Memory is Not Prophecy.

Sometimes I linger in purgatory – trapped in my past and shadowed by depression.

It can last days, weeks, sometimes months.

There are days when it feels hard to get out of bed, hard to take care of myself, and hard to understand the life I’ve been dealt.

I don’t have a bad life, but it’s not the life I wanted for myself when I was younger.

I was promised I could do anything, be anything, achieve anything. I was (and am in many ways) a star student, a talented creative, an overachiever at heart, and a constant pursuer of “different”.

My husband once told me about when he first met my dad, we were at a climbing gym, and I had only been a couple of times, and I was trying a new route that was a little out of my experience level. He was giving me some pointers, but I ignored them and did something entirely different than he suggested, but it worked. My dad told him, “That’s Suzannah. She never does anything the way you think she’s going to.”

I don’t intentionally do things harder or illogically, but I follow a certain intuition. I’ve always followed that intuition in everything I do.

I’m weird. I’m a tiny, blonde girl with lots of tattoos and a love for video games. I also have a master’s degree, a love for roses and puppies, and a deep feeling that I am moments away from pure insanity. I’m reliable, dependable, and despairingly overly critical of myself. I am so many paradoxes that I even named my “brand” after it (lace and ember). I love high heels and lipstick almost as much as I love horror films and Star Trek. No one will ever be able to read me, but that’s my superpower in a lot of ways.

And right now, as I type this, I am depressed. I am climbing out of the depression, albeit slowly and begrudgingly, but I’m starting to see my way to the other side.

It’s a common saying that the person who is depressed lives in the past, and the person who is anxious lives in the future. I have spent a lot of time in the past. Just in the last couple of years, I was forced to quit a job where I made really good money, I had a stroke, my parents got divorced, and I was held hostage – I’m not even thirty yet.

No matter what happens to me, I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The bad thing that’s inevitably coming. That’s why I am depressed. I work hard, I do my best, and I try to be a good person, but I am always met with some outside negative force that relentlessly tries to keep me from happiness.

I guess I’m realizing that I have to create my own happiness. Nothing can do it for me. Overanalyzing why I’m depressed only furthers my depression. But memory is not prophecy, the past is not the present or the future, and again, I don’t have a bad life. I have loving friends, a weird family that I’ve mostly chosen but that’s family nonetheless, and I have myself. I do things differently, so why not get out of my depression a little differently by owning it, voicing it, giving it room to be present? I’ve always been quiet, refusing to share my thoughts and emotions. Afraid that I’ll be met with harsh judgement, anger, disapproval, and maybe even outcasted altogether. Who would hire me? Who would want to be friends with me? Who would love me?

Even though I have evidence of all of those things right in front of me, I just have a hard time grasping the fact that both can exist. That I can have had such hard moments and still have happiness ahead. So, from the heart of lace and ember’s meaning itself, I say let’s be a paradox. Let’s be honest, wholly ourselves, and let’s accept the love where it is and ignore the disapproval where it’s unwelcome. Today is hard, tomorrow might be harder, but I am not my negative memories of life, and I am moving further away from those memories every day.

-Suzannah