Someday This Pain May Be Useful

JENNIFER PASTILOFF

I’m tired. I just spent a week leading a retreat with twenty-two women, a yoga retreat in which these twenty-two women and I talked and wrote and laughed and celebrated our capability to make the most of our lives, and our desire to own our own happiness.

I love what I do, but I am also exhausted. I’m awake and filled with gratitude, but at the same time I’m drained. It’s my job to inspire others to reach for joy, but I can’t help but be very aware, in this moment, that I’m more than a yoga teacher, and a retreat and workshop leader, and a writer. I am also a depressive.

I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety for as many years as I can remember; many of those years I was anorexic as well. I hit my worst in around 2007. I was desperate, as in crawling-on-the-floor and eating-food-in-my-sleep desperate. At the time, I was working as a waitress in LA. I’d been working at the same restaurant for eleven years, even though I was miserable there. There were days when I would do almost nothing but read over and over again instant messages (still so novel back then) from my ex-boyfriend, messages like: U just gotta get your shit together. U gotta get out of the restaurant. U gotta make moves. You’ve gotta decide what u want to do with ur life!

As if I didn’t know that I was drowning.

As if this were what I wanted for myself.

I finally had my nervous breakdown behind the restaurant. That’s where everyone went to smoke once the tables had their food and seemed to be as happy as they would ever get during their meal. In that little secret cove for the smokers, I leaned against the red brick wall and slowly slid down to the ground. My chest heaved, desperately wanting air and not finding it. About a hundred years passed. I was surrounded by cigarette butts, millions of them, and they were staring at me with their ash and nicotine and lipstick stains and sticky bird shit that also had been on the ground. There might have been bubble gum too, but when you can’t breathe you don’t pay attention to anything except oxygen, and that is what I couldn’t find anywhere.

Somebody help me my brain told my mouth to say. But nothing came out.

Except one word.

The word enough.

Enough.

Enough waitressing. Enough guilt. Enough anorexia. Enough numbing myself with sleep and food and drinking. Enough saying what I don’t want instead of what I do want. Enough sex with people I don’t love or even like very much. Enough living in the past. Enough worrying about the future. Enough wearing six-inch platform shoes because I feel being short means I am inadequate. Enough self-hatred.

Enough.

That one word slipped out and traveled down Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, past all the shops and the traffic, and I saw just for one brief second where it was headed—before I lost sight of it behind the roller-skating homeless man.

At this point I realized it was it was either sink or swim for me, so I decided to go on antidepressants. Cymbalta was the one I found worked best for me, especially with the obsessive anorexia thoughts.

It took some time to help, but it did. About a year later, I quit the restaurant. I started teaching yoga and I went back to my first love, writing. When I started sharing my blogs and personal essays I developed an online following, and then I started leading transformational workshops called The Manifestation Workshop, which quickly turned into sold-out events and retreats all over the world!

It all happened very quickly—in the course of two years, I went from serving tables to traveling around the world and being on Good Morning America and featured in New York magazine. This was my life! I had found successs! It was thrilling.

But there was a caveat: I was still taking meds, and I felt like a fraud. I felt like I should be able to be who I was, and to use the tools I taught in my workshops, without chemical assistance. So after a few years I thought it was time to see if my depression was “circumstantial.” I also thought I might want to get pregnant. So in the summer of 2014 I went off my anti-depressants, and about five minutes later got pregnant.

This did not work out well.

The hormones from being pregnant, combined with the emotions and brain freak-outs from going off medication, made me feel like I was going crazy. I was scared all the time—even before I began hemmoraghing, even before I learned that the pregnancy was ectopic, or “extrauterine,” meaning the fertilized egg didn’t implant in the uterus, and was thus unviable. Even as I put on a happy face to teach workshops in New York, and Lenox, Massachussetts, and Seattle.

I was desperately miserable, but I kept going, smiling for women and reminding them that life can be joyful and complete.

I’m not sure I can pinpoint the moment that I first earned the reputation for being “positive” or “inspirational,” but I can tell you that the irony isn’t lost on me. This is my dichotomy: It is in my life’s work to be asked how I got over my own depression and sadness, when some days I haven’t even managed to brush my teeth because I am sitting by the front door with only one sock on and a bag of trash and I can’t find the will to move.

But what I’m learning is that this isn’t so ironic after all. And that being depressed while embracing joy is not so strange. To pretend to be always perfectly content would be a lie, the same lie as when we believe our own illustions about the people we admire. While we pine over their “perfect lives,” behind their closed doors, they may be silently weeping into a coffee mug.

I no longer feel like a fraud for having taken meds, either. I have finally come to understand that my success was not owed to medication, but from being myself, being real, and telling the truth about who I am. I like to say I have a no-bullshit clause in all that I do. I think people need that—it’s refreshing in a time with so much perceived perfection on social media, and in yoga classes.

I am willing now, in ways I wasn’t before, to be honest with others. I’m willing to talk about masturbation, or what lies in the bottom of my closet, or how I drink too much wine. Honesty is important because it keeps us fromg being stymied by trying to live up to the expectations of others.

Honesty is important because if we don’t face our truths head-on, they will come back to get us in other, more insidious ways.

I’ve carved out a beautiful life and love what I do, but sometimes, especially lately, I feel the old tug of depression. It’s a magnet of sadness, buried somewhere next to the grief of losing my father at a young age—though not relegated to just that grief.

The sadness can appear out of the blue—when I’m leading a retreat to Costa Rica, on a day when I receive a plethora of praise and validation, when everything seems to be on the upswing. No matter how “positive” my situation may be, or seem, the blueness can still come.

If depression is a thing in your body, as mine is—some days it lives in my throat and gives me migraines; others days it makes me hide out in my apartment all day—then you have to deal with it. Pretending it doesn’t exist, like by saying affirmations or posting happy quotes on Facebook, isn’t going to help. And to start dealing with it, I say let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk about how hard it is to keep going when you can’t move, when you want to get down really low to the earth and see if you can hear it hum and when it does, you want to stay there—all flat like that, pressed to the floor.

Let’s talk about how that nothingness feels.

And let’s talk about how, for some, facing depression means taking anti-depressants. Lord knows, there are people who cannot exist a day off medication, literally. Not a day. And while I’m not taking medication now, truthfully, I feel far more emotionally tentative now than I was when I was on them. Even though a lot of my days off them are good, if my depression again gets too much to bear, I might take them again.

I also might try to ride it out. (Or, rather, to write it out.)

It’s complicated, the circuitry of the brain and the things we are hard-wired to believe. I know we have the power to change our thoughts, and I teach believing in ourselves, and who we are in the world, and who we are surrounding ourselves with, what inspires us—how all of that creates the lives we want for ourselves. And it does. But if we hit times when we get so low to the earth, skimming for love by any means available, when we are literally jonesing for something that is dead, well, sometimes the pain is no match for the affirmations.

The fact is that I am struggling. It’s real. It’s in my body, possibly from who-knows-when, carried down from my ancestors, passed on through my Romanian grandmother or my Native American great-great grandfather.

Or maybe it came when my father died in the night and left something broken inside of me.

I don’t know.

But in my mind I keep hearing a quote by Ovid: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.” And so I’m trying: I’m trying to be patient, I’m trying to be tough. I’m trying to imagine a time when I will have greater perspective about my pain, that I’ll be in a place where it could be useful to me.

And I also keep thinking that, instead of hiding who I am, I should share it: I should tell you about what I’m experiencing, the full truth of it. And then, maybe my pain will somehow be useful to you, too.