We contain multitudes

Some recent thoughts on suicide, hummingbirds, and contingency plans

Do you ever have so many words inside you, you feel like choking? You need to get some of them out STAT, but they are stuck, like 2 people trying to get through a doorway in a cartoon, both running in place and trying to elbow the other person out of the way, but neither going anywhere.

I have so much I want to tell you. About how terrifying it is when someone with depression and substance abuse issues takes their life, because if they lost the battle, maybe you will, too? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it - how suicide is hovering in the distance, far away, but there. Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Heather Armstrong - I carry their names and memory with me, like a veteran who can’t forget the names of their comrades who didn’t come home. There are more names, close to home, names that won’t mean anything to you, but meant the world to their families and friends. I collect them, hug them close, beads on a necklace resting close to my heart.

I don’t want to scare you though. Whenever I talk about my depression I always make sure to add the disclaimer that “I’ve never been suicidal!”, because I don’t want people to worry. And it’s true - I haven’t been. But can I rule it out? Can anyone? We can’t predict how we’ll react when truly bad things happen. Everybody has a breaking point. And who am I to proclaim I’m stronger than my fellow mental illness comrades?

I come up with defenses against the threat, devising strategies and contingency plans.
The dogs, I write on my list (yes, there’s a list). I could never leave the dogs. Writing, I continue. Catastrophes make great writing material. Walking as fast as I can, because: endorphins. Your best days haven’t happened yet - a corny statement that I find oddly comforting. My husband isn’t on the list, because the list exists for a world when he won’t be in it anymore. As long as I have him, we are good.

I want to tell you how two guys were talking earnestly about investments, stocks and bonds, ETFs, S&P 500s the other night, urging me that I should invest now, it’s a good time, I could triple my investment, think about your future! Do you have RRSPs? Do you have a tax-free savings account? You have to think ahead! They were showing me graphs that rise (they skimmed over the dips), predictions of where they could be in 30 years, and barely mentioned that they lost money last year, quite a bit, but it goes up overall, and in 10 or 20 years it will be worth it!

Talk like that makes me anxious and bored in equal measures, as do predictions that we won’t have a pension if things keep going the way they are going, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, our politicians are idiots, AI will replace us all.

I could tell you that it’s already been 37 degrees and it’s only May, that the sky is covered in smoke from the Alberta wildfires, the sun a bloodred disc in the sky, ominous and scary.

But I won’t tell you any of these things. Instead I’m gonna tell you that I bought a 10kg bag of sugar exclusively to feed the hummingbirds (and maybe bake a cake). We have dozens of hummingbirds this year, and nothing gives me greater joy than watching them come by the dozen, gather at the feeders at happy hour, greedily gobbling up the nectar I prepare fresh every day and store in the fridge in the big jug that I usually use for lemonade.

I want to tell you that Teddy, our big beautiful mama, has started to produce milk since the puppy joined us. She isn’t pregnant or has puppies, and he’s not nursing anymore, but sometimes that happens, and I’m in awe of it. Isn’t nature spectacular?

The lilac is in full bloom, and yesterday my husband brought a bunch into the house. I’m currently writing next to it, the smell wrapping me into its purple arms like a hug, making me grateful to be alive.

And I want to tell you about my latest passion, poetry! How I wake up filled with ideas, excited to write them down, thrilled to have found this new way of expressing myself. I’ve written 12 poems. I’ll write another one later today. I’m filled to the brim with creativity, words spilling out of me with lavish abandon, my notes app filled with ideas, random sentences, a new thought that I have to write down right this minute! or it will be gone forever. There is an urgency to it, an almost feverish desire to capture the elusiveness of a moment, to glean the wisdom from it.

And I read poetry now, too! I never understood it, found it weird and boring, but now I get it. I get the appeal, how nothing can capture an emotion quite like a poem, where you fill in the blanks with your own experiences, your own pain, your own longing.

I joined a writing community (hi Sustenance peeps!), and I feel so seen. It’s incredible, this feeling of finding your people. What a gift.

There are so many more things I want to tell you (the words are boundless!), but I’ll stop now. The dogs need walking, the hummingbirds feeding, another poem wants to be written.

I’ll leave you with this little nugget of wisdom that I remind myself of daily:
we can live the life of our dreams and be depressed. We can fulfill a dream and feel sad or disappointed. We can love someone and want to murder them some days. We can reach a goal and feel let down, thinking “what now?”
We can have more than one emotion at a time, because we contain multitudes.

My book Everything is Broken and Completely Fine is available here and as audiobook!