Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 38

Re-Considering the Covers of the Cobble Stones Books

I’ve been increasingly aware over the last year that there is something lacking in the covers of my Cobble Stones books. I was pleased with the covers when I made them, but even then I thought they could probably be better. I didn’t know how to make them better using the skills I already possessed. I couldn’t even see why they were wrong, I just had a vague sense that they could be better somehow. I called it good enough and put the covers on the books. Then they didn’t sell. Not only that, but I watched during conventions when all the other covers on the table got perused or picked up and examined. The Cobble Stones covers did not. Ever. The only time those books sold was when someone who reads this blog came to the table specifically looking for them, or when people listened to me read out loud from one of them.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what to do differently, particularly as I’m contemplating releasing a new book in the series this year. I’m going to need another cover and I didn’t want to replicate the mistakes I made with the first two. So I did what I should have done before designing covers. I went out and found several books that are very like mine in tone and content. Then I stared hard at the covers. I found they all were mostly plain with a single image and then text. In comparison the cover of Cobble Stones 2011 is busy and confusing.



I chose to photograph photographs because that was within my skill set. I chose images that had actually featured on the blog, because that seemed appropriate to me. I thought that having lots of images reflected the episodic nature of the book’s contents. I tried to make sure the images had an implied journey. Up close you can see all those things. From more than two feet away, or at thumbnail size, the book just looks…brown with something jumbly going on.

In contrast, Kennison’s book grabbed me from across the room. The blue drew me in and the title captured me. In fact, that is how I found Kennison’s book. A teacher had it on her desk during a parent teacher conference. I kept sneaking glances at the cover and scribbled down the title at a moment when the teacher thought I was taking notes on my student.

Here is another stark comparison.



For the Cobble Stones 2012 book I was in a tearing hurry. It is even less cohesive than the first Cobble Stones cover. With the first cover I refined it multiple times and engaged the help of a friend with an artistic eye. We shot all sorts of arrangements and selected the best one. For the second cover, I did it all myself in the space of an afternoon. It shows. None of the images match to any of the essays that are inside it. All they share in common is the fact that they appeared on this blog during 2012. I suppose that is fine for a sampler book, but the cover image is supposed to be an advertisement for the contents, not an extension of them.

The cover for My Grandfather’s Blessings demonstrates to me the importance of a good subtitle. In creative non-fiction, memoir, and essay books the title catches the reader, the subtitle elaborates and sells the book. I need better titles than: Cobble Stones with a year appended. I need to make clear that these are books in the Cobble Stones series, but each book should have its own title and subtitle. I suspect the first two will always retain the titles they currently have. I intended them as samplers, and they’ve served that purpose. Incidentally this will also solve a problem I’ve had when packing and shipping orders. The titles of the books are so similar that I have to pay special attention to which book was ordered. In fact I put the words “snow” and “sand” into the item description just to help me differentiate. This is manageable with two books, but could get very problematic with more.

For the print editions of the first two books, I’m stuck with these covers for awhile. I have over a hundred copies of each book and it doesn’t make sense to spend money re-printing them when they still haven’t broken even. I’ll continue to sell them at conventions and use them for promotional purposes. The next Cobble Stones book will be different. I may try to do a more thematic arrangement of essays. I’ll definitely see if I can work with a cover designer who has the necessary skills to produce the right cover.

Of course the other reason the Cobble Stones books haven’t sold is because I’ve put so very little energy into marketing them. People can’t buy books if they don’t know the books exist. With both books, I kicked them out into the world with very little support because there were so many other things going on at the time. I hope I can do better for future books.

By the way, I highly recommend The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kennison and My Grandfather’s Blessings by Naomi Remen. They are both excellent.

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Strength of Wild Horses Advance Copies

With all the other things going on, I forgot to share the joyous news that I’ve received my advance copies of Strength of Wild Horses. They are beautiful. They match the original Hold on to Your Horses books in all the ways that I hoped they would. I am really excited for the rest of the books to arrive so that I can send them out into the world. Naturally the Kickstarter backers have already had a chance to read the book. I sent them all a PDF, as I promised. I really like fulfilling promises. So happy.

