Last week Aaron Henkin interviewed me about my memoir in verse, The Altar of Innocence, on The Signal, a radio show he produces for WYPR in Baltimore. The call came on Monday morning at 9am, and he wanted me in the studio the next day to tape the show that would air on Friday. Of course, I said an immediate “Yes!” to his generous offer, then I went to work, barely able to keep my mind on the tasks in front of me. I’d been on the radio a few times before, so it wasn’t the interview that scared me. It was the subject matter.

Depression. Self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. Suicidal ideation. A car crash. Electro-convulsive therapy. Hospitalization for depression. Verbal abuse. The silence surrounding trauma. Keeping secrets. Why, you might ask. Why talk about all of those dark and private things? Many have told me, “They’re in the past. Let them go. Move on.”

All of those things are true. And to keep silent about them is to allow them to have power over you. In AA literature they tell you, “You’re only as sick as the secrets you keep.” Well, I’m not “sick” anymore—and now I strongly reject that label for my mother’s and my own experiences with depression, anxiety, and self-medicating. My mother and I were doing the best we could to cope with deep and painful wounds. Trying to live day after day—take care of children, cook meals, run households, even run a business (in my case). Trying to carry the awful weight of sadness that enshrouded our spirits. Trying to find some light.

Sadly, in my mother’s case, she never seemed to be able to find her way back to the woman she was before she fell into depression. And neither she, nor my father, seemed to have any understanding about the deadly interplay of psychiatric medicines and alcohol. Neither one understood how that daily cocktail could keep my mother imprisoned in her darkness when she so wanted to escape it.

I never knew my mother as the delightful free-spirit my dad used to reminisce about when the two of us sat in the kitchen and had a few moments of vulnerability together. I never knew the woman who played tennis or designed amazing dresses. I never even saw my mother paint anything, except a room in the house.

But, as the oldest daughter, I was often privy to her pain. She confided in me. She depended on me—to cook dinner or take care of my siblings. She sobbed in my arms.

How does a young girl hold all of that pain inside and still walk into the world and do what a child, an adolescent, needs to do? How does one keep silent about the pain all around her? Sadly, the times I grew up in offered no answers. No comfort. The only thing I knew about therapy was that my mother went once a week, and we never saw any improvement.

My pain, the pain of my father, the pain of my siblings was never disclosed in such a way that we could get help. So, when I experienced my own multiple depressions, finally culminating in a major depression that lasted four years, I had a lot of pain to unpack. And a lot of shame.

Brené Brown defines the difference between shame and guilt. She says that guilt is feeling bad about what you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are. I went back to the journal I kept for the duration of my depression, I found page after page filled with my own feelings of shame for experiencing depression.

And writing my book was about unpacking all of that pain. Hanging it like laundry in the warm sunshine of love. Finally realizing the truth of what Carl Jung tells us when he wrote:

“I am not what happened to me.
I am what I choose to become.”

That’s why I wrote The Altar of Innocence. That’s why I spoke on the radio. That’s why I am letting go of secrets.