Three years ago today (2019) I had the unique opportunity of experiencing an underwater photo shoot. For years on Pinterest, I had collected pictures of serene, sometimes haunting women underwater. As my 50th birthday approached, brainstorming ways to commemorate it, I googled “underwater photographers” and found one close enough – in Atlanta, GA. Sometime during the spring of 2019, I had booked with them for September 3.

2019 would find me at a crossroads in my life. As discussed in quite a few of my previous blog entries – I’d had a rough go of things in the 4 years prior. I’d become critically ill with a rare pancreatic tumor (insulinoma). The day I got the call that a tumor had been found in my pancreas was one of the happiest days of my life. I’d become so chronically, gaslit by doctors, so entirely depleted that this was welcome news. I would be healed, shortly. The tumor would be removed and my life would return to normal. My happiness soon turned to terror, though, as I learned the surgery to remove this tiny tumor would be a Whipple bypass. An 11-inch incision down the middle of my abdomen, sternum to pubic bone. 3 inches of pancreas, 4 inches of stomach, 6 inches of intestine, my gall bladder, and 23 lymph nodes removed in 9-hour procedure. My digestive system was entirely rerouted. It would be 5 months before I would have my first pain-free day. It would take me an entire year to recover.

Only a few months short of that one-year anniversary, I found out we would be leaving not only the home where I’d raised my children but the city I had come to love so much, Alton IL. Alton and I were on the same frequency. I’d devoted so much time and energy into this city. I was well known. While I never believed that I would live there for the rest of my life, I in no way anticipated leaving that year. It was too soon. What the surgery did to my body, the move did to my heart. Having to leave the place that I loved was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. It broke my sprirt. It broke me. I left dear friends, I left everything of comfort to move to a city I swore I’d never accept as my own. Our oldest child had graduated High School three months before we left. The four of us have never lived together in the 5 years since. My children never had a familiar bedroom to come back home to. The memory of our home, the home where I’d raised my children with the history that I loved and the smell that meant home, to me, was gone forever.

It didn’t stop there. I left my oldest child at college and drove away, knowing I would not see them for a minimum of 4 months. On my drive to the new home I never wanted, I ended up randomly hospitalized along the way, in an ICU with a severe GI bleed. I reached my new home only to barely unpack the last box when Hurricane Irma bore down upon SWFL. We evacuated, in what seemed like the cruelest twist of all – I’d spent so much selecting only the things that meant the most to me. The rest of our belongings went to auction. I found myself driving away from the few things I’d brought with us, not knowing if I’d ever see them again. Family photographs that could not be replaced – handed down heirlooms, memorabilia from my childhood. Even my wedding ring had been accidentally left behind. Three people, one car, one cat, one dog, a box of important paperwork, 3 pairs of shorts, 2 tee shirts, and one pair of flip-flops were all I had as I watched Hurricane Irma make landfall.

And still, it did not end. But at this point, it becomes ridiculous so I will just skip ahead. Did I believe I wasn’t going to make it during that time? Absolutely. I believed my life would end in such a way that I expected it. Daily. I expected to die because how much can one person take and what could the future possibly hold for me when the universe obviously had it out for me?

And yet – 2019 was the sharp end of the stick. As I reached the summer of 2019 I found myself entirely without hope, consumed with a pain that was unbearable and 100% sure that nothing in my life was ever going to get better. And I was done.

Our perspective of traumas can change over time. For instance, the move. At the time I believed I would never get over that. I was willing to trash my life over it. I refused to make friends, refused to make a home, refused to participate, even refused to learn my way around. I’d planned to turn to the wall on a mattress placed on the floor, boxes all around me and wait for the end to come. I would never let anyone be happy in our new home. While the memories of that time never evolved into anything happy – it was a very difficult time in my life – there’s now an edge of adventure to it. How many people sell everything they own and move to SWFL? There is no grudge or regrets. It simply happened the way it happened. Much of my pain could have been avoided by communication skills I lacked at the time. I can also see positives now that I didn’t then. I had become overly involved in Alton. I was almost trapped in a few things that were making me downright miserable. We visited last year. We drove through our neighborhood, we saw our old friends. Everything seemed so small. Small house, small town, small life. My personal growth accelerated since we left. I have continued to evolve. I have become much more vibrant. My mind and my life are much bigger now than they were.