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Thoughts on Some Things That Happen Inside Heads

I’m not good enough, that is the background music playing in my head this afternoon. It colors my writing, colors my work, and brings me to near tears when poor Link had to wait a long time for me to come and pick him up because I miscalculated a timing issue. The music plays, but I find myself turning to the conductor and confronting him. So I’m not good enough, what does that have to do with anything. Also, good enough for what? Some weird warped standard in my head? Who, exactly, is keeping score here? I’d like it if the confrontation stopped the music and made the conductor slink away, but the music stays like a song stuck in my head which I can mostly ignore.

A young mother came and sat next to me at church. She is my visiting teacher and wants to know when she can come see me, as she is assigned to do. This is one of the programs of my church that I love. The women of the congregation are paired up and asked to go visit a third sister once per month. It builds friendships and community connections in some really good ways. It also adds things to my schedule. I pulled out my phone so that I could look at the calendar. After tapping through the next few days the young mother said “Wow, you’re really busy.” For a moment I pondered her life. She lives in a stay-at-home-mom world with one toddler to her charge. I suspect her hours are every bit as busy as mine, but her tasks are not the sort that get written on calendars. Mine are. I have calendars and lists. I have appointments and carpools. I wonder how my life appears to her. I had a life like hers a decade ago. I enjoyed it, but I don’t want to go back. I’m enjoying this life too. Funny how I can write that and mean it, so soon after writing about not feeling good enough. My head holds paradoxes all the time.

Kiki called yesterday. The minute I saw her name on my phone, I knew something was wrong or at least urgent. When she reaches out for social reasons she uses computer based communication methods rather than calling. She’d lost her stylus for her wacom tablet. She knew it was somewhere in her dorm room, could I please help her find it. The room, Kiki, and stylus were all over two hundred miles away from me. My ability to help was limited, so I walked her through the logic behind trying to find something that has been misplaced. Finding things is less about moving physical objects and more about tracing the thought processes that led to the item being put in an odd place. I know Kiki pretty well. Five minutes into our conversation, she found the stylus. I don’t know if I actually deserve credit for the find, but I’m going to claim it, because the story is fun.

We’ve reached the point in Patch’s cello playing where he does not always immediately drop what he’s doing and go practice when I ask him to. This has more to do with his natural disinclination to switch activities than a dislike for music practice. So I sat down with Patch and we agreed on a fixed time for cello. It comes right after dinner and right before homework. This is a good placement because dinner already interrupts and he can slide into practicing without any trouble. Of course it means that I now have yet another reason why I should be better about supplying dinner on a regular schedule.

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Recalibrating the Finances

I’ve been co-managing a business for more than twelve years now. Since the business continues to support our family, evidence suggests that I have at least a minimal level of competence at the tasks that I must do. However I’m constantly aware that there are huge gaps in my knowledge, because I learn things as they become necessary instead of having a comprehensive knowledge. This means that sometimes I’m doing things the hard way. Once I had a successful way to get something done, I never stopped to wonder if there could be a better one. As one my goals for this year, I’ll be trying to redress this. I’ll be learning how to make reports and graphs so that more of our business decisions can be data driven rather than instinct driven. We have pretty good instincts, but those instincts will only get better if they’re fed data.

Along with trying to make our business flow more quantifiable, I’m also re-vamping our family finances. Last year we took on some significant additional expenses (college tuition, ongoing mental health care for family members, lessons) and we changed the way that we handle paychecks. Last year we had a large monetary influx that helped us cover all of that. We won’t have a comparable influx this year, so it is time to recalibrate our monthly budget. We don’t want to accidentally run ourselves further into debt instead of slowly digging ourselves out.

Both of these projects required me to spend most of my Saturday deep into accounting. I dug into historical records to create profit and loss sheets for each book. I sorted through papers to make sure I had everything in order. I sat down and re-learned the budgeting system in Quicken so that I can be checking our status every week, month, and quarter. I’ve assigned myself additional work for each accounting day, but I’ve turned it into routine work instead of stressful work, which is important. Stressful work gets avoided, routine work gets done.

