A long walk through hell looking for lemonade

I am returning.

One sentence.

Three words.

…but, damn, if they aren’t the three I’ve traveled over a thousand miles to write.

I am returning.

I am returning.

I am returning.

My god, I wish I could just bellow those three words loud enough to shake the walls of Jericho… just roar them from the belly like thunder from a lion.

Unfortunately, I can’t. The reasons are simple:

1) I am writing this in a Panera; and

2) I assume doing that sort of thing is either frowned upon or prohibited entirely.

If it’s the latter, me going all Lion King could turn into a whole scene. I could very well end up getting tossed from the place. If that happened, word could very well get back to Panera HQ… and then the unthinkable could happen: I could lose my membership in the Sip Club.

I can’t take that risk. There’s too much at stake.

Right now, I am entitled to a free beverage every time I visit… and… unlimited free refills.

Unlimited free refills!

Refills which are both free *and* without limit!

There is agave lemonade on the line here. A LOT OF IT. A volume that would fill drums.

I need to really drive that last point home here.

We are talking about a lot of lemonade here, guys… A LOT…

…and I REALLY like lemonade.

I am a very strong liker of lemonade-- No, that’s mincing words, and I won’t do that with you.

I am a lover of lemonade.

I, Michael A. Goodnough, son of Martha and Roger; grandson of Robert, Marjorie, Reginald, and Helen; love lemonade… I am a lemonade lover.

There, I said it - and I’m glad that I did.

What we hide from others, we first reject in ourselves.

I am a lemonade lover.

And while that sounds like the name of a Bruno Mars album, it is also my truth.

I love lemonade.

Now you know.

It was never a secret. It was just something I never said.

There have been a lot of things I haven’t said lately.

They weren’t secrets either. They were just things I couldn’t say during a period when I couldn’t say anything at all.

The lemonade thing wasn’t one of them – but if it had been, it would have been the very smallest on the list.

It seems so silly even talking about it, writing about it, my love of lemonade.

It is… but behind it is something serious.

I haven’t published anything here since January.

The reason is because I have not been okay.

My mental health has not been okay.

I haven’t been okay emotionally. I wasn’t okay psychologically. I wasn’t particularly well physically. I wasn’t doing okay. There was nothing in my life that was going okay.

I was not okay.

In the beginning of February, my mental, emotional, and psychological health just collapsed.

It was like a dam broke – and just like the way dams often break, it happened very slowly and over a long period of time - and then very suddenly and all at once.

A couple of things happened. They were not the kinds of things you would typically think of as likely to be traumatic, but they had just the right amount of impact required to push a structure already damaged past its breaking point – with the structure being ‘my shit’ and my ability to keep it together.

The levee that held me together failed. I felt it when it did. A breach opened, and once it had, an entire reservoir threw its rage against the gap and roared down the dam altogether.

I got hit by a wall of water that just washed the ground right out from beneath me. I was dragged under by its churn, concussed, reeling. I couldn’t even process what was happening let alone how I might surface and save myself from it.

I was just talking on the phone one minute and drowning the next.

It was that abrupt.

My mental health just washed away entirely. My ability to right myself, regulate, manage, cope, were all just swept away in a ferocious roil of earth and tree root.

Everything stopped. My life stopped. I stopped. Time flattened to a single, abstract, forever-day. The entire month of February felt like one endless day spent walking in a dark fog that was neither dawn nor dusk but just the way of the place.

I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t focus or concentrate.

I felt like I was in danger. My brain thought I was.

I was drowning in adrenaline and cortisol.

My entire nervous system was in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight. My brain and body couldn’t reset, couldn’t regulate, and couldn’t calm.

Much of February, I wasn’t even a person. I was just two flailing arms out way past where the lifeguards might see. I was fighting frantically to break the surface and gulp air.

I felt like I was drowning.

My brain thought I was in imminent peril of actually dying.

It felt like I was.

Not physically per se. Emotionally, psychology, existentially.

It felt like I was in imminent danger of no longer existing.

By the end of the month, I was at least treading water for the most part. I was still getting pulled under by things that hurt anew, but I had gotten to the place where I could manage through things that grabbed at my ankles without letting them drag me all the way to the sea floor.

I was not okay.

I was not doing okay.

Nothing in my life was okay.

But I had at least gotten to a place where I wasn’t in a state of constant drowning held off only barely and only by my full effort to not.

I was exhausted. I was sleeping poorly and practically hemorrhaging weight. I felt like I had suffered an actual severe brain injury. I could feel it in my head. I couldn’t not feel it. It was a woozy, almost dizzy feeling akin to when the coyote catches his own falling Acme anvil right to the dome and then sees a ring of stars circling overhead. It felt ‘spinny’ and I couldn’t clear it.

I was hurt. I was hurting. Everything was upside down.

And all I wanted to do was write.

That is all I wanted to do.

Just write.

I just wanted to sit down at a table like I always had, and just… write.

I wanted to write about all of this. I wanted to just tell the truth about what was happening to me.

And I couldn’t.

The very worst of the effects of my brain flipping into a traumatized 24/7 state of ‘MAYDAY!’ was what it did to the place in my brain where my ‘writer’s voice’ lives.

It pushed it beyond my reach.

It blew the bridge that allows me to get to it.

My nervous system going entirely off the rails separated me from my own ‘inner narrator’ as if on two sides of a chasm with no way across. I suffered that estrangement with an agony. It was the most excruciating part of all of this.

I couldn’t reach the inner narrator who is my favorite companion, the host of my favorite radio show, the voice I most love to listen to when alone.

