Walking each other home

An antidote to losing ourselves in our chatter

Welcome to Getting Better. My name is Miriam, and I share weekly personal essays to offer moments of pause and reflection.  My pieces touch on motherhood, loss, chronic illness, and questions of human nature. I share all my work freely right now. Subscribe for free, or upgrade for the price of an oat milk latte — my favorite / unequivocally the best drink out there 🥰  Sign up here:

2021, Violet Short Photography

Depression forces me into a month of silence. My mind fights panic while a heavy darkness settles over my body, sinking into my pores and saturating my soul as I fear for my life. I can’t turn off my thoughts, but I can’t really hear them, either. They don’t make sense, nor can I find sense enough to express my fear in a way that others might understand. I don’t understand it myself. It’s an urgent, static terror. I try to say something — I need to communicate that I need help — but my jaw hangs limp, half-open, half-shut, waiting for instruction that never comes.

All of me hangs limp. I’m half-dead, half-alive, the former determined to claim a majority stake.

My friend packs my bag, gets me on a bus in New York, and calls my mom, who picks me up in D.C. My parents got a puppy, and I notice him without feeling a thing. I know I love puppies, but I can’t access that at all right now and that terrifies me.

My world is molasses — nothing feels right, nothing makes sense, and I don’t have enough strength to push through the thick goo. Gravity dares me to move a muscle, and I’m not up to the challenge.

I see someone in a mirror, but there’s no connection. I’ve lost all sense of Self — and not in a beautiful, spiritual way. Tears streaming down my face tell me I’m still here.

I have a memory of this happening before. How long did it last, those times? A week? Two? I can’t survive that long.

For the fourth or fifth time in my life now, I literally can’t speak. This lasts for nearly a week, and then one day I fumble long enough to give voice to the essential — “ok,” “no,” or “I’m scared.” Soon I’m able to express more nuance — full sentences, but still long after a thought first arises.

I used to talk as though I were at risk of losing my voice at any given moment. I offered a near constant narration of anything and everything in my head or my heart. I was somehow both authentically unfiltered and always seeking to entertain (I think I melded The Entertainer into my personality). I had a lot of fun being like that, and if you enjoy mindless entertainment, I was pretty fun to be around.

Now I prefer silence and eye contact over most noise. It’s not always as entertaining, but it feels more connective and personal, which I crave. Have you noticed how often we talk past each other, not even bothering to look at one another, all of us focused solely on getting out whatever it is we planned to say? There’s so little room for discovery and connection with this frantic noise making. I participate in these false conversations often, and even as they’re happening, I wonder why I can’t seem to stop myself despite feeling my energy drain.

It’s uncomfortable not to match someone else’s energy, and we all seem to share a compulsive need to fill the space. Being the one to slow down or invite stillness feels daunting. I hope to build the confidence to create and hold space for someone to just be with me — not to chatter. It seems like we can’t bear the intimacy of eye contact, let alone a shared silence. (Maybe this is why four minutes of silent eye contact leads to falling in love, per The New York Times?! It’s a double whammy!)

A silver lining of my depressive episodes is that they gifted me this quiet stillness, and a verbal reset. I barely said a word for a month, and then I only managed to communicate what was necessary, and I’ve slowly rebuilt from there. My means of expression have grown leaner, and I’ve discovered beauty and wisdom in silence (a foreign concept to me in my early 20s).

I don’t wish a forced silence upon anyone, but I find that moments in a voluntary, welcome silence are worth exploring. The quiet and stillness invites presence and truth. When my mind meets my body there, it always discovers unread messages. It clears the cobwebs of chit-chat and small talk to reveal what’s really on my heart. Some of these messages are intensely joyful — blessings I’ve overlooked in my milling about — and others are heavy with a sadness neglected. While only I can decide which I’m ready to receive and respond to, I often become aware of what’s there because of someone else; there are few things I cherish more than the sacred gift of shared silence. (And I don’t mean the one induced by us looking at our devices.)

I’m good at escaping from truth with my own compelling stories, but sharing silence with someone who cares inevitably brings me back home. Ram Dass’s words capture this beautifully, “We’re all just walking each other home.” This walking home happens in many ways — including both in conversation and in silence — but being walked home by a friend in silence feels like a uniquely precious gift because it’s so rare. Some of the most powerful, memorable, and transformative moments in my life came from someone who was comfortable and confident enough to hold me in silence.

Of course this isn’t always appropriate — I’m guessing most of us prefer common courtesy small talk to a stranger staring silently into your soul. But there are often moments when silence is appropriate. It’s just swept away by the force of meaningless conversation because of our discomfort and awkwardness.

During my days of forced silence, I often couldn’t process my parents’ words quickly enough to make sense of them, let alone to find a suitable response. They picked up on this, slowed down for me, held me in silence, and expressed so much through the intensity of their gaze. I clung to that gaze, praying for it to carry me home. And it did. Their eyes were my life raft, even more so than their loving words or their caring hands, and they gave my half-alive spirit the encouragement it needed to keep going.

In our shared silence, their eyes revealed to me that I was still there — that I mattered and that someone cared.

Despite my 21-year-old self’s best intentions, chit-chat does not a transformative moment make. But a little bit of silence and some good eye contact? Fertile ground for walking each other home.