All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [137]
Even after I left that house, the man continued to write me, and begged me to write him letters in return, giving me his friend’s address to which I could send them without my family member knowing. Completely freaked out, I told one of my parents about it, and their response was, “Well, is he your boyfriend?” I managed to avoid him and his attempts to contact me, and then I proceeded never to talk about it. This was one of the many reasons why my after-care plan included a commitment to ongoing trauma, adult child, and abuse survivor work.
I moved on to the other end of the treatment exercises, which, for me, included making a collage of what life had looked like as the depressed Lost Child in my family, and in recovery, what my role in the family might look like. I created my after-care plan and processed it with staff and peers. My minimum commitment to myself was to spend time every day with other recovering people, to read recovery literature every morning with my prayer and meditation practice, to apply the principles and slogans of recovery in all my affairs, to reach out to others on this journey by phone, and to give away what had been given to me so freely. “We cannot keep what we have, unless we give it away,” Shades stresses. I also committed to do an intensive six-day family-of-origin, and survivor-abuse and trauma workshop every calendar year, to continue the deeply healing process of “uncovering, discovering, and discarding.” I made a promise that were I ever to relapse, I would return to inpatient treatment. Simply put, I committed to continue to go to any lengths for my recovery, to clean house, trust God, and help others.
Perhaps most saliently, I wrote a goodbye letter to depression. I had witnessed other clients reading powerful goodbye letters to diseases they had come into treatment not even knowing they had, or denying had been killing them. The work had been exhilarating merely to witness, and so it was perhaps this assignment more than any other that let me know I was completing something, dying to an old way of being, being born into a new life of freedom. I was moved and surprised by the words that effortlessly flowed from my pen. It was an ode, a farewell, a thank you letter, and most important, a triumphant statement of “good riddance.” It said, in part:
Dear Depression,
You have, indeed, been dear to me. You were my way of life, and such a natural part of my existence, I hadn’t even known you were smothering me, so completely and thoroughly were you my companion.
I remember night after night of lying in bed, and you coming to me in the form of those dark, negative thoughts, and how I’d collect them, each one a precious chink in my armor. I’d draw those thoughts to me, turning them carefully into the poisonous refrain, and when they settled deeply enough in my brain, and the much-needed chemical relief came, I’d let it evaporate. Another one would instantly materialize, much like the subsequent waves in the ocean—the tide draws the form back into the sea, where another has been simultaneously prepared. And so these thoughts would collect relentlessly until I got what I needed—proof I was wrong, proof I was unloved, proof everyone chose the words and actions they did to disregard me, their desire to let my needs go unacknowledged and unmet an indictment of my very existence being wrong. I could review the day with your devious help and reframe it to my most severe disadvantage.
The effects of this were numerous. I could make sense of moments earlier I had not understood. I could pull into the cocoon of my bed and avoid the dangerous man whom you lied about to me, telling me he had all the power to hurt and save me. I could connect the thoughts within my body and freeze, go idle,