Puzzle Piece Bridge

This wasn’t like how movie characters wake up on a Saturday morning, beautifully rested, and decide to change themselves into a completely different person. Depression teaches you many lies, one of those being that your pain defines you and there’s no escaping it. “There is no getting better” is a sentence that was repeated in my brain like clockwork. For days I would rot lying in my crammed bed, which was filled with miscellaneous items from hobbies I had picked up and then lost motivation for. The floor of my room looked like an ocean made up of discarded outfits and doodle papers. I continued to rot like this for almost three years, too suffocated in my sadness to move. But over time I found myself beginning to feel anger and resentment for the way my twisted mind was built. I was angry I couldn’t change and even angrier that the comfort of my own sadness made me not want to. It’s almost as if I had finally had enough of myself. The self-deprecation and constant feeling of being too much or never enough was just plain old. I had been so focused on those who hurt me and why they had the right to, I allowed it to consume my every thought. 

Then I was reminded of what my third, most influential therapist once told me. “You are the one constant in your life. You can hate, lie to, and hurt yourself, but you can never leave. You are the only one who gets to decide who you are.” It may sound like a cringe quote found framed in a psychiatrist's office, and 15-year-old me thought that as well. But it’s something I never knew I would need later on in life. I wasn't Cinderella, and my fairy godmother didn’t wave a magic wand. She didn't declare that I was no longer depressed. The genetic makeup of your brain doesn’t all of a sudden change; it’s a lifelong illness for people like me, although it doesn’t have to control your whole life. The sole reason you live on this earth is not to suffer. Tough love is a hard concept to grasp, and even harder to apply to yourself. 

On a late morning, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, I woke up with a daunting feeling and was so tired of it. The air was crisp and cool, but not freezing. The fog covered the highest point of the trees, and the clouds were floating above. So I went to my grimy bathroom mirror and told myself it was enough. “No one is coming to save you. Do something with yourself because moping around in your misery clearly hasn't worked. Get up.” It was hard to hear, and even harder to tell myself, but was the truest thing I said in months. After listening to my mom tell me time and time again about the positive impact exercise and walking has on mental health patients, I finally gave it a try. Since I woke up with such an urge to change, I would try anything. I remembered the trail a friend showed me a few weeks prior. The journey was tricky, over the slightly terrifying train tracks and even more terrifying rocky downhill on the other end. I snuck through a secret path, covered in bright orange, purple, and buttercup-yellow leaves from the fall foliage. I arrived at my destination, a small rock surrounded by a field once filled with wildflowers. Still, I wasn't satisfied. Frustrated with the idea that my first attempt at a better mindset had failed, I kept walking as the path extended. After jumping across four pebble-filled creeks, stomping through puddles of mud, and even hiking up a hill using the rope ladder made by a kind stranger, I stumbled across a bridge. It was a bridge I had driven over a million times before, yet never truly knew existed. 

From the outsiders’ perspective, it seemed like a bridge built to help the flow of traffic and allow the river to peacefully exist under it. But when I found a new way of looking at it, it was much more beautiful. Underneath is filled with graphic art stacked over each other like puzzle pieces, vibrant colors, letters, and hard work from artists who would never be known for it. After admiring it for some time, and recovering from the shock of discovering the unknown, I realized I hadn’t had a negative thought since I found it. 

Every day until the temperature dropped too low to wear anything but a ski suit outside, I visited this same bridge. I wrote poetry, showed my friends the hidden beauty, cried tears of joy and sadness under it, and spent endless hours pondering as cars drove over my head. My spirit became brighter each day, and I could feel the outside air calm my soul. Even my parents and peers noticed a difference. “You’re more lively now” or “You seem more present,” they would say.  I would still visit every few days or weeks in the winter, wrapped up in my warmest jacket and beanie. Soon after this, I would realize the growing love and respect I had for life was never about the bridge or the walk itself. It was about doing something for me, getting up for me, walking for me, adventuring for me. The idea that I could value myself for something more than just the bad things that have happened to me. It was an exhilarating feeling to be out of the slump I had been stuck in for so long. And the bridge wasn’t infused with a magic antidepressant and my illnesses didn’t disappear, but my days got brighter. “No one is coming to save you,” and so I made the decision every day to save myself a little more. I gave myself time to escape the troubles of the world, time to think of myself, my needs, and time to do something for myself.

 I once wrote a creative piece under the bridge, on a day I was overwhelmed with emotion and angry at a person I couldn’t place:

“One day we will all be frameless faces on nameless walls, forgotten souls floating around, observing the living from afar. And in the short time we spend on this beautiful planet to never have my heart broken again, or feel sadness in my chest, how exceptionally boring would that be? So continue to choose to live a life filled with animosity towards those who left you behind and cowardliness disguised as self-preservation. I will live mine dancing freely while tears drip down my face and my feet are bleeding.” 

I later realized the person I was writing to was myself. I couldn’t spend another minute locked in my room, with a whole world outside covered in undiscovered beauty. I chose to live, not simply exist.