Part of this recalibration is shifting our spending habits downward a bit. We don’t have to go into crisis mode, but I do need to dust off some of my frugal living habits and make sure that we’re using our resources wisely. This means I need to be paying attention on a smaller scale than I have been for the past while. I need to be pausing before buying. Sometimes I’ll buy anyway, but that pause is important because it allows us to prioritize. To use a metaphor, we don’t want to spend all our money on popcorn and not be able to afford movie tickets. At the end of all the mucking around with numbers, I feel better. I have a clearer picture of where we are financially and where we need to be headed. Now I need to go make dinner instead of waiting until the last minute and then buying one.

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Quick Reminder

This Livejournal feed is sent over by the cross poster on my website, onecobble.com Sometimes there are communication difficulties and the cross posting fails. If seeing all of the posts is important to you, I recommend reading directly on my site, or following @onecobble on twitter.

Balancing Current Happiness Against Future Plans

When Kiki was a sophomore in high school she nearly broke for a little bit. Utah is strange in that freshman year is spent at the junior high school. Sophomore year is when the kids start high school and the switch was really rough on Kiki. It was so rough that we found ourselves in a school administrator’s office saying that we wanted Kiki to drop out of one of her classes so that she could get extra sleep. The administrator advised against it. Making up lost school credit is difficult. But we chose the option which allowed Kiki to retain a good life balance for that year even though we knew it could adversely affect her later.

When Kiki was signing up for classes for her junior year, her teacher gave her a slip of paper saying that her next math class should be pre-calculus. Those teacher recommendations were spoken of as edicts in the group scheduling meeting. “You must sign up for the math class that your teacher recommends.” Except that we had spent all of sophomore year struggling with Algebra 2. Kiki only survived it because an adult friend came over and tutored her at least once per week. We could not picture Kiki having a happy year if pre-calculus was part of her life. I was very ready to get off of the math emotional roller coaster. So we put Kiki into accounting. It was not college prep. It would not help with her ACT. But it filled a math credit and was likely to be very useful for her long-term life plans. We chose what was right for her growth at that time instead of for an imagined future.

The moment kids hit high school, it seems like everything is aimed at getting them into college. I know much of this effort is because some kids do not think of the future at all unless someone really gets in their faces. It is good for kids to have an inkling of the big picture, yet it is more important that they make choices based on what they need to develop as knowlegable human beings rather than because it will look good on a college application. The truth is that kids who are living life fully and who are growing and developing will look good on a college application. They may not get into high-pressure schools, but then maybe a high-pressure school is not the best choice for their ongoing growth and learning.

Despite the fact that Kiki had to make up a credit and that she took accounting instead of pre-calculus, Kiki made it into college. She even got a scholarship. The school she entered was only medium competitive to get in, and she is very happy there. It is exactly the school that she needs.

I keep this all in mind as I’m helping Link figure out what classes he should take next year. There are so many factors to weigh, because I want to foster current growth while not closing off future possibilities. Yet I find that I don’t have to carry that “won’t get into college” panic, because I know that we’ll find ways to make things work so that he can keep growing through high school and beyond.

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Finding Happiness in the Muddle

In my head there are four versions of today. There is the day when I got out of bed early and focused on book design and layout work with only brief breaks for meals. There is the gardening day where I spent all my hours outside rescuing my flower beds from the dead masses of last year’s weeds. There is the day where I cleaned all of the things, setting our entire house into order. There is the day where I relish the fact that my kids are out of school and we go do something fun. There is a hidden fifth version where I run off to visit Antelope Island or hide and write all day long.

The day that I had was an unfortunate mish mash of parts of all four days. (Sadly that fifth day remained illusory.) Because it was a mish mashed day I arrive at the end of it feeling like I did not use my hours well, which is not my preferred feeling at the end of a Monday. The truth is that I always have four days worth of stuff that would be useful to do in each day. I can only thin out the tasks by eliminating things which truly matter to me, so mostly I just bounce from one thing to another trying to make sure that each thing gets some attention during the week. It sort of works. Except when it doesn’t.

Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to acknowledge the importance of the things I am getting done rather than only seeing what they cost me. For example, there is a writing retreat that I would love to attend later this year. At the moment it looks like I will not be going. This makes me sad. I could focus on that sadness and make a huge list of all the events I have to miss for lack of child care. But the reason I miss them is because ensuring proper supervision for my kids is more important to me than any event. I am not willing to settle for less, so I have made a choice. When I feel trapped by my life, it is often because there is something more important that I’m not willing to give up.

I apply this knowledge to my task list. I try to see the value in the things I get done rather than the long list of things that I did not. It still wears at me. I don’t always succeed. Particularly when I see an urgent task and note that the due date was a month ago. I never get around to priority number five because I’m constantly handling the things that rotate through priorities one through four. I’ve stopped believing that I’m going to catch up, because this constant stream of things is my life right now. And it is a good life. I choose it in the moments long ago when I chose to have four children and then to support Howard in being a cartoonist. I chose it when I decided to start a blog and to self publish picture books. I chose it when we kickstarted projects. Granted, at the moments of choosing I didn’t really understand how these things would converge all at once to give us some really busy years. There are also other things that add to the stress of my life that I did not choose, but had to deal with nonetheless. I would really love to have a few winters without major illness. That would be nice. We have ongoing mental health issues with several family members. I don’t get to choose all the things.

But of the things I did choose, I could un-choose some of them. The un-choosing would have far-reaching consequences, most of which would make my life more difficult and far more miserable. So I muddle along and try to find happiness in the muddle, because when my life is less busy (and I will have less busy times eventually) I do not think that happiness will just be sitting in the midst of the empty hours waiting for me to collect it. I will only find happiness in empty hours if I brought it with me. This means I must learn to live in happiness now, while my life is busy.

It is not easy, particularly at the end of a mish mash day, but I shall continue to try.

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Photos at Sunset

Our outing to the park for sunset photos was a success.

The kids particularly like the odd swinging structure we found in a corner of the park.

When the light dimmed and the air got chilly, we traversed back home.

These were photos that I took. Some of Link’s are better than mine, but he’s not going to process his until tomorrow.

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The Messy Desk of Many Projects in Process

This was my desk about halfway through this morning.

My desk is not usually this buried in piles of stuff, (that would drive me insane) but yesterday I was in the middle of copy edits for LOTA which spread out everywhere. The arrangements of those papers would allow me to pick up where I left off. Then this morning we ordered some lapel pins, which poked the financial section of my brain and I could tell I was going to fret over the bill for those pins until I opened up the accounting and proved to my brain that yes, we really do have the money and this is a good idea. So you can see me mid-accounting on top of being mid-copy edits. You can also see a stack of Strength of Wild Horses art, a manila folder full of postage and invoices ready to be shipped from the warehouse, a returned package, the black binder with the rough cut of Massively Parallel, and lots of other reminder notes. I took this photo at the maximum messy point of the day. Within an hour all the financial stuff was cleared off. Within two, I’d taken care of the shipping things. The copy edits are still using most of the desk landscape because I’ll tackle them tomorrow.

Despite the messy desk, things are going very well. I don’t know if we’ve caught up after being sick, but I’m not really trying to keep score anymore. Mostly I’m just trying to make sure that each day contains the right mix of work, parenting, house stuff, writing time, and relaxing time. It’s been pretty effective the last couple of weeks, so I’ll continue.

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Married to Depression

I started writing this post six months ago. I started again four months ago. This week I opened it up again. It has been very difficult to get the words right, but then I realized that getting them right is impossible. There is no way that I can convey everyone, regardless of their experiences, what it is like to be married to someone who struggles with depression. The audience is too diverse and the experience is as well. My thoughts and feelings on this matter maybe similar to that of another spouse, or they might be quite different. It is impossible for me to get it right, because there is no “right” when discussing a subjective experience. I can only write about my experiences and hope that something in the story is useful to other people. When I look at it that way, the only way to get it wrong is to not write the post. So I wrote it. All 3000+ words of it. The first part is personal history for context. The rest is things I think will help other people in a similar situation. I put those things in bold for those who want to skim.