I can’t say the same about my underwater photos. My album remains in its box in my closet. The anniversary of it is a solemn one for me. It is a day of reflection. The pride that I take in them is not their dark beauty but rather that I survived when I thought I would not. You see, the woman in the photograph below has only barely survived the past 24 hours of her life – and she has but four days to live.

Looking serene under the water isn’t as easy as it looks. The important thing is to have no air in your lungs whatsoever. Air makes a body bouyant. You will spring to the surface. To be suspended means ignoring your survival instinct (less worries of course if you happen to have a death wish) to grab as much air as possible to take beneath with you. There’s even a point past, where you exhale enough to feel the last of your lungs deflate. Push under, sink, seeing nothing clearly, look serene, relax, hit the pose then push to the top for a breath. I took direction from the main photographer and two assistants in the water with me. The assistants would hold me down, push me down, manage my skirts, pull me up and hold yards of brightly colored fabric behind me. We used two different pools during the day. Every one of us was up and down, up and down for over 4 hours. But I was the one without breath. It was fitting. As I would learn last year (2021) in Mermaid Camp (I was a natural, ha ha) no, you never will see what you are smiling at. You hold your head in some appropriate direction – and you pretend.

I had arrived in Atlanta the evening before. My terror that night was so immense that I drove to a nearby mall and walked it till it closed – all to avoid being alone in my hotel room. I wrote and wrote, I cried and I slept. I woke the following morning as I did every day – overflowing with terror. An introvert who had always savored her solitude, I spent the entire summer of 2019 terrified of being alone. My moods could shift beneath me like quicksand. The pain I felt, left unchecked, could swallow me whole. I’ve always been a woman of strong emotion. It’s not all bad, honestly. A few weeks ago I had a near religious experience watching a movie. The vibrance of my life is breathtaking. It’s not bad – until it’s bad. It was bad then. I had 5 hours of terror to make it through. I walked circles in my hotel room saying – you can do this. You can do this. I felt worse than the night before. My mornings were usually like that. Terror. Just absolute terror of the 24 hours ahead of me. At home I would sometimes rise at 5:30am and drive to the gym where I would run for an entir hour to vent myself enough to survive the day. At one point I got sick. And finally, I put my suitcase in my rental car and drove.

I was not well.

I don’t know if it’s the person I am or my upbringing – there is something inside me that can act absolutely normal when the worst is happening inside of me. I’ve always been able to act how I need to act and this is confusing to people when I later tell them just how bad I was doing. I don’t know if anyone that day picked up on my distress. My plan to only make it to the 7th. All strangers – did they feel my darkness as I passed them by? Did they feel suddenly agitated. Did they wonder why? I was a ghost of myself that day. A slight chill in the Atlanta air – was it me I felt?

I am not well. I am not well. But I have only to make it through this one day.

I actually had no idea what the plan for that day was. I’d brought a single ball gown with me – I had not been instructed otherwise. Outfit change after outfit change. I lost count. We left the first pool and arrived at the second, which was heated. The sun, which had been high above me at the start was now approaching Golden Hour. I would spend the rest of the shoot suspended under a pool cover, not even the natural air to greet me as again and again I broke the surface. I remember a single moment where I forgot. I simply forgot my life. I came up from the water with a smile on my face and joy in my heart – then it hit me, again. Look how much it takes to distract a woman who is drowning in her life. My arms turned to jello and shook uncontrollably as I clung to the side of the pool.

And then I see a change.

