Word Vomit
Word vomit. Once again, I could feel it rising like bile from my stomach to my throat, a burning sensation piercing my esophagus. Everyone knows that moment when you’re huddled over a toilet and heaving to get whatever is eating at your insides out of your body and into the clear toilet bowl. And the after taste that seems to linger for hours no matter how much mouthwash you gargle with or milk or water you drink.
If you’ve only had the pleasure of encountering real vomit and not the word vomit I am referring to, you are a lucky son of a bitch. Real, food-induced vomit leaves you feeling satisfied in a way. Aside from the disgusting taste and the wretched aftermath of your toilet bowl (pardon my graphic description), your body feels cleansed, a washcloth wrung out and hanging to dry. Your stomach in this case is the washcloth that has been wrung out. Hours from now, it will be ready and hungry for another meal.
Word vomit, on the other hand, is quite a different story. It’s just as unpleasant as food vomit as it has a similar kind of trajectory, starting from a pit deep in your stomach and rising to your throat. But the aftermath of word vomit leaves you and everyone around you feeling empty and not whole anymore. Saying all of those things in the moment might make you feel momentarily unburdened by the weight of the emotion within them but afterwards, it leaves you hollow. At least food vomit is something you experience in private (hopefully). It’s for you and you alone. You’re the only one to witness the ugliness and the messiness of it. You’re the only one to feel brief discomfort and pain while your body rejects whatever you put into it a couple of hours ago. You can only blame yourself for having that last taco at Rita’s Taco Stand for lunch or for ordering a second helping of fries at the diner around the corner. It’s uncomfortable for a bit and then it’s over.
Word vomit is contagious. It’s like that adage of “breaking the seal” while drinking. Once you visit the little ladies room to tinkle after a couple of beers, suddenly, you have to visit the little ladies room three times an hour. Once you let a string of words come streaming out of your mouth, you can’t stop.
There is a brief moment of clarity before you let those words come out where you know that you have the power to control what you are about to say. You have the power to reflect on your next statement and realize that it’s either a). digressing from the conversation at hand and therefore, not contributing anything useful or b). downright miserable and something you need to bear alone in order to spare the other people in your life. You have the power to control it.
But I didn’t. I never did.
Until now.
You don’t realize the effect your depression has on other people until someone you love points it out (in a gesture of kindness, of course, and ever so gently so that your feelings aren’t smashed in the process). Up until they do so, they have been nothing but loving and caring and supportive and they push you and challenge you to become a better person, a happier person. They lay out all of the opportunities before you, spell it out for you, rearranging the words that make up your word vomit so that they form happy, positive sentences rather than depressive, debilitating declarative statements, such as “I’m scared,” or “I feel lonely” or “I’m sad today.”
You don’t realize the effect your depression has on other people, or really, that you’re even depressed, until you’re sitting in a random Noodles & Co. crying into your pesto cavatappi while your mom sits across from you and your dad to the right, positively bewildered at what could be upsetting you so much (this is a true story). And the worst part is that I love Noodles & Co. more than I can begin to describe. Pasta is my happy place. And not to mention, my parents. I love, love, love my parents.
My dad is the kind of guy who can make you feel whole in one sitting. He can be difficult and frustrating and offer a perspective that I often cannot relate to, whether that’s from a generational standpoint or simply that a father cannot always understand what his 24-year old millennial daughter is going through. But, he is the best guy I know. He lights up a room and every friend of mine or of my brother’s or sister’s who has ever met him can say without a doubt that they wouldn’t mind if he attended happy hour with us and that they genuinely enjoy being around him.
My mom is so much stronger than I often give her credit for. She is where I get my sensitivity from and we both take things the wrong way much of the time. She can also be difficult and frustrating and make me angry enough to want to hang up the phone on her. But, she is the best woman I know. She has a tough exterior which has been passed down from generations of women above her. She rarely complains — when it comes to finances, or physical pain, or even emotional pain that’s been inflicted by neglectful friends or family members or god forbid, my dad or even her own children, she always puts her family first and that means sparing them from her greater hardships sometimes.
In any case, these are the people that surround me with love each and every day. My mom often texts me “Good morning, sunshine” followed by a smiling sunshine emoji (which she has recently mastered the use of). My dad picks me up from work and drives me home, and has let me projectile word vomit all over him more times than I can count. If there existed such a tool to illuminate word vomit, and you inspected the inside of my dad’s car, you would discover something akin to a crime scene. Word vomit spattered on the dashboard, on the windows, on the radio, on the floor, even the ceiling of the car on particularly bad days. Take a look inside his closet and you’ll find bits of the word “lonely” and “sad” and a whole lot of tears stained on his Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein sweaters. More so than my mom, he has received the brunt of the word vomit and all the while, he has been a rock, beating ceaselessly against the current of my tirades, trying to break through that impenetrable and depressive wall I constantly put up. And to be honest, he probably still would do that if it weren’t for my own sudden realization, a figurative light bulb going off in my head.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that all of my problems are fixed. A lot of people assume that once someone acknowledges that they are depressed and that they need to do something about it, all of their ducks happily fall in a row. What were once sopping wet, muddy ducks will magically transform to furry yellow ducks bobbing happily and without complaint across now clear and smooth waters.
This is not true. There will still be word vomit (and I promise I will stop referring to it as “vomit” shortly). There will still be meltdowns in which I end up a sloshing puddle on the ground, a reckless hazard with no caution sign to speak of so that people will slip and fall with me. There will still be unhappy moments and I definitely don’t have an easy road ahead of me. Unfortunately, there is no road map to happiness and there’s even a more difficult path to emerging out of the forest of sadness. But…where there’s a will, there’s a way.
In the words of the great Bill Murray from What About Bob?, “baby steps.”
This is what I will do. I will take baby steps to emerge out of this so-called forest of sadness, a cluster of trees darkening and obscuring my view to the sunlight beyond the trees. I will make a concerted effort to recognize when the word vomit is acceptable to allow out and when it’s not so much, when it’s maybe time to take a step back and let someone else word vomit on me for a change, if that’s what they so desire. I will remember that word vomiting takes more out of me afterwards than it would just to keep it down and swallow it whole.
This doesn’t mean bottling it up by any means but that there’s a time and a place to let my emotions take the wheel and a time and place for me to stop and become the driver again. And that my parents and my friends and those who love me won’t be around forever, and is it really so difficult to try and show them I am making an effort to work on my happiness and to take care of myself? If I do lose any of them — and I dearly, dearly hope I don’t any time soon, or ever — but if I do, wouldn’t they be better off knowing in their other life, in Heaven, that I am doing okay? That they left knowing I was working on myself and I will be fine? If I love them as much as I say, I can do this one little thing for them.
My name is Caroline, and this is my journey through whatever I am going through.