My Mum Knew I Was Having Suicidal Thoughts. Here’s How She Gave Me My Life Back.

“Everyone’s depressed,” my mother said when I told her about the sick dread and the lead in my legs that made taking a walk seem unbearable. At 32, I was living in the ice-encrusted city of Buffalo, New York, with its many shades of gray, slogging my way through a gloomy English Ph.D. program. The bed was my world, the only place where I could slip into the fleeting death of sleep.

“No, Mom,” I said. “I don’t think everyone is depressed.”

I’d seen evidence of this at a winter street fair: a man wearing a baby in a front holster close to his heart; the baby in a white snowsuit like a winter starfish; the way the man absentmindedly cradled her and kissed the top of her head; the pure blue water of peace in his eyes.

I knew the man was happy. At that moment, on that day, in that world, it was, for this man, good to be alive.

“They are depressed,” Mom insisted. “They just hide it.”

My mother, a high-strung Irish Bostonian, believed that life troubles should be endured without complaint. She had survived a bitter childhood where her stepfather had visited her room at night, and when she told my grandmother, my grandmother said: “You imagined it.” As an adult, my mother reasoned it was nothing to dwell on. 

With me, she was softer. When I was a child and feeling low, she used to pour me some milky tea in a china cup and invite me to tell her my worries. The taste of her love soothed me. But even then, her impulse was to shoo feelings away. Nothing was as bad as it seemed, now was it? When tea time was over, one was meant to get on with one’s life. 

“I don’t want to believe that everyone’s depressed,” I said. 

“Well, it’s true,” she insisted.

But I shook my head. Hope was an amulet that I gripped to stay alive.

My trouble started in college at the University of Vermont. It came on me like a flu. One minute, I was trudging to classes in the bright snow and conversing easily with friends. The next minute, I was mute in bed in the foetal position. I slept for 20 hours at a time, rising only to ransack my roommate’s store of Cheetos and Ring Dings. My mother was so frightened that she called the dean of my college and demanded that he do something. I was put into counselling.

The sorrow returned as a low-grade haze of numbness in my 20s. My mother and I were sitting in a car watching a sunset over Lake Champlain. I stared at the streaks of pink and gold as if they were trapped behind a pane of glass.

“I think it must be beautiful,” I said. “But I can’t feel it.”

She sipped her tea from a thermos. “You can choose to feel it,” she said.

When I moved to Buffalo, it followed me. During sunless days of trying to write a dissertation in a drafty apartment, a drumbeat of a voice berated me: You are a loser and have always been a loser. You are so fat, you are hideous. You won’t be able to do it. You will be publicly humiliated if you try. 

These thoughts were like little scorpions stinging my mind, and I would fantasise about opening up my skull and placing balm on my brain to soothe the pain. With the lows came brittle highs of tight-wire anxiety — an electrical hum — telling me that something catastrophic was on the verge of happening. Thoughts of death were constant. I considered the options carefully, taking bleak comfort in the planning. 

But what about my mother?

“You are my life,” she first told me when I was 3 years old, and she repeated it so often that it became knitted into my consciousness. As an only child, I knew it was my duty to stay alive for her. I was to be the emissary of happiness.

“Maybe it’s our family,” I said to my mom at last. “Maybe just everyone in our family is depressed.”

I had thought about this before. Irish melancholy is romanticised, but in my family, it was a banal truth. Drink was the main antidote. Amid hilarious stories, wit and rowdy fun at weddings, there was a thread of sorrow running through us.

Each of us sought a cure: drugs, work, food. But not doctors or prescribed medications. Those were taboo — reserved for those locked up in Mattapan, one of the cruel asylums in Massachusetts that got shut down after an explosive documentary on mental institutions in the 1970s.

“Maybe.” My mother finally conceded the thread of darkness in our family.

Because she knew the roads. She knew the deadened agony of hanging the laundry when the black dog was at the door. In the 1960s, she bought a red Karmann Ghia. She used to drive too fast. What was she leaving behind in the rearview mirror? Was it her stepfather? My parents’ disappointing marriage? Her unrealised dreams of being a writer?

“Your problem is you have no problems,” she said when I was in Buffalo and repelled one of her pep talks. I was in a state of anguish, and I could see that she was afraid.

I stopped going to her for help. I sought out a psychiatrist, medication and meditation in my 40s. I was diagnosed as bipolar. This explained the mysterious bouts of euphoria when I’d buy 14 pairs of shoes online and hide them from my boyfriend in the closet. I suddenly understood sleepless periods when I would write all night and be convinced that I was writing the great American novel, but later found the pages rambling and incoherent.

The medication has helped. I started walking to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden every day in spring to watch the flowers bloom — first purple crocuses, then red and yellow tulips, then pink cherry blossoms, and finally the miracle of lilacs.

I went into recovery for an eating disorder that had plagued me since I was 14. I never spoke of my diagnosis with my mother. I was afraid of her reaction. In the conversation, I imagined, she’d shake her head and say, “Don’t be so dramatic.”

My mental illness is a balancing act that requires constant maintenance. I get good sleep; I walk every day; I reach out to friends; and I’m honest with my doctors. But sometimes I get tired of being vigilant, get out of my routine, and slip back down. It feels so familiar to drape the robes of my depression around me again, and I’ll take to my bed. For years, I kept a store of pills in my drawer — just in case. 

One night, over a few glasses of wine, my mother and I relaxed into a state of truth-telling. Once I had stopped treating her as my therapist, our relationship had improved.

“I have one request,” she said slowly. 

I had no idea what was coming.

“If you are ever set on doing it — if you have really made your mind up — I’m asking you for one last thing: I want you to call me.”

This was the first time we had spoken of such things in years.

“I know how bad it gets,” she said. “I want you to call me. And if, after we talk, you still want to do it, I won’t try to stop you. It is your life to do with as you choose.”

We sipped our wine.

At that moment, I felt a flood of relief. She was finally acknowledging that what I was going through — what I had always gone through — was real. By making this request, my mother was putting a phone call between me and death.

With those six words — “I want you to call me” — I felt she was giving me my life back. Worrying about what my death would do to her had often stayed my hand,but I had never developed the desire to live for myself.

This conversation changed me, but it could not change the dynamic of my relationship with my mother completely. I was still afraid to tell her about my diagnosis. I mentioned it in passing one day, and it was met with silence.

My mother still believed in the power of will to chase away bad thoughts. She came from a different generation where emotional struggles were to be borne alone. I had watched her bear the abuse of her childhood in silence. I had watched her muscle through her grief when my father left. And when dementia slowly took her mind, I watched her rage, but never cry. Her way was an idea of strength that would never seek help. Her way was not my way. But she broke the silence between us and spoke of the things we must never speak about. And that saved me. As I learned in my recovery, “We are only as sick as our secrets.” 

My mother passed away three years ago. I no longer have a promise to keep. But in its place is a new promise to myself. I cling ferociously to life and sound the alarm whenever that resolve weakens. I learned how to sound the alarm on my own. The ability to be ferocious is something I learned from my mother. 

Julia Anne Miller is a writer in New York City whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon and Smithsonian. She has performed in such storytelling venues as “Stripped Stories” and “Speak Easy.” Her essay “Sharing a Cab and My Toes” was read by Greta Gerwig for the New York Times Modern Love podcast. She is working on a collection of essays entitled “My Life in Cake.” She can be found at https://julia-anne-miller.com.

Help and support:

• Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
• Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
• CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
• The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
• Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.