The day I almost ended things, and the four words that saved me.

Today I’m writing about my husband. Jason and I have been together eight and a half years now. It’s hard to distill all of the love and gratitude I have for him into words, but I’m going to try.

A year ago, I’d hit a dark, dark spot. My depression had once again surged up, unbidden, from the depths of my unresolved childhood trauma, and this time, I was too tired to fight. I’d begun to daydream about suicide. This has happened in the past as well, and it’s usually a sign that I need to take my troubles to my therapist. However, last July, I was feeling like I’d done all that before and this time it seemed pointless.

That’s the thing. Everything seemed pointless. We can fight and fight and fight to hang on to the breath in our lungs, but in the end, we all die. Everything we love or care for gets buried, washed away, unwritten.

And I thought, wouldn’t it be better to just… stop?

Used to, there was an overwhelming voice that would rise up in me to shout, “But we don’t give up,” and this time, another voice, quiet, insistent, constant, would whisper back, “Why not?”

Last July, that voice was winning. And I began to think maybe she was onto something. Why not give up? If it all ends anyway, why should I care if the Texas State bus should flatten me in the crosswalk? I started to take note of the bus schedules. I started to time my morning runs with them. Then one morning, while on auto-pilot, I almost let myself step off the curb.

Thankfully, I saw the face of the girl driving the bus a second before my heel left the sidewalk. I understood that if she hit me, it would scar her for life.

I also understood that when I tell people I’m doing so much better now… it’s a lie.

So I went to Jason and told him I needed help. No questions asked, he emailed me a list of therapists (my previous therapist had retired) so I began the tedious search for a new one.

I found one available via Zoom. That first experience was awful. I said in my intake forms that I was feeling suicidal. This woman (Greta, in Houston) said she was having difficulty connecting her camera. Though she couldn’t see me, I could see her just fine, and witnessed — for the cost of $100 an hour —- as she picked her nose and read diagnostic questions from a textbook.

Took me a good minute to try again. By then, I was worse. It was hard to even drag myself out of bed. I knew I was disappointing everyone, including my husband, who had never experienced a partner with depression before.

Yet he was there, unwaveringly, through the whole thing.

I found a new therapist, and on the evening before my appointment, Jason took me to dinner at our favorite Italian place. While we sat there together in a lovely corner table, both of us dressed nice, I told him what had been happening for the last… honestly, I had lost track of the duration. It might have been months. Definitely weeks.

Then I asked him, “What if I never get better than this? What if this is the best I can give? What if I never fully overcome this stupid, heavy, horrible, sticky bitch of this depression?”

He said, “Well… then that’s okay.”

Seriously, those four words did more for me than forty-four years of therapy.

It meant that I could rely on him to be there. He wouldn’t yell at me. He wouldn’t judge me. He wouldn’t give up on me. He wouldn’t ask me why I couldn’t just be happy. He would just be there.

I did see another therapist. I did go to my doctor and get on an antidepressant, which made things SOOOO much worse because then I didn’t feel anything.

But after a couple of months, the depression subsided again. Like it does. I’m no longer fool enough to believe that it won’t come back. I used to always think, “Yay, I’m healed, I’m over it now, she didn’t beat me.”

The truth is, the things that happened to me in my childhood did break me. They did. I have to accept that the person I could have been will never be. I have to mourn her loss and be settled with the duct-taped, super-glued, painted-over, modge-podged thing I am instead.

And if it gets to be too much to bear. If it gets too heavy, I hope I remember that Jason said, “Well… then that’s okay.”

Thank you my sweet husband, for actually liking me.