“done nothing with my life”

horizontal in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on my trusty borrowed steed. Photo by Julie Savage-Lee.

I have always been incredibly hard on myself. These days it most often takes the form of “I’m 35 years old and I’ve done nothing with my life.”

In years past, it was about feeling ugly, or not being “the best” at anything, or not being able to make a living in the career I trained for. (What does that even mean, anyway, the “best?!” Skills are always fluctuating, and particularly in the fields that I am a part of, “best” is entirely relative! Why do I still hear my mother’s voice in my mind, saying, “You’ll never be the best at anything, but you won’t be the worst, either.”??)

This past year, though, I finally did something that felt like doing something. Something that felt like living into my purpose of cultivating intimacy in all its forms. I started this podcast, and, even though it wasn’t “perfect” and I have plenty to learn about recording and mic technique and editing and sound design, for the first time in my life, I didn’t just abandon my project when it got hard. For the first time I actually believed that what I had to offer was so valuable that it wouldn’t matter if the sound wasn’t studio quality or I didn’t have a gold-standard radio mic. I felt, truly deeply, madly, that I had an obligation to release this work into the world, because it had the potential to inspire.

Things were going well! I got a great boost in the beginning, I reached 20,000 downloads in a few months, and people were saying lovely things. Telling me that because they were listening, they had conversations with their lovers that they never otherwise would have broached.

I got excited. I went on that solo cross-country road trip to record more episodes. See visual aid, above. I spent most of my savings on it, traveled for two months with full autonomy, catering entirely to my intuition, my curiosity, my whims, my delight, the kindness of strangers, and my penchant for beauty. I drove 15,000 miles. I listened to books and podcasts. I sang to myself. I worked things out. I chatted on the phone over the rumble of the road. I screamed. I cried. I wailed. I yelled. I was quiet with myself and loud with myself. It was an ambivert‘s dream: I spent hours with myself, recharging, and by the time I craved human company, I would arrive someplace and connect with other humans. Before I became too full with social contact, I got back into the car and breathed the deep breaths of chosen solitude.

I circumnavigated the United States for two whole months, by myself, and I felt so free and so happy.

But when I got back on December 1st, my fatigue caught up with me.

I’d been feeling fatigued for … years, I think. I had ruled out thyroid, anemia, sugar addiction, and environment. I figured that if two months of freedom on the road didn’t cure me, then I’d go seek some help for my mental health.

I didn’t manage to release episodes after the first couple of weeks on the road. It was too much to devote the time I require to edit an episode. All the hours of driving and figuring out where to stay and exploring and experiencing and recording. I decided to give myself over to that. I did feel less tired while I was on the road, but it was still there, like a downward tug on my body, like gravity was heavier than gravity for me.

It just got worse and worse when I got back to New York. I got so depressed that I didn’t produce any episodes at all for another two months — even though I had 14 new recordings in the can, and 4 from before I’d left! Eighteen recordings I was sitting on! It felt awful. I felt awful. It got to the point where I was binge watching TV nine hours a day and/or staring at the ceiling of my bedroom (where some mosquitos once died a horrible death and I have forever after forgotten to bring something up to the loft bed to clean them off so I wouldn’t be staring up at them wishing I had the energy to get up and wipe off the damn ceiling, but entirely unwilling to actually do it).

For a few weeks, I only managed to drag myself out of the house to teach my classes. I only managed to do what was required for basic survival. I did not write. I did not edit. I did not make art of any kind. I couldn’t even manage to lie down and do podcast work on my computer. I felt hazy and detached, like my thoughts were molasses. I wasn’t even horizontal with myself.

I was sleeping ten or eleven hours a night and waking up feeling as though I’d slept four, yet I didn’t want to sleep any less.

I had always chalked up my blues to an artistic temperament. I didn’t ever want to take medication, because that would mean that I was like my mother.

