About 15 months ago, I wrote an essay about depression. I had mentioned in passing some struggles I’d had but my writing dug in a lot more deeply and honestly than anything I’d said publicly before. People told me it was great, people told me it was brave, people told me that it was helpful. So in hopes of maybe helping somebody again — and to keep a promise I made to myself about fighting stigma around mental health — it’s time to do an update.
In short? It got worse.
When I last wrote, I had been in therapy for a bit and had just started taking meds. After several rounds of experimentation I found a combination that helped, and for a while it seemed like I was getting better. In some ways I definitely was. Those meds got me out of bed, into the shower, off to work, following through with social commitments. All notable improvements from where I’d been.
My therapist was fine but I wasn’t getting much from it so I stopped going and stuck with meds. Things held steady and I thought improvement would continue. What actually happened was the energy I managed to summon for those most basic functions was the only energy I had. Still no laundry, still no housework. Sure I was showering but I’d take off my clothes wherever I was and just leave them there. My mailbox would get full so I’d toss the mail inside, leaving it on the floor without opening it. I’d order packages in a state of hypomania that never got opened.
My downstairs living space was so cluttered I couldn’t stand to look at it so I started just going straight upstairs every day when I got home, lying in bed eating dinner, then working or interneting until it was time to go to bed. Of course said interneting was on data, because my real internet was still out because my house was too gross to let the tech in.
At some point, the kitchen became too much to deal with. Besides, where was I going to find the energy to go grocery shopping or cook or do the dishes anyway? So I started eating fast food. All the time. Every meal. I would take it up to my room, eat it, and just leave the packaging (and any food I hadn’t finished) on the bed. When there got to be too much piled on the bed, I would shove it off into the floor.
I ordered underwear off Amazon in bulk, but even that at times was more than I want to talk about here. Generally, my clothing got piled into what could and could not be worn again without smelling, but I’m sure at some points I failed at that as well. When I ran out of options, I’d go Target and buy a bunch of cheap t shirts and start again, adding them to the piles.
Eventually, it got to a point where the upstairs was worse than the downstairs and I couldn’t be there either. I couldn’t be home at all. So when I got tired of the office I went to the bar. Sometimes getting drunk, usually not. Still, even nursing a few beers over several hours every single day is unhealthy and expensive and led to some sincere concern (and a bit of mean spirited gossip) about my drinking, assuming I was out every night getting hammered instead of just being paralyzed with revulsion at the thought of going home. I would stay at the bar until I was tired, drive home, sleep, wake up the next day, and do it all again.
I have an old house with lots of old house issues but since I was too embarrassed to let anyone in to fix them, they just started piling up. By the end I only had one sink that worked. One had backed up so bad there were larvae coming out of the drain that turned into flies. I had a toilet that ran all the time and got a $200 water bill once (not to mention all the water that was wasted). The cats stayed fed and watered but I was buying new litter boxes and setting them next to the old ones — not really cleaning anything for weeks at a time. My beautiful aquarium got down to 1/4 of the proper water level and the fish all died.
Was I telling anybody about this? No. I’ve always been a terrible housekeeper, so “oh, my place is too messy to host — can we do it at yours?” isn’t something that rang alarm bells on an individual basis and nobody noticed that I hadn’t actually hosted anything in a couple of years. When I went longer and longer without putting my house on the market once I’d quit my job and couldn’t afford it, I thought people might get suspicious but they just thought I was really busy. “Hire Merry Maids! They’ve seen it all.” is a thing I heard a lot, telling me that no, people really had no clue what was happening.
I knew I needed to try again to fix this. But I had never quite gotten what I needed out of therapy and oh God, the first therapy appointment is the worst. Sitting in front of a stranger and categorizing all the ways that you’re broken is just such an exhausting thing to do when you’re trying to keep your life together. Then a very dear friend of mine had lucked into a therapist that sounded amazing and sounded perfect for me, so I called and made an appointment.
From the very early days of our sessions I would allude to problems in my home, never in much detail. But I’d always cry and she was picking up on that more than I realized, though she didn’t ask a lot of questions.
One day after a couple of months she handed me a flyer she’d got in the mail and asked if I thought about anything like this. It was a specialized hoarder cleanup service. Well, let me tell you that is not a word that anybody wants to apply to themselves. My first instinct was to tell her to fuck off and walk out. But we’d built up a lot of trust, so instead I sat there with it and let it sink in. We both agreed I in fact was not a hoarder in the typical way we think about it. I had no attachment to what was in my house, I just didn’t have the energy to get rid of it. Still, the end result was the same so maybe the solution could be the same as well.
I finally said to her “Isn’t this kind of cheating?” To which she said “how so?”
“Well if I call these people in to do all the work then I haven’t had any consequences from it from letting it get this way. I did this. I should be the one to fix it.”
She sat there for a moment, and then said “Dawn? Do you feel like you deserve to be punished for this? And if so, do you feel like you haven’t already been punished enough?”