Howard and I have been married for twenty years. It was not all bliss. Parts of it were gut-wrenchingly hard. In hindsight, many of those horribly difficult parts were directly related to Howard’s struggles with anxiety and depression. Other difficult parts were directly related to my personal stash of neuroses and emotional baggage. Yet our marriage is good. Our life together is more than good. We have built a partnership through the years that sustains us, a business, and our four children. Part of the reason our marriage is still good twenty years in, is because we pulled together when things got hard instead of pulling apart. That required conscious decision from both of us and bucketfuls of forgiveness that we splashed all over everything.

Howard is a bright spot in my life. He makes me laugh. He makes my days better, which is why it hurts so much when this amazing person vanishes into himself and radiates despair or anger. Suddenly instead of having a life partner who is carrying half the load, or even saving me because I’m stumbling, I have a person who is faltering and struggling to carry only a fraction of what he usually does. Not only that, but he radiates the bleakness and it permeates the house, actually creating additional stress and strain. These days we have good strategies for minimizing the impact of a depressive episode. That was not always the case.

The first time I really got to see inside Howard’s pit of despair was on our honeymoon. I was twenty, still trying to figure out who I was as an adult. Still trying to choose which life patterns I wanted to emulate from my family of birth and how I wanted to do things differently. I’d been around depression before with one of my siblings, but my family did not name it. It was the elephant in the room around which we all danced, trying to create a peaceful life. I carried that approach into my marriage. I knew Howard had mood swings. I’d witnessed some during the course of our engagement. But there we were, about halfway through our honeymoon, laying in the dark together while Howard cried and talked. He was letting me further into his heart than he’d ever let anyone before and it was terrifying for both of us. I stared into this deep, dark, seemingly bottomless pit and knew it could swallow me whole if I was not careful. It could swallow us both. And I did not want that to happen.

The next morning the bleakness had passed and my wonderful Howard was back, but I did not forget that the pit was a possibility.

Our family, the new one that Howard and I made together, danced with the elephant for decades. We built habits in the hopes of increasing the good times and reducing the bad ones. We looked for cyclical patterns. We evaluated. Early on I might have suggested therapy of some kind, but Howard had done therapy following the death of his parents and he reported it hadn’t done much for him. We were smart people, surely we could figure out the right diet, or exercise program, or spiritual regimen. All of these things were good management tools and we used them. Sometimes they helped. Other times they were powerless. We were powerless.

It was not until eighteen months ago that we named the elephant. That was when we finally saw this thing that had always been in the middle of our lives and said it was

A. real

B. a problem

C. something we should address.

That shift came because of many things, the most obvious being when our friend Robison Wells began speaking publicly about the mental illnesses that plague him. Rob and a couple of other friends showed Howard that admitting a problem could be a step toward better answers. There was also quite a lot of spiritual guidance and inspiration. Howard and I are religious people and we believe that we were guided. We also wish we’d been a little less thick headed to inspiration when we were younger.

The other thing that shifted was me. I’d been sorting some old emotional baggage (because of inspiration) and finally realized that my job was not to fix Howard, nor to save him. I was to love him no matter what. In fact that was a very clear inspiration directly to me, that Howard is strong and that my job was to love him, not fix him. After realizing that, I changed my answers. When Howard was filled with despair and said “I’m broken.” I stopped saying “No you’re not. It’s fine.” I allowed broken and suddenly let’s get this fixed became an option. Howard no longer had to live up to my need for everything to be fine. He finally had the space to consider and then seek treatment. This is exactly what I mean when I said that some of the difficulties were caused by me, even though I am not the depressed person. He worked so hard to be fine for me.

Howard has a problem with the chemicals in his brain. They sometimes make him feel like a complete failure as a human being, even when everything in our lives suggests exactly the opposite. It means that yesterday was happy, but today is miserable even though nothing has changed overnight. We tried all of the non-medicinal options for nineteen years and we still found ourselves occasionally trampled by the unnamed elephant. It was not good for us, nor for our kids. But a year ago things changed. That was when Howard saw a doctor and we started fixing the chemistry by applying medication, and it worked.