My mother is bipolar. I could tell that my swings weren’t as ferocious as hers, and I felt like my ups and downs were within the “normal” spectrum of the mental health curve. After all, I thought, I always managed to go to work. I could pay my bills all right. I dressed myself in the mornings (all right, in the afternoons. I wasn’t much of a morning person). So, I was all right, right? I was functional. And I didn’t want to flatten out my lows anyway, because I felt protective of my melancholy. There’s a part of me that enjoyed being sad. I was good at it. And I felt proud for not fearing sadness, and a bit of pity for those who do. I understood sadness in my body, it made sense to me and I knew it wouldn’t level me. And that was another thing: I felt sad! Depressed people, from what I knew of them given my singular data point (an MD once said to me “You’ve had one bipolar patient; I’ve had hundreds.”), depressed people didn’t feel much of anything. But I felt sad. So it was all right for a life.

Except this time I didn’t feel sad. In December and January, those slushy crushing months, I felt more fatigued, and further, I felt malaise. The phrase that kept repeating itself, reverberating in my head was, “I don’t want to go anywhere I don’t want to do anything.” One sentence, all strung together: I don’t want to go anywhere I don’t want to do anything.

So, for the first time in my life (“that’s what my mom does, not me“), I went to see a psychiatrist. For the first time in my life, I got medication for my depression. This psychiatrist had a reputation for being a great diagnostician. And you know what he said to me? He said, “The thread I see in everything you’ve talked about — your mother, your career, and your love life — is that you are incredibly hard on yourself.”

Dammit. I thought I’d worked on that. I thought I’d made so much progress. Is this thing gonna stick with me forever?

It’s now about seven weeks since I began taking a depression med known to be especially useful for treating anxiety, and I can’t believe it. I didn’t know that I could have this. It makes me regret all the years I was resolutely unwilling to seek pharmaceutical help. I really didn’t know that I was capable of feeling energized, because until the anti-depressant started to kick in, I literally couldn’t remember what it felt like to have an abundance of energy. No matter how much sleep I had, I woke up tired. No matter what I ate, or if I exercised, or if I was getting laid (or not), I felt exhausted.

During the first week I was taking it, it was as though I could feel the haze begin to part, mist-cloud-like. It was as though I’d had a filmy layer over my eyes, a kind of vaseline over the lens of my perception, keeping things from being in crisp focus. The feeling that the clouds were beginning to part is one of the most hopeful things I have experienced in my whole entire life.

Now that I have internal battery power, I’ve finally begun releasing the second season— I’m four episodes in as of Friday. It feels good. It feels more than good. It feels purposeful. I’m reminded of the quote, “Everyone needs someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.” I have something to do. The thing is, now I actually have the wherewithal to do it.

I really wanted to share this with you, because I am committed to rewiring my more anxious-type nervous system for joy. I am committed to celebrating my successes in all forms, “big” and “small,” these days. It is my way of training my body towards contentment by deliberately mixing gratitude and exuberance. It’s a means of expressing, “Yes thank you! More please.”

Screenshot from the day I hit 100 5-star reviews!

Last week, horizontal with lila surpassed 100 five-star reviews. On Saturday morning, it hit 30,000 downloads. I’ve gotten messages like this one, “There’s so much of you in each of these. Wasn’t expecting that. It’s one thing to interview people, it’s a whole other to be so vulnerable and authentic and raw and share your most intimate experiences and fears and desires. It’s bold and ballsy and bodacious lol,” and this one, “The podcast feels like a instrumental contributing piece in my own healing work that I’m doing. Whether the things I hear resonate strongly or bring up a wave of contraction, I’m so grateful for both, because it provides a powerful mirror. I don’t know that I’d be looking at some aspects of my own experience had the resonators and foils that the podcast provides not afforded me that opportunity.”

I am so fucking moved by these words.

Things are rolling again, I’m producing again, I’m writing again, people are writing me again, and I feel grateful to have the deep sense that I am making something important, even if only a few people are paying attention so far.

If you’d like to follow along as I unfold, sign up for stories / show notes / behind the scenes photos below, and the horizontal arts shall be delivered to your inbox.

Thanks for listening.

Big Love,

Lila

P.S. I just wrote this to my doctor: “I thought I wasn’t driven enough, that I was essentially lazy and didn’t have what it takes to cultivate financial/artistic/status success in this world. But as it turns out, I was just depressed. Fucking A, you mean I could have been productive all these years?!!” And he sent a laughing emoji back and and wrote, “The more you know…”

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