The angle of my head becomes defiant. My arms find their mark without much mental guidance. I can see, in this picture, the moments in which my life had been saved. At the end of the day, when I rose from the pool for the last time, I had wholly abandoned my plans for the 7th. It was the physical strength it had taken me to get this done. In the photo above you can see my midline Whipple scar. I originally asked for it to be photoshopped out, then changed my mind. My body has been through so much. The Whipple was my 12th surgery. The hernia correction made 13. While I would like to count that as my last surgery, I simply know that’s not possible. 13 has always been a lucky number of mine. So I feel it will stick for at least a while. I see, in my face, a vast difference between my first and last picture. Not many people have the privilege of having a transformation like this so closely documented within a single day. The journey between – I only have to make it through this day – to – maybe I am stronger than I thought.

My shoot had run long. I had to change as fast as I could, no time to even brush my hair out and drive for the airport through the setting sun. Return my rental car, duck into the bathroom long enough to wash my remaining makeup off and do some hasty braids. I ran through the terminal and reached my plane just in time for final boarding. I was happy. I felt happy. It was enough. It was enough to keep on going.

I wish I could tell you things only got better from there – but they didn’t. I skipped along through September, some days good, some days bad. October was just flat out bad. I hit the point of no return on more than one occasion, but did not go past it. Things in my life were rapidly changing that month. I’d been keeping some things inside regarding the origin of this dangerous episode and in October it all came out. This is the month my life was truly saved, as everyone (without exception) huddled around me and told me I must live. And I did.

November 1, 2019 is the date I mark as the day my depressive episode started to lift. I never would have lived to see November 1, never would have known it was waiting for me, just around the corner, had I not had Septemer 3rd. In the depths of my pain, I would forray online for advice. In how to end it. It is difficult for me to say this now. So much has happened. But it is true. Some lone soul in the vast internet had tagged their page with “suicide instruction” and left 10 reasons to live. The one that stuck with me “I can’t tell you things will get better. But I can tell you that, if you make this choice, you will end any hope that it will.”

The woman I became – in the after – is the alter-ego of the woman I’ve described. Most of the people I currently know only know me as this bright, happy, light of a person. The bold outfits, the petticoats and pigtails. They have no idea of the depths of my soul. They don’t know at all the woman who owns this blog. Who spent the better part of 2020 writing out her pain. Figuring out her life. Purging so many things. Most of the people I currently know, if I linked this post on my social media would follow it expecting to be entertained. They would expect humor, never knowing my writing has always been my dark art. Like Kate Spade – I’ve become known for my happy-go-lucky brand. It is only half-me. I rarely visit my darkness at this time in my life. And I guess that’s ok. After running just fast enough to stay ahead of my demons for 50 years, I finally have a chance to rest. And I do. I rest a lot. I don’t choose to do a lot of social things right now. I treasure my solitude. I treasure my peace. My time with my husband. My children are the only numbers allowed through on the weekends. All the world is a stage Monday-Friday. I have earned my peace. I am grateful that the universe has given me a much needed break. I am grateful for the time to just be happy.

I hope, at some point, when I see these pictures, at a crossroads in my life, I will primarily see the strength in myself. This year, I still see the current of pain that runs through them. The pain of the night before, the pain of that morning, the smell of my hotel room, every texture and pattern is seared into my brain. The things I’m ashamed of, the strangers who saw me and knew that I was off – something other-worldly – something wicked and frightening. An ominous shadow in the midst of their workday. I remember bare details of my photographer and assistants. My make-up artist who was subjected to my dark playlist. My dark tale that brought me to that place. The red dress that tore as I took it off. My ballgown I had planned to stuff in a trashcan that I ended up leaving behind – hoping the next woman that wore it wouldn’t feel a cold chill. Hoping her happy mood wasn’t suddenly transformed into something desperate and feral without any explanation as to why.

I have erased every possible thing in my life from 2019. The pictures on my phone of that summer, deleted. The rooms painted over. The clothing thrown angrily away, stained with betrayal. Destruction, anger and despair reigned over my life. Had it been anything less than this – anything less than an opportunity of a lifetime – I would have destroyed it as well. My only evidence of a terrible struggle. Hauntingly beautiful, existing only in my memory and a sealed box in my closet. Digital files stored on my computer. I hope that someday, the defiant tilt of my head will outweigh the rest of it. Until then, it serves as a mile marker of how far I have come.