I took a walk for lunch today and stopped to sit on a park bench. As I sat looking around at the lush greenery, listening to the birdsong and watching them flit about and grab their lunch, I had this moment of wonder that this could be me sitting here.

I felt the formation of tears, but they got no further than forming-this wasn’t a cry moment, not even a happy tears moment. I just wanted to be in the appreciation.  This was not something I would have seen five to seven years ago as something I would do that could have this effect on me.

And this is not a time when I feel total peace in my life; I am actually having some discordant thoughts. But I am still able to appreciate this moment as its own and not let the beauty of it be unnoticed and unappreciated; I am able to feel gratitude for the privilege of being able to sit on a park bench, in the middle of a work day, and watch the birds, even if it’s for 10 minutes.

I start with this story as the -in- to my story.

In 2015 I was severely depressed, had been for years, but it took some time before I could recognize my mood as such. At first I thought it was just extreme sadness, a state it felt like I had been in most of my life; so I thought this was just more of the same. But as the sadness became an increasing lack of interest, lack of desires, and not wanting to be around other people, I started to see it differently.

The word depression was more frequently being used in the mainstream zeitgeist; you could see multiple commercials featuring medications for depression during a thirty-minute program. I can’t pin point the moment when the awareness came that these were some of the things I was feeling, because this was just my life; it was supposed to be sad. I don’t know if I even had an idea of what I thought depression was before that. I think I probably would have just thought of it as sadness, and it had such a clinical term because it applied to white people; that’s the only image I can recall seeing in the commercials. This was not something to apply to black people; I had very limited, naive, and uninformed understanding at this time.

I injured my back in 2011; actually, I believe it was the progression of an injury I sustained at work 3 years prior. But now it manifested in a very acute and debilitating incident that left me barley able to walk and unable to work. This may have been around April of that year; April seems to be a catalyst month for me. At any rate, I found myself incapacitated and unable to function for months prior to the surgery. I don’t know how much detail is necessary for this story, I’m sure there are parts that might inform, but may not be needed. I guess the biggest part- I’m connecting this as I write this now- is that it left me alone; without the normal distractions of daily life, and regular human interaction work provided. And maybe that, faced with how small and isolated my life truly was; the depression that may have been a small shadow, now spread to fill my whole being.

I had surgery in June of that year. I was 34: overweight, lonely, disconnected, unconscious, and can’t remember finding anything in my life that was pleasant or worth wanting. I’d had those months of being alone, and feeling the lack of personal connections, so now all the negative thoughts were amplified, more vicious and personal, much more constant; and now they seemed to have proof that they were true.

From here, slipping into even more thoughtless behaviors, and what my limbic brain saw as protection and self-preservation, was a natural reaction.

My daily routine consisted of: waking, going to work, coming home to be alone, and eating while sitting on the couch watching television. This was my every day. There was nothing that would happen to differentiate a Monday from a Wednesday from a Thursday. And the weekends were even more of a black hole. At least during the week, I would have the work day interactions; the weekends left me alone for 48 hours. No interaction, no conversation, no human contact. Being in this state does not leave you in a place where you can reach out and try to find support. Mostly because you can’t even see the waters in which you’re drowning.

That’s the thing with depression and other mood disorders. They don’t usually happen acutely: they’re subtle, gradually building over time. A pervasive and aggressively invading mental state that becomes the orchestrator of your decisions, which makes it the conductor for your life.

I moved from just sad and depressed to suicidal ideation, though I didn’t know that’s what I was experiencing at the time. I just know thoughts of not feeling like I needed or wanted to be here began to form. Then came the ‘what if’ thoughts. What if I just drove my car into one of the giant concrete columns while I was driving. I would have thoughts of what it would be like to fill the tub with water and bleed out. How long before I would be missed, and who would find me? Thinking of taking pills and not waking up. I wasn’t living a life; I was trapped in existence. It’s not that I felt like I wanted to kill myself, it was a lack of caring if I lived. So, I would fixate over possibilities of death. The only pleasure I could experience was through food, and food became the star of the show.

I marvel that I didn’t have diabetes, or other weight related health issues. I would bake a sheet pan cake and eat it in 2-3 days. Cook 10 plus pancakes at a time, smothered in butter and syrup. I ate every sugary item I could find, and invented some of my own. I would be standing over the cake crying, begging myself not to eat like this, but the need to numb with food was always stronger.

I didn’t understand that I could be an emotional eater. I thought I just liked to eat; it was something I had no control over. That I just didn’t have the willpower needed to resist. And I had been obese always, I didn’t know how not to eat this way. I had lost weight before, but I had never been below 300 pounds, and it never lasted. I couldn’t see how I could change something that felt like me, not just a behavior, but who I was.

There is more to what shaped my story than just weight and food, but these were the most obvious, and what I thought at the time, were the only things that were affecting the way I experienced life.

Then D-day came, decision day. It was like any other. I was on the couch, eating, and had what had become a frequent occurrence; I was having heart palpitations. I didn’t feel my heart beat stop, but there was an intense pounding when it would restart. It happened frequently enough that I knew if I felt for my pulse long enough, I would be able to see if I could actually feel it; and I did. I felt my pulse stop, a full stop, and I could feel it in my chest and pulse, the intense feeling when it returned. In that moment I had the most important conversation of my life; with myself. Is this what I wanted the rest of my life to be? Are you willing to kill yourself for the momentary satisfaction you get while eating?