When I say “it worked” that doesn’t mean everything is all better now. Howard still has depressed days, but they aren’t as often and they don’t get as bad. Visits to the pit of despair are a rare occurrence, where they used to be regular. Howard has had the chance to experience a steady happiness where life feels generally good. More important, when Howard is having a bad brain chemistry day, we see it, we name it, and we know how to adjust for it. This is quite different than trying to adjust for an elephant that no one wants to admit exists.

If you have a loved one, a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, partner, who is depressed, and you want to help, there are some things I think you should know. The first and most important is this: You can’t fix it. There are dozens of ways that depression can be managed, healed, or even cured depending on the causes of it, but you can’t fix it for them. The depression exists in your loved one, maybe it is chemical, maybe it is situational, but it is inside them, not you. I tried to fix Howard’s depression. Believe me I tried. For eighteen years of marriage I adjusted all of the things I could conceive of adjusting in the hope it would prevent or alleviate the dark days. He’d have a dark day and I would clean all of the things because then a dirty kitchen wouldn’t add to the stress. I’d manage his schedule. I’d take over chores that were usually his. I’d hug him when the shape of the darkness allowed for that. (Sometimes it didn’t and he would flee from all touch.) I argued with him when the dark manifested as verbalized self-loathing.

My efforts helped some. I could see that they did, which is why I kept trying harder. I kept hoping that I could exert control over this thing. My efforts also masked the problem. When your loved one says “I’m broken.” It feels like the right answer is “No you’re not. Of course you’re not. Everyone has bad days.” The more powerful and helpful answer is to say. “Yes you’re broken. This depression is not normal. I love you anyway.” I love you anyway is the answer which allows the depressed person stop being strong, and start seeking help. I love you anyway gives the depressed person permission to change instead of demanding a status quo.

As soon as Howard decided that maybe he was willing to see a doctor, I did the research. I found out who we should go to. I made the appointment. I continue to make appointments for him from time to time. Because making an appointment is an act of will. It feels like an admission of illness. Making the appointment is a barrier that can be really hard to clear. I schedule half of the things which end up on Howard’s calendar anyway, so me doing this is a natural extension of what I already do. The frustrating piece was sitting on a waiting list for three months before they would make an appointment. (There’s a shortage of mental health professionals in Utah.) I went with Howard to the first appointment, but not any of the others. Again, this was me helping him over the first hurdle. After that I needed to stay out of the way because Howard has to own this process.

That is the second thing I want you to know: the depressed person has to control their own healing process or it will not work. I suppose it is possible to force someone to take drugs, but that doesn’t make them want to change the way that they’re relating to the depression. Howard had a huge emotional process to go through with taking medication. He had to grieve. I don’t know why daily medication requires grief, but I felt the same thing when I had to begin thyroid medication. It feels like weakness, or failure. It feels unfair. I see lots of friends who take psychoactive medications making snarky comments about the meds that they are on. Howard started taking the medicine and at first he didn’t want to see that it made a difference. Then he could see the difference and was angry at the medicine for working, because it meant he needed it. Slowly Howard is learning the ways that the medicine helps him. He’s learning that it is a useful tool and that it is okay to use all of the available tools in dealing with this.

Naming the depression changed everything. The moment that we looked at Howard’s depression and said “maybe this isn’t normal.” It changed all of our conversations on the subject. We started talking about the depression as if it were a phenomena that could be observed, which it is. We developed a taxonomy of sorts to describe the different variations. Howard directly asked me to be his spotter with the medications because he is very afraid of slipping into abusing medicine. He and I used calm times to discuss how to handle depressed times. I began to pay closer attention to the sorts of things he would say when he was sliding into depression and I learned when gently pressing him to take a pill was the right choice. I don’t have to press as much as I used to do, because Howard has learned to watch his own brain and identify when he needs the medicine. It took lots of practice. I am very much a part of Howard’s management process, but he is the director of it.



