The Tide Is Coming In
My psychiatrist once asked me six words that rearranged how I think about self-care. Are you giving yourself any comfort?
Giving.
That was the word I latched onto. Comfort was always something I got from everyone and everything else. She was handing the responsibility back to me.
And I'll be honest with you about my answer right now. It's no.
My mom and my sister are worried about me. My therapist is worried about my capacity. Which, to be frank, is a frustrating thing to hear when I'm accomplishing as much as I am. I'm more creative than ever. My brain is firing on all cylinders. Am I sleeping well? No. But am I depressed? Also no. I'm lonely. Deeply. But I'm okay. Both things are true. All of it can coexist in the same messy house. And a messy house is not a crisis.
I also understand that the twenty years I've struggled with my mental health have had a profound effect on my family, too. So they've earned the right to worry when my sleep starts to slip. Or when anything starts to slip, really. I try not to be too hard on them for that. But even when the concern comes from love, it stings to wonder if I'm still seen as the girl at the bottom. The girl who had to claw her way back so many times.
My greatest hope is that I'll be known for my resilience, not my rock bottoms.
So yes, without anyone having to tell me: I, Abigail Reder, am currently not taking care of myself. I'll say it loudly, and very publicly, for everyone to hear.
Which begs the question: Then why in the hell is she writing a book about this?
That's precisely the point.
There's a line I've carried with me for years. Anthony Bourdain wrote it about pilgrimage. His words were this:
"The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca."
I first held onto that line when he lost his life, and it became the catalyst for the most vulnerable essay I had ever written. You don't take the A train to your own wellness, either. There's no express route. No straight line. There is no mental health Mecca. No pomp. No circumstance. No arrival point where I've figured it all out and never have to walk any part of that path again. One of the most pivotal moments in my own healing was accepting exactly that.
I didn't come to that acceptance gracefully. The road there was paved with enough self-sabotage to prove the point. My stubbornness in its grandest form. But once I accepted it, taking ownership of my own mental health didn't scare me. The knowing shrank the fear. It even shrank the disappointment when I fell to the bottom of the pit again. Acceptance meant knowing the exhausting list of things it takes to keep me well is mine to do.
I will be using these tools for the rest of my life.
Because pain will come. That's not pessimism, that's the weather.
And we must be prepared for it when it does. We have to build an arsenal before we need it. But when the pain subsides, joy follows. It always does.
I've written before that joy follows pain the way the tide follows the moon. Healing moves like the tide. Stand at the water's edge and all you can see is the wave: it rushes in, it falls back. Rushes in, falls back. From where you're standing, it looks like losing ground half the time. But walk away and come back an hour later, and the water is higher than where you once stood. That's the tide. For me, that's twenty years. Four steps forward, three back. Then five forward, two. Then six forward, one.
The more we do this work, the closer we get to a more whole and healed version of ourselves. Life will still knock us down, that part never stops, but the more healed we are when it finds us, the shorter the fall, and the softer the landing.
There's a line in my book that devastates me every time I read it, and I'm the one who wrote it. It's about the woman standing at the beginning of the path once more, devastated to find herself there again. That was always me. Every time I ended up back at the start, the devastation of being there again was its own kind of pain. But here's what I know now. You don't have to walk the whole path today. You don't even have to see the end of it.
You just have to be willing to stand at the beginning of it, look down all that immensity, and lift one foot.
So my mom and my sister and my therapist are worried about me. And they're not wrong to be. The wave is out right now. I know it, they know it, and now you know it too. But I've stood on this beach for twenty years, and I know something else: the tide comes back in. It always does.
Joy follows. It always has.
And on July 31st, I get to hand you the proof.
✦ ✦ ✦
