The Healing Hack Hoax

I’ve officially co-oped an existence as Depression Barbie this summer. Instagram hate scrolling sold separately.

We are so often told to take care of ourselves. Take care! It’s something we say without thought. I’m guilty of this myself. Drink water, go for walks, exercise. Well, I call bullshit. That’s maintenance. That’s not healing.

Real healing is torture no amount of cucumber water and a daily meditation is going to fix.

Instead, healing is only accomplished in the abyss of vulnerability, because it forces you to go to the black holes where we keep the things we are often ashamed of, the things we dare not say out loud. There is the surface vulnerability of sharing the intimate details of my digestive system, or crying in multiple doctors offices because I was so overwhelmed by what was happening to my body that I wished so badly to discard it and put on a new one. A body that didn’t want to get out of bed for days straight, a woman in the mirror who scared me.

This didn’t happen overnight either.

Over this past summer my body hit its breaking point. It was screaming for help, and it physically manifested in rashes, numbness on one side of my body, tingling, blurry vision. I was so convinced that I had a physical ailment that I ended up in a neurologist’s office who took pity on me. Between ER visits, family doctors and specialists, I ended up meeting with 8 doctors who all said the same thing. Everything looks normal. Everything in my body was mechanically doing what it was supposed to.

It wasn’t until I was venting my frustration to my husband one night that he said I was severely underestimating what burnout, depression and anxiety does to the body. In retrospect, I realised that I had spent the last seven years in survival mode. I am convinced that my body has been internally combusting since 2016. Between two hard pregnancies, a bout of postpartum depression, giving birth during a pandemic, being home with two small children during the pandemic, then teaching during the pandemic and moving twice, it gave out. I asked too much of it.

It all started at the end of the last school year where I kept getting hit with infection after infection, almost like open sores that wouldn’t heal. I was already burning out from work. The fact that my values as a human being and an educator were in direct contradiction to the expectations required of me at school became unbearable. Kids were less willing to be responsible, parents were becoming hostile, and suddenly I was no longer a teacher, I was a babysitter.

Then came July. The metaphorical final straw.

In the month of July a group of students harassed me at my home and vandalised it. They came to my home with masks on in the middle of the night, taunted me from the end of my driveway, rang my doorbell and eventually egged and toilet papered my house. This happened on two different occasions. The day that my home was vandalised I had spent a cumulative 13 hours in the ER.

When I woke up that morning I heard my husband dragging a ladder outside. When I called him from bed to ask what he was doing he hesitated. I knew in his voice he was debating telling me the truth, eventually he simply muttered “the house was egged last night.” When I went back to look at my camera, I saw that it was the same group of students. I dragged myself out of bed and stood in the middle of my driveway and looked at the staining on the bedroom window where my five year old son slept.

My stomach collapsed in on itself as I stared at my feet with scattered eggshells strewn around them. I let out an internal scream that sounded like a dying animal in my head. They violated my family, and the sacred safety that my children are supposed to have in their own home. The small mercy that day was that my sons had slept at my parent’s house since I had been at the hospital. I shuddered to think of the terror my son may have felt waking up to the sounds of eggs smashing against his bedroom window.

I immediately retreated to bed, where I called the police.

Later that day the left side of my body went numb. My legs tingled constantly, and then I lost sensation in part of my face. My husband couldn’t take me to the ER because we were still waiting for the police to come to file a report. I frantically called a friend who took me.

When I was getting a CT scan to rule out a stroke, I remember staring at the picture of the cherry blossoms they had put on the ceiling, and I started writing my own eulogy. I picked out the flowers I wanted and donations would go to the AIDS foundation in honour of an uncle I had never met. “Bye, Bye, Bye” by N’Sync would be an appropriate recessional. I wasn’t suicidal, I was just convinced that my body had decided it was done. I was so physically distraught that I didn’t see how much mental turmoil I was in. Sure I was stressed, but I didn’t realise at that moment that my nervous system was throwing out its Hail Mary.

Eventually I met with a psychiatrist, and social workers who diagnosed me with PTSD, anxiety and depression two months later when I just was not getting better. I struggled with the PTSD diagnosis, because I thought it was extreme. PTSD is for soldiers, refugees, assault victims. It was only when my therapist said what had happened back to me that I had an epiphany. Masked boys came to my house in the middle of the night with the sole intention to terrorise me. That was traumatic. The bigger revelation was not just the PTSD, but the realisation of the cognitive dissonance that so many teachers are forced to adopt to survive this profession. I thought a bunch of kids throwing eggs at my house was not that big of a deal at face value, because I had been conditioned to always excuse students' bad behaviour. We are always told to think about mitigating factors as to why a child behaves that way. The problem is not in the existence of the mitigating factors to explain the behaviour, the problem is in allowing those factors to excuse the behaviour.

The worst part of mental health is how suffocating it is. You make it through another day, but then the night comes with its overbearing stillness, where you want nothing more than the sweet release of sleep, but your mind denies you that.

There is a crushing loneliness to mental health. It’s in my own person, only I can beat this, and yet I am acutely aware of the fact that I am not doing this alone. My life would have already collapsed if I was doing this alone. I am incapacitated as a mother, my children are being cared for by my husband, teachers and their grandparents. We have had family and friends send food and gift cards (and that is truly what helps in dire situations like what my family is in). I am simultaneously doing this alone and with the support of people who love me.

I am getting help, but am struggling severely with finding medication that I can tolerate. I am in therapy to deal with my PTSD, physiotherapy to undo and rebuild the damage that has been done to my body from carrying things that were so heavy for so long. It is a hell of a lot of hard work on my part. It’s being forced to sit with the most tedious parts of our own fragility. Sitting with the shame of not being able to parent, the fear that I will eternally be trapped in this black hole. This is a fate I wish on no one. You sit with your fragility because healing from mental health is notoriously slow. There are no hacks, no secret algorithms. It is trial and error, it is panic and exhaustion and hopelessness.

It is sitting in a dark cave with everything you loathe about yourself.

But know you are worthy of feeling the sun again.