Even with excellent treatment there will still be hard days. Some depressions can be worked through and resolved in a permanent way. We may yet find a way to do that for Howard, for now we still have to manage the down times. The hardest days are the ones where I’m not feeling completely stable myself. I could be ill, under stress, tired, or just feeling a little down. If Howard hits a depressive patch during those days, it feels massively unfair. I find myself angry at him for being depressed, even though I know he would never choose this. There was one day where all manner of little things went wrong, and I was ready to cry. That was the day when two of my kids had emotional meltdowns simultaneously and Howard was having a medium-down sort of day. I lamented to Howard how unfair it is that I never get a turn to fall apart while someone else picks up the pieces.

The “never” part isn’t true, of course. There have been many times when Howard has rescued me and taken care of me. This is one of the reasons the depressive days hit so hard. I depend upon Howard. He handles his things, I handle mine. We’re both full to capacity with things to do, but without warning Howard will be unable to do his things. He’ll feel like he’s never going to be able to do his things again. He’ll say that to me as he’s sorting the thoughts in his head. And the horrible little voice of anxiety will whisper in the back of my head “what if he’s right?” Right now depression shows up and lays him flat for a day or two. But we don’t know why it shows up. We have no way to make it go away. What if some time it doesn’t leave? This is the horrible fear that I lock away in the back of my brain during the hard days. I see the depression and I know it could destroy us, because when Howard is deep into a depressed day, he is different. His thoughts and attitudes are different. His capabilities shift. The Howard I love and depend on is gone and all I can do is wait for him to come back.

So that is a thing you should know too. Depression can be traumatic and terrifying for the loved ones because they are forced to face being powerless. Of course, that one is unlikely to be news to you. But it means that you are at a higher risk for anxiety and depression yourself. Be on the lookout for that. Be aware that you might also need help and treatment. It is possible that the best thing you can do for your loved one is to go see a therapist or spiritual advisor yourself. You need a support network, because this is a hard load to carry. Faith is a huge part of my support network. I have conversations with God about Howard’s depression all the time. I feel like we’re partners in helping take care of this amazing person we both love. I truly believe that any path that Howard walks toward eliminating depression forever will be an inspired walk of faith. I hope that we’re on that path already even though I can’t tell how far we’ve come or how far we have left to go. But if this is a lifetime-long walk, I’m okay with that. I didn’t sign on to be married to Howard just for the easy stuff.

Preserve your own balance. In order not to be pulled into depression myself on the days that Howard is down, I have to actively shield myself against his moods. This is hard, because I am a naturally empathetic person and I am highly attuned to the emotional states of my family members. Sometimes this means that I need to have physical space from Howard when he’s depressed. Sometimes Howard provides that space deliberately in acts of heroism. In recent memory we had a family party on a day when Howard was depressed. It was the first time I’d been able to enjoy the company of my siblings in a very long time. Howard hid himself away, keeping his bleakness contained so that I could enjoy the event. I recognized his sacrifice and told him that I did. The verbal recognition was critical so that he knew that I knew that he was making a special effort for me. Also so that he knew that I was aware of his depression and he was not abandoned with it. It was our way of working together to make sure that the depression did not ruin a party. We hope for future parties where Howard and I can both attend.

Listen without judgment. This is probably the most important function that I serve for Howard when he is depressed. He needs to process and think through what he is feeling. Over the years we’ve learned how to communicate the depression without wallowing in it. It is rare that I’m able to say something that alleviates the depression, but not being left alone with it is a huge help.

Talking about it can help. There is a silence that blankets anything that hints at mental weakness or illness. People are afraid to admit that they’re struggling with mental health issues. Some of those fears are founded in reality. Employers think twice before hiring someone with admitted mental health struggles. People look askance. The stigma is real. But part of what helped convince Howard to get help was when he first started talking about the depression with trusted friends. Part of his ongoing process is to speak up on the internet when he’s having a bad week. The responses to those posts are overwhelming support from others who have walked similar paths and thanks from people who are grateful that someone is willing to speak up. This is the reason I wrote this (very long) post. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs it. And because once I began it, I realized that I needed to say all of it. I’m certain there will be more things to say on a different day, but this is my last thought for you right now. Hang in there. You and your loved one can get through this and find a better place. Howard and I did.

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