Love, incarnate

I am not my thoughts, I am not my fears

Fallen Dogwood petals. 4.22.23

They are not their disease. They are not their addiction. They are not their mental illness.

Every support group I’ve been to, from AlAnon to Survivors of Suicide, as well as every mental health institution I’ve worked for has emphasized this fact. Use person-first language; they aren’t a depressed person, they’re a person coping with depression.

I realize I’m not very good at this. When I write about my mom, Bennett, or my brother, Quentin, it’s hard to stick my fingers in the web of pain, mental illness, and circumstance to disentangle who they really were. I have to remind myself: Bennett Bridgers was not Depression, embodied. Quentin Moss was not Delusion, incarnate.

The reason I struggle to find perspective and remember the joyous, loving, laughable bits is that I don’t give myself that grace. When I’m in pain, I think this is who I am.

My past month or so has been harder than I’ve let on. Only the people closest to me have seen the exhaustion, the fumbling tears sprouting from a place I can’t explain. I’ve felt a lot of confusion, uncertainty, doubt, and fear.

“Normally when something’s wrong,” a friend told me when I called her the second night in a row, crying. “You tell me what your feeling and why you’re feeling that way, then what you’re going to do about it.”

It’s uncommon for me to have ambiguous pain, without apparent action to take. It makes the experience even worse.

When I’m like this, I’m ruled by my thoughts. I know it will end, logically. But I project into the future—will I be as depressed as my mother? We are cut from the same cloth, the same mitochondrial DNA of anxiety and depression and deep perception of beauty. Am I also Depression, embodied? Delusion, incarnate?

Meditation helps you distance yourself from your thoughts. To notice how foolish or pretty or mundane they are with a degree of separation.

I was listening to a Jack Kornfield lecture and he emphasized the point that we are not our thoughts. I am not this painful ick of criticism, distrust, dejection, and exhausted sense of hopelessness that’s spanned the last few weeks. I am not my thoughts or sensations of brokenness.

Sometimes it takes people who knew my mom before she was ill to remind me there was more to her. There was a before. Before the first divorce, before the toxic new husband came to the proverbial rescue. Before the heartbreak and the never-parting poverty.

See, there I go again, her life as a short series of cataclysms. But she was so much more than that. She was joyful and beautiful, with a natural depth of wisdom people work hard to replicate. She meant the world to so many; as the greatest mother, the dearest friend, and a powerful therapist.

I got lunch with her sister, my aunt, yesterday. She reminded me of the greater perspective of my mom, to not remember my mother as only Depression.

In life, my mother was not her thoughts and feelings of despair. Just as I am not these thoughts of helplessness or pity. When I identify myself with my thoughts and she with hers, I feel damned. Like a dark curse is sitting on my feet, smirking.

With two people in my nuclear family having died by suicide, you’d have to be naive not to ask me about what’s in my own head. After telling my aunt all that was going on for me in the last few weeks, she asked me if I was dealing with ideation. I said no. And that’s true.

Occasionally, when I am immersed in black thoughts of confusion and pain, I sighingly wonder, “Oh is this what they were feeling? Maybe I’m not so different, not so far off.”

Whenever I have a thought limping towards suicide as a far-off option in my life, it’s like a bully with arms thick as my thigh slams a fist down on top of my brain.

In the wake of Quentin’s suicide, I was numbly walking my college campus, headed toward the library when the thought intruded: “Maybe I should kill myself, too.”

The bully slammed me in my chest. I stopped in my tracks and shook my head to clear it out. “What the fuck was that?” the bully always presses. “I’m having none of that.”

The bully only intervenes when I’m identifying myself with my painful thoughts. It gives me a gut punch and tells me to not be ridiculous, for God’s sake. To look at the beauty around me and remember why I’m here. It jolts me out of thinking that my pained thoughts are immutable and inescapable pieces of myself.

I am so much more than those thoughts, those feelings of suffering. Just as my mother and brother were more than their diseases.

Jack Kornfield then went on to a guided meditation. He invited listeners to envision themselves in the memory of doing something incredibly kind. One of the kindest things you’ve ever done. In that act of kindness, what sensations arise, and what thoughts come? How do the corners of your mouth feel? What do you think about yourself? How do you feel about yourself

I thought of my friend Lucy. I’d made her a small embroidered pillow saying, “I love Lucy” and stitched in dozens of her friends’ initials for her, crammed in between stitched vines and leaves and flowers. I wrote her a letter and gave her my mom’s St. Christopher to keep her safe in Cameroon. I adore her so wholly, I’d have given her anything, and I gave her what I could: Wishes of love and safety.

She texted me when she opened the box and said, “Vanessa I have never met anyone that loves like you.”

Sometimes it takes people who know me to remind me there is more to me than pain. That’s what I am, then. Love, incarnate. And if my cynical brain still isn’t convinced, I logically have to give space for this new sensation. I must be love, at least as much as I am despair or delusion.

Quentin was love, too. My mother was love. It’s what we all are when we see down past the turmoil and doubt and ever-yammering wild-man of self-criticism. Love, incarnate.