I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time, everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else…

…Be lonely Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”  – Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

Somehow relationships are always stitched into the seams of depression. We’re triggered into dopamine floods of ecstasy, and then, just as effortlessly, with broken hearts, plummet into the darkest version of black there is.

Love, and the often hidden addiction to love, can be very accurate reflections of the gaping holes in our souls. We mirror our pain in the ones we choose to become infatuated with.

The bad boy who destroys me with his manipulation and lies is a recurring messenger with different faces until I learn to see it has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with me.

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When I launched my blog two days ago, purposefully silently into the ether, I also got my first tattoo to seal the day and my mission forever. I will explain, through this post, why I chose the honest lines of soul ink that I did.

Yesterday when I had lunch with a friend, she noticed my tat immediately and asked what the significance of it was. As I explained my connection to the semi-colon project, and how close it hit to home, she asked me a question I wasn’t quite prepared to answer:

“I’ve been depressed. I’ve had some dark moments. But I’ve never once thought about taking my life. To be honest, I don’t understand why someone would ever feel the need to do that. Why? What goes through your mind in those moments?”

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Sometimes the pages of a particular book seem to morph into hands that take hold of your lungs and squeeze so hard it feels like you can barely breathe. “The Devil Within,” by Stephanie Merritt, holds just that much longer, so that by the end you are gasping for metaphorical air.

“Depressed people are hard to love and require extraordinary patience, just as sometimes it seems impossible to love and be loved from inside the darkest heart of depression. Depression is the loneliest place on earth; no one can reach you there, when you most need to be reached, and even the most steadfast, unswerving love of family and friends must remain an abstract knowledge until you emerge enough to feel again. To believe that life – your life – matters, that what you have to offer is worthwhile, when you are least able to feel it, requires nothing less than faith.”

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