It was like losing a best friend at a time when you could most use their company.

All I wanted to do was write.

All I wanted was to hear my own voice again.

It was the first thing I thought about each morning. It was the last thing I thought about each night. I thought about little else in between.

And when I say ‘thought about,’ I don’t really mean it in the sense of the kind of ordinary thinking that you or I did today or will do later or do usually.

It was the flat, hazy cognition of someone mired in a deep, dense, gray fog with no landmarks, in which they are searching for someone lost in it… and that someone is themselves.

All I wanted to do was write, and I couldn’t even think straight.

And then all of February blurred past, and so did half of March.

By the middle of the month, I had gotten to a place a little better than where I had been at the start of it. I had gotten my arms around a set of tools and resources that helped in managing through a continuing fusillade of things that hurt or reminded or conjured back up.

I wasn’t ‘better’ in any real way. I was just better at not being better…

…and both in that place and suffering worst of all my separation from writing, I thought I could start to write again. I told myself I could. I talked myself into believing I could.

I thought that if I could just gear myself up for it - if I could just lean on the tools I had picked up to stay calm and centered and self-soothe when starting to wobble - I could just… edge my way carefully toward the bridge to where my writer’s voice lived… and then inch my way across it... and then write like I always had.

Determined to do it, I thought it would be best to aim for first thing in the morning so I would be the most rested and fresh. Woke up the next morning. Ate something. Gave myself a pep talk. Grabbed my things and left the house to drive to a Panera only a few miles away.

I started having dry heaves before I had even gone a mile and thought I might have to pull over to throw up. Managed to breathe them down without stopping. Made it the rest of the way to Panera. Drove around back to the place where I always parked. Found a space maybe 50 feet from the door. Parked the car. Got out and grabbed my bag…

…and then I couldn’t go inside.

I was drowning in adrenaline and cortisol. I could feel it. I could physically feel it in my head. It was the same woozy, woooshing feeling I had first felt one morning the prior August. I could hear it in my ears. I could feel it coursing through me. It was the release that came from a nervous system triggered into a danger response… and that response was also the same one that blew the bridge to where my writer’s voice lived and worked and spoke to me.

The bridge had blown on the way over. The charges had been triggered by even trying to write.

I thought I could do it. I really thought I could.

I could hear my writer’s voice before I left the house. The bridge was open. I thought I could just edge up to it and inch across it, and then it was just… gone.

Standing there in the parking lot knowing it was futile, hopeless, pointless, I just walked around the building a couple times and then got back in the car.

“It’ll be better at home,” I told myself, “I’ll be better at home.”

Then I started crying on the drive.

All I have wanted to do since I last posted months ago was write.

All I’ve wanted was to be in a place where I could.

It has taken a herculean amount of effort to get back to that place… to get here. You’ll notice I’ve spoken nothing of that effort.

It has taken the hardest work of my life at a time when it was hardest to do. You’ll notice I’ve said nothing about that work.

Instead, I have focused solely on how unwell I was mentally, emotionally, psychologically… how impaired I was… how broken.

I could have written anything.

Yet, I’ve written only of something as frivolous as lemonade… and of something as serious as a mental health crisis severe enough to have initially felt like I was drowning while my brain reacted as if I truly was.

The choice of those two topics was deliberate. Stupid, silly lemonade. My health, my whole life, just spinning into collapse. I chose the two as a pair because… *this*… is my real lemonade.

Doing this.

Writing.

Writing *this*.

This is my real lemonade.

Just baring the whole of myself – not just shining a light on my darkest corners but shining the light brightest on those corners – that is my real lemonade.

It is the thing I drink up by the gallon by pouring myself out by the page.

Somewhere early in this, I said that what we hide from others, we reject in ourselves. The converse is also true:

What we show of ourselves, we accept in ourselves.

What we share, we accept as part of who we are – and in the judgment that we ourselves are acceptable… that we are worthy, that we are loveable.

What we share, we accept within us. To share the whole of us is to accept everything within us.

That is unconditional self-acceptance.

That is self-love.

And if you grew up in an environment like the one I did as a child, arriving at that place is a journey of some distance – and it is a climb, not a walk.

Sharing the whole of myself is an act in acceptance of the whole of who I am. I know exactly who that person is. I know my flaws and imperfections. I know the things I don’t do well or don’t do well enough. They fill a list that runs past the back cover. I know I will be forever wishing I could shorten that list, but probably never will.

I know I will forever be a work in progress and will probably be forever gnashing at not making progress enough - or feeling like I am not making any at all.

I will never get there.

But I accept myself here.

The whole of me.

I accept that person as worthy of love and deserving of it first being granted from me myself.

I inhabit the world as exactly who I am because, to me, doing so is the ultimate embodiment of that acceptance.

As hard as this may be to understand, shining a light on how I fell apart so completely, I almost had a nervous breakdown trying to walk into a Panera – writing about it, sharing it… to me, is… beautiful.

It is seeing my self-acceptance reflected back the most brightly in the sharing of things others might reject – and not being one of those people myself.

That is my real lemonade.

Being my truest self in the fullest way.

I lost that… and then I was lost altogether.

All I wanted was a little lemonade, and I couldn’t even walk into a Panera.

And here I am, sitting in one. Two lemonades on the table. One in a cup, the other poured out on the screen.

I am returning.

Three words.

A single sentence.

To me, maybe the most beautiful I’ll ever write because of how far I’ve had to travel to write it.

But here I am.

And here you are.

And now it gets good.

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