At which point I just started to sob. She told me that the cleanup wasn’t the work, therapy was the work. To the extent I thought I needed to earn a clean house I earned that by the work that I was doing in our sessions. To the extent that I thought I didn’t deserve to live in a clean house… well that was basically bullshit.
So I sat with that for a while. I told her I would think about it.
After session I called my mom. I didn’t go into a lot of detail but explained that the house was worse than I had let on and my therapist thought I might need a specialized professional to come in and fix it. One thing she has gotten very good at after years of dealing with my mental health is saving her reactions for after she’s off the phone with me. She calmly told me that it sounded like a perfect solution for what I needed.
I looked at the flyer and decided I didn’t really like that particular operator, but I was all in on the idea of this being the solution so I researched all the providers in the region. I found one that was owned by a woman who was a nurse, which just seemed perfect. So I sucked it up and called. The woman’s name was Heidi and I gave her a brief overview of what was happening and what I thought I needed. She then asked if she could come out to make an estimate or if I would prefer to send pictures. I somehow was not ready for that question and blurted “I’d rather send pictures because I can’t handle the look on your face when you first see how I’ve been living.” I started to cry. She immediately, kindly said “no problem at all I’ll give you my email address.”
I knew if I didn’t keep the momentum going I was going to lose my nerve, so the next morning I did a video walkthrough of my house, narrating stuff that might not be picked up by the camera and wrote a very neatly outlined document room by room of what needed to go and what needed to stay and sent it all to her with the very official subject line “Proposed Scope of Services”. The irony that I could have my shit so well together to prepare something like that and yet be in this situation in the first place… what was wrong with my brain?
I got back a full written estimate in a very businesslike standard format with lots of industry jargon. It made it feel like maybe I wasn’t the only person living like this. This was an actual thing. I really wasn’t going to shock her- and that was important.
The cleanup was scheduled for the week before Thanksgiving week and would last two to four days. Were it just me they could have done it all while I was out each day But I had cats, so I needed to temporarily relocate. That was when I told my first friend about what was going on. This is a friend who not only has had mental health struggles of her own, but has for so many years been the person in my life I can tell my ugliest stuff to without judgement. This time was no different. Of course I could bring the cats and stay with her for a few days. Of course.
I left a key in my mailbox for the cleaning crew because even though I was feeling somewhat better about it I still couldn’t face people in my house. I was Hell on Wheels to everyone I came into contact with that entire week. Angry, snippy, sensitive, rude. Just completely off the rails, and way more so because I couldn’t share what was happening.
As for the process itself, the whole thing was as discreet as it could be with their unmarked vehicles, but there was a construction dumpster at my house so I’m sure an intrepid neighbor could figure out what was going on. I got nightly texts from Heidi about the progress and met her on the last day to do a walkthrough and pay. The moment I walked in the door I started crying and apologizing to her and the other crew members for having to deal with my problems. She smiled and laughed and said that that was literally their job. She also said something that really stuck with me. She said that in the vast majority of the cases she works on her client is a family member of the person who is sick. The sick person has been talked into this, wants nothing to do with it, and is generally a little hostile about it. She said the fact that I was doing this on my own to make a better space for myself ,that I called her myself, managed the process myself meant that I was very strong and that I was going to be okay. I replay that conversation in my head a lot.
As fate would have it, immediately after leaving my new clean house, it was time for my therapy appointment. I did pretty well in there, until I got to the part where I explained that I had to get a new mattress because they threw it out my old one. It had bugs in it. I cried so hard at that point I almost choked. I’ve literally never been so ashamed of anything in my entire life. I’m crying again as I typing out now. Once I got my breath back and calmed down a bit, we talked about what was scary going forward. I told her it was the work that needed to be done to get the house ready to sell. She said she was there for that too. We pulled out some notebook paper, made a list of the highest priority things to deal with, and put it in order. She sat with me while I called and made an appointment with a plumber. The rest we could deal with next week. Or the next.
As with the last time I wrote about this topic, this is very much not a before-and-after. It’s a during. I think it’s always a during as long as I’m alive.
Right now, I’m still adjusting. I like my house again. I like to spend time in it. I’ve been grocery shopping, and invested in a fuzzy robe and slippers to come home and hang out in my recliner on these cold cold nights. I’ve even had a couple people over. My feelings are all over the map. I’m actively delighting in how normal my life feels right now, how normal I feel right now. I’m working very hard in therapy to deal with my list a little bit at a time. Because getting overwhelmed means getting anxious which means shutting down which means it all happens again. Mostly I’m walking around all the time with simultaneous feelings of shame and hope that are each so strong that either one of them alone would be difficult but both of them together is sometimes more than I can bear. I’m never the most easy person to deal with, but it’s been worse lately, and will probably continue to be for some time. I ask for your grace.
I wrote my last essay because depression is super common and I hoped people would see themselves in it and be helped by it. I write this time not because my specific plight is eminently relatable, but because I suspect that even in this world where almost everyone is on Prozac, people suffering with more severe forms mental illness still feel alone. I know I do. But we aren’t.
Be well.
