If You Try Sometimes

Someone told me yesterday that being with me was like being with a very complete person. It was a lovely (if somewhat odd) thing to say so perhaps it’s fitting that I found it oddly touching (and wholly endearing).

During my most recent bout of depression I’ve experienced some pretty strange feelings of being separate from the rest of the world. I’ve felt oddly “not real” at times. I’ve struggled to do what I know helps me feel better—to be present in my daily life and to truly engage with the people in it, to touch people as a check-in to make sure I am, in fact, real. That I am truly complete. That I’m here. (Of course I don’t actually touch people all that often because that would just be weird.) But try as I might to stay “in the now,” my mind, rather cruelly, has continued to wander to another time and another depressive episode when someone I loved told me that the person he had fallen in love with, the me he had fallen in love with, no longer existed. That statement has been echoing in my head like a malevolent refrain with the volume turned up to eleven: You don’t exist. You’re not real. You’re not complete.

I've sought help for my depression and I know I’m on the right path. That in itself makes me feel better, but it takes time and I’ve been finding it difficult to be patient.

And then yesterday, out of nowhere, I found some renewed patience in an observation from a kind heart. A somewhat off-hand remark from a person who had no idea what it would mean to me. At least to that person, I seem complete. It was an affirmation that I’m real. That I’m still here.

Almost everyone over the age of five knows you can’t always get what you want. But at 45, it seems I’m just learning that if you try sometimes, you get what you need.