Snorkeling in a depressive sea

I found the sharks

You’ve been there. You’ve got a straw deep into a thick, ice cold $5 milkshake and no matter how hard you suck, nothing comes through the straw. You spin the straw, put it up and down. The pressure in your head builds and the insides of your cheeks couldn’t be any closer together, but you keep sucking. Because it’ll be worth it when you taste that first trickle of vanilla on your tongue.

Right now, I’m sucking. So hard.

I’m snorkeling in a depressive sea and all I can see for miles is… more fucking sea.

The distance between where I am and where I want to be feels so unbearably far. I’d say insurmountable but then my friend Jackie would remind me that shit’s meant to be surmounted. And he’d be right. In theory.

And I can’t help it but to think that all of this — the depression, the metaphorical snorkel and sea, the distance — that it all has to do with the dawning of my big 5-0 on December 10.

And I’m supposed to be this hopeful queer hick. The go-getter and fire-upper and the one who says the quippy phrase others leave to ferment in their minds. I’m the pie chart bitch and the f-bomb and the sentient middle finger drawing the line between your unbelievable human hotness and those who dare try to dim your light.

But right now, I’m trying to figure out if it’s too late.

Too.

A small fucking word with such unearned power. Three letters but it’s really only two because one is a rerun and yet here I am looking at it like it’s the Hoover Dam and I’m supposed to scale it with the grace of a gazelle or some cape-clad bastard with an entire movie franchise behind him.

This depressive sea is the world’s largest collection of toos and they’re circling me like sharks.

When menopause made my hormone head for Fiji without me, my waist got too wide and my jeans, too small.

Because I’m too old and can’t expect my body to “be what it once was.” Let’s not talk about the Class-A human who uttered those words. Like, my lower back is MySpace and I really need it to be TikTok. And yeah, Tom unfriended me*.

*I refuse to explain this because IYKYK**.

**Also refuse to explain IYKYK.

I have too little saved for retirement and too much debt to save more and I’m too far into my marriage to dare tell my spouse the truth about what I really spent during the early throes of the pandemic because I was too anxious/depressed/scared/lonely to tell him that what I really needed would never be delivered by Amazon. I’m scared that I kept quiet too long about how lonely I’ve been and now it’s too late to say that the thing I need more than anything is next to me each night but still — somehow — out of reach.

I’ve let the toos pile up like a wad of orphaned socks in a drawer — and I’ve let them pile up so long that I can’t close the drawer. I have to look at them and deal with them because on top of this jammed-open drawer, I’m about to hit my expiration date in less than five weeks. 50. Ten years past my last fuckable day.

And what’s most baffling is that I’m too fucking smart to believe any of this but yet…

A part of me does.

And if I could, I’d grab a magnifying mirror, home in it on this fucked up part of myself clogged with toos, and excise it. I’d cut it out and post a nicely filtered pic on the Instas. The ‘gram. The Twitters and book of faces. And I’d be able to show you that I HAD FOUND IT.

I’d hold it high overhead and scream in my best Braveheart that I’d found the absolute fuckweasel that had burrowed its way into my rational self and made me believe that the toos now run my life.

And maybe you’d chime in that you’d excised your very own fuckweasel, quit snorkeling, hailed the Coast Guard and founded a new organic peanut fiber business that looked on target to end world hunger (and peanut allergies, wut) by 2027 and oh hai just took down a round of funding by Christ himself and his 18 queer disciples (because we have to be extra about everything).

Take that, evangelicals!

But I’m not there yet.

Today, I’m snorkeling in a depressive sea and I hope touch the shore soon. But what I couldn’t do is keep hiding from you because I was afraid of being too down when you come to me for the up.

And maybe the “up” today is knowing that it’s a heap of toos I have to contend with and knowing a shovel’s gonna be hard to come by out here in the sea. So I’d best start looking for a different way out of this. Not to mention, some goddamn flippers.

xoxo.

E.