Undercurrent of Sadness

My therapist asked me, “Well, are you depressed?” and I responded as truthfully as I could in the moment. A truth that has carried me from moment to moment for 34 years despite my best attempts to deny, fix, and ignore it.

“I think I am always depressed. I watched my daddy die… I think I’ll always have an undercurrent of sadness.”

I’d never said that out loud to someone, let alone meant it, accepted it, and resigned myself to it. I have always been uncomfortable with my depression.

Uncomfortable with the roots of my trauma. Uncomfortable with what I know is not my fault but can’t help but to take ownership of. I think I’ve always known that I am a perpetually sad person. I have been disassociating, suppressing, and healing my shadows my entire life. I have always known my shadows and my trauma. I’ve always understood it logically. My brand of ADHD hoards information and has to know the answers to all of the questions. Sometimes my sadness feels limitless, but so is my ability to absorb information—equal in our inability to stop. I have not known how to stop my sadness, just like I have not known how to stop searching for the answers. Throw c-PTSD into the mix and we are never stopping, always moving, always thinking, always feeling and knowing too much, and disassociating, and stepping into my least favorite mode of PTSD—flight. Only allowing them to the surface when safe to do so.

Growing up is realizing how I have not been safe enough to access parts of my healing. I get distracted. I have always understood the intimacy of life’s spectrums… of life and death. I grew from child to something else in the shadows of my father’s spirit transitioning before my eyes. I took on the last shadow of my father’s life and wove it into the wings of my own, unbeknownst to me. As he transitioned, with Barney playing in the background, my spirit grabbed a bit of his strength so I could take care of his wife—my mama. So I could be strong because I saw her spirit breaking a year ago in the elevator of the doctor’s after we all got intimately introduced to Daddy’s cancer. I saw her depression forming when I was 10 when he was diagnosed. I saw it take hold when I had to wake her up to the news that was delayed for her and felt like centuries for 11-year-old me. Daddy was gone. I was molded in the warm embrace of my parents’ love. They adopted me. They saved me from another life. Another version of me on another timeline. I like to think I was molded in their love. But when my daddy died, I saw my mama morph into the strongest woman I’ve ever known. That strength cost her a lot, she was depressed. I have known sadness, anxiety, and depression for a long time. I saw my mama fight through it over and over again. I saw what it did to her body. I’ve never needed Your Body Keeps The Score. I have seen when your body loses and the score does really matter then.

I’m saying all this to say—I have always known the root of my undercurrent of sadness. I’ve always had the ability to see it in others. I see it. I see people. I see them because life forced my hand and I had to see all the parts of myself at an early age. My software got upgraded beyond what my young mind could handle, and it made adjustments it thought appropriate.

I am still unlearning and decommissioning parts of myself that won’t serve me in this next phase. I am still, always, and forever more becoming something more than the undercurrent that has rocked my world for 34 years. I am, in this new phase, trying to holistically and “wholistically” heal the parts of myself that have been submerged in the undercurrent of my chaotic and beautiful existence. I am becoming something more than the depression I’ve carried in its many seasons for 23 years. I am more than my anxiety, OCD, ADHD—and the most recent two my psychiatrist added to the party—PMDD and c-PTSD. I am more than my abandonment issues. I am more than what the scale says. I look better than the mirror reflects. I am more than the moments when my thoughts obsess. I am more than my brain chemistry. I am more and becoming more every day.

I am just Eboneé and that’s enough. I am enough.

– Just Eboneé