Dear Husband of Chronically Depressed Wife

you didn't sign up for any of this. (TW: mental illness)

anvil.

Dear Burdened,

I’d like a peek inside your mind to see how it works, more than I wish to know how my own mind operates.

Your mind is a marvel to me—the way it never malfunctions. The way you keep moving. Your durability. How you take on prepping, cooking and serving dinner after I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head. Like it’s just part of the package, even though dinner is my job and my duty unfulfilled (it’s our job, our life, our home, you told me, to try and free from my mental trappings and self-inflicted shame).

How you are the purest form of content, just watching the NBA or the PGA, fixing the toilet, and reading quietly in the early Sunday morning hours.

I can only do these things on a good day. And today was not a good day.

Today I was a burden again; angry for no apparent reason (the world), horizontal and asleep in the middle of the day (one of your two days off), my eyes affixed to the walls like I had no brain activity (I didn’t, which was a relief).

I hate being this way. Especially because I was doing really well; tending to the garden, checking things off my to-do, staying hydrated, remembering to defrost the chicken.

I want you to know that I am so sorry. Sorry I’m unwell. Sorry I’m a burden. Sorry I’m not effervescent and fluid, that I’m more like an anvil sinking to the sea floor. If you wanted to cut the rope binding your ankle to the anvil, I’d understand. I would watch you ascend through every shade of blue until you got to the shallows, broke through the watery surface—finally able to breathe! Then let Circe take me.

It’s hopefully clear to you all I’ve done to not be this way, to not weigh you or our family down. And yet.

I walk into and out of the rooms of the house like a specter. I consume, water, food, electricity, I drive the car, but the proverbial needle doesn’t move, and I’m wandering in some gray, liminal space. Everything feels difficult, so difficult.

How do you do it? How do you keep going with a smile on your face and with purpose, carrying me on your back like an albatross?

I want to be someone else for you. Someone worthy of your efforts, someone who can match your energy level, someone who doesn’t live in dread or wake up some days wishing they’d never woken up at all.

But you say, We’re in this together. I love you.

I guess this is what love is. Someone refusing to let your hand slip from theirs. Even though I don’t feel I deserve to be loved like that, I am loved like that. And doesn’t some benevolent force know better than me?

Depression is the anvil, but sunlight somehow still reaches me on the sea floor. That image—the ombres of blue, the piercing, vertical, sun rays illuminating the sand I lay upon, creeping slowly until they shine on my floating body, too. And you, cutting the rope from the steel weight, needing air so badly but refusing oxygen unless I take the hand you’re offering me.

So I take it. And you pull me out.

Just like you always do.

hand underwater, reaching.