of core beliefs dealing with unworthiness that are rooted deeply in me. Everything always comes back to that. It’s a place I frankly don’t want to go. But it’s a place I know I have to go. I have some semblance of an idea of how to get there, but I’m not really sure what to do when I arrive. Which puts me in the grey space, in the midst of uncertainty, my arch-nemesis, as I confront emotions and beliefs that I have always been afraid will consume me.

I wish I had more insight as to how this is gonna go. I wish I could say that I felt confident that I’ll be out of the forest soon. I wish I could say I’ll never go back. But I don’t and I can’t. At this moment in time, I’m not okay, but that’s okay because I’ll be okay again eventually, ya know? It’s okay to not be okay for a bit. I’m moving, might be a crawl, but it’s something. Everything will turn out alright in the end, there’s just a lot of grey space between here and there and I have to learn to lean into these moments - to be okay with grey as I work towards the larger goal. I would rather not, but it seems to be the only viable option. Typical.

All that being said, send me your good vibes while I work my way out and maybe take some time to think about your version of the forest and what you need to stay on the path. It’s all a journey, my friends. Here’s hoping to many more days to come on the sunlit path.

Peace and love,

Adam