Memories, tattoos, and allowing myself morning

(TW: suicide ideation, depression, anxiety)

Ten years ago this June, I got so depressed that I had to move back to Los Angeles.

I had been hospitalized at a psychiatric ward for a week, walking off my still-new job in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I wandered the halls of the hospital, sure that I did not belong there. I remember the cold floor in the bathroom, the woman who kept conjugating the Latin word for the verb “to love” loudly, over and over again, the doctor telling me I was on suicide watch. I remember every single person who came to visit me: my mother, my aunt Susan, my frat brother James, my soror Vanessa.

I would call my mom, my thoughts and words jumbled. I would randomly think of another person she had to call or email. By now, my internet friends I knew through Twitter were wondering where I was. I had to tell them that I was okay and alive, and I asked my mother to call them. She also called my line sister Stephanie.

It was true. I had thought of killing myself not even a week before I was admitted into Seaton House (or as I like to call it, The Worst Place In The World). The thought crossed my mind the way that the idea of going to a new restaurant would. I was sitting on the couch in my SW Washington, DC apartment, feeling numb, zoning out even as music videos played on my television. I knew there was a set of knives on my kitchen counter. The thought entered my mind. You could use one of the big chef’s knives. It would be quick. No one would know for days.

The second time was, naturally, the day of my second anxiety attack, when I had been coaxed to head to my therapy appointment that morning. I was at Metro Center waiting for the redline train. I visualized throwing myself onto tracks. You wouldn’t be missing much. Your life is in shambles.

I arrived in LA not even 48 hours after being released from Seaton Hall, my hair just a little bit longer than it is now because I made the quick decision to cut off my long dreadlocks before getting on the plane the next day. The first sound I heard was the windchimes hanging from the small entryway outside my mother’s duplex apartment. The only clothes I had were in two large suitcases. I spent weeks looking for random items that I left behind: earrings, my gold-plated name necklace from senior year of high school, my Pucci silk scarf my auntie bought me on a business trip to London. All of them were gone, but I did manage to find my official sorority pin, which my mother kept close to her so that it wouldn’t be lost like everything else. I often would talk to myself while doing my grooming routine in the morning, not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because I was willing myself to believe I was Getting Back To Normal.

I’m nearly ten years removed from the week I learned that what I was going through had a name, and it was depression. Ten years sober as my therapist would put it, who also told me last week that she believes I am currently at my most emotionally healthy. For the first time, I fully believe that to be true.

I’ve been thinking that I will get a tattoo to commemorate the milestone anniversary. I wanted something that I see as a symbol of my hometown. Los Angeles was the one place I could go back to and heal. It was where I got back to myself, where I rested, where I chose a new career, where I allowed my mother and sister to love me. I learned how to enjoy my own company, how to make a good turkey burger, and I rediscovered my personal style. I needed an amulet, a reminder.

I decided that the reminder I needed was the Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which roughly translates to “return and get it.”

An actual Sankofa amulet given to me by a dear friend a few months ago.

Sankofa. The symboI I would see on almost every screen door and every iron gate in South Central LA where I grew up and where I lived after being hospitalized. I think we even had one on our screen door.

I returned to LA and got an understanding on how to take the best care of myself. I returned to LA and got a better sense of direction for my life and career. I returned to LA and healed from sexual trauma, work trauma, and at least one bad relationship.

I returned and got it.

Come June, I’m getting a tattoo of Sankofa on my left arm, closest to my heart, on the underside of my forearm. I think it belongs there.

I just finished reading I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying by writer and one of my Twitter faves Bassey Ikpi. I am someone who has read a LOT of memoirs and essays written by Black women, a few written by other folks, and of all the memoirs I have read, I related to Bassey’s the most. In this collection of essays, she tells her story of living with Bipolar II Disorder. No one else has put into words what it is like to be hospitalized, and what it is like to know that the way you had been feeling, acting, experiencing the world had a name the way Bassey does in this book. I cried all the way through “We Don’t Wear Blues,” which reads like a journal of her week in the hospital, feeling less alone than ever.

But one thing stuck out to me the most, and that was her recommendation that we “allow [ourselves] morning.”

“Today may have been a rolling ball anxiety and trembling, a face wet and slick with tears, but if you can get to morning, if you can allow yourself a new day to encourage a change, then you can get through it. Allow yourself morning.”

I was in Los Angeles for two years total.* Those days were hard, they were sometimes monotonous, and I spent some of them angry at myself for hitting rock bottom. But each day, I woke back up and gave it another try.

There are still days where I cry, still days where the anxiety monster tries to eat me whole. I allow myself morning every time, knowing that maybe tomorrow I’ll win.

I’m thankful that I’ve allowed myself enough mornings to see myself ten years sober.

*(I came back to DC for about three months to chase a relationship—that was a terrible mistake that I will write about one day.)