My oldest step-sister and I have always been close. Maybe it’s because we’re both the “eldest” but mostly, I think we’re just wired in similar ways. In a few years, she’ll finish her PhD in Social Work in Calgary. Until then, her trips to Toronto and ours together are the best kind of time we spend. Professionally, she’s spent a good chunk of her adult life helping patients and their families transition from care at SickKids into the wider hospital world. She’s a dancer, she can make anyone photogenic, and she has a mind-boggling phobia of bananas. She loves Nutella like it’s laced with something, and with five years between us, she was everything I wanted to be when I was learning what growing up meant.
About ten years ago, her mental health declined, and held her down. She’s been carrying the weight of a heavy mind for a long time. Like many others, she often carries it silently. She goes home and it reawakens without the distractions of the day. It’s a pair of shoes that blister you but that you can’t take off when you step into your home, your throbbing feet remind you they’re there. Depression has a way of deadening your spirit no matter how powerfully alive you were born with the potential to be. Still, some manage to ignore the cold fires behind their sternums to put out those in others. My little demon feels like that, at least. It gets colder the darker I get, it pulls on life instead of pushing it to its limit. On my darkest days, I would and sometimes still shiver. My sister cries, and slips into sleep, a pause before she wakes and braces for a new day. We all wear the badge in a different way.
I think it makes it easier to forget you’re in pain, when you’re helping someone else succeed in the ways you have the power to aid. When I was at my sickest, in fourth year of my undergrad, I was offered a job as a teaching assistant for a cell biology course. I had been working in that same class as a volunteer for years, and my boss had no idea how bad things had gotten. I said yes, even though I knew full well I could barely keep it together to get to class, let alone teach other kids. Still, even in my haze, I knew I needed more than just me to live for.
I spent hours preparing for class, magnetizing glass slides so the DNA in our samples would stick to them. Some creatures produce their own light through chemical reactions. Like little fireflies, the shrimp we were experimenting on naturally glowed bright blue under our microscopes. Part of my job was to dampen that natural bioluminescence. Without putting out their light at least partially, the students wouldn’t have been able to see the green and red chemicals they’d need for their experiments. We never found a method that worked completely, but we managed to turn the lights down just enough for the experiment to be worth doing.
By year’s end, I had taught 48 students how to put droplets of neurotoxic dye on those tiny, preserved crustaceans. When our experiments were done, I would watch my students’ faces light up the first time they looked through the microscope and saw their handiwork glowing, blown up before their learning eyes. When I lectured, I learned quickly what the signs of their confusion were, sometimes I’d call on them before they could raise their hands, and I felt good when I saw them struggle and was able to stop it. I was doing jack shit for myself, but I was doing my best for them. I told my boss at the end of that year, when I had the strength to step back and see what saved me, that teaching was why I hadn’t dropped out. Being good at something kept enough of me alive to save the rest. It’s been a few years since then, and the sharpness of that time has worn away. What never faded was my understanding of what kept me afloat, glowing dimly in a dark sea.
This past December, my family of seven, with three partners in tow, took our first vacation together. We washed up on the beaches of Antigua, sweating profusely, intensely relieved to find that the accommodation we booked actually existed. The potholes we’d hit on the road to the place had put a dent in our confidence that it did. We stepped out of our ten-seater van, and it took my siblings and I about 2 minutes to overcome our motion sickness and make our way into the ocean. Our Canadian skin was unprepared for the sunshine, but we only had one nasty sunburn incident all week when one of my in-laws accidentally took a too-long nap on a lounge chair.
By day, I spent my time searching for wildlife in every corner I could crawl into. I have always loved nature, and marine life is an even more niche and profound obsession. On our second afternoon, I nearly died slipping on algae-covered rocks I’d been recklessly walking on, while following a black and white-striped crab. After a morning of reef-fishing, I paid my karma-dues by rescuing a tiny lizard from the pool, but probably tipped the balance back against myself by scaring a hermit crab right out of its shell while rifling through the bush for firewood that wasn’t soaked-through. If my family lost track of me, they knew to look first to the sea, to see if I was out hunting for chunks of coral to stuff into my carry-on.
On occasion, my oceanic obsession caught the attention of my skeptical, eye-rolling family, too. On our second evening, I went down to the beach after dinner. The sun had long-set, and I walked just far enough from the main strip to find myself in near complete darkness. I stopped with my feet in the shallow, warm sea, and looked at the stars. I looked down, and saw them reflected, only to realize that my feet were no longer underwater. I was looking at wet sand. In front of me was a different constellation, the earth was speckled with living stars. Tiny, bioluminescent phytoplankton glowed bright, bright blue as they washed ashore. As I watched the returning tide, they lit the water like blue-hot fireflies. I ran back inside, and showed anyone who was willing to come with me that the ocean was alight. We scrambled to collect the glowing specks to return them to the water, even if all that did was give them another chance to whirl in the waves around our feet.
On the last night of our trip, my step-sister finally told some of us just how bad her brain had gotten. They had never known she was in so much pain, she and I conveyed it in plain English for them. The gravity of her statements was not the focus, she spoke to help her people understand, and explained her day-to-day in a way that hit home. I imagine it felt a bit like hearing a well-crafted will being read out loud; the raw truth of someone’s whole life, assets, and debts are there in black ink. From what you have and what you owe, you can lay out the people who receive both. My sister shared her daily life, the things she did to survive it, and her debts in sorrow in a way that was simple and true.
The second half of the conversation, my brother-in-law openly wept across the table, unable to reconcile with the fact that he’d spent seven years not seeing what was right in front of him. He understood she hid in plain sight, but that did not lighten the burden of having not held her when he thought he ought to have known to. As is often the case with those who understand the burdens of the mind, my sister was the first to comfort him. When there were no more words to say and the tears had run dry, he lit us a bonfire on the beach to end our final day. We took turns fanning the wet wood we had found under some nearby palms, the fire finally took by the time the last of us had found our way to the beach. We stood quietly for a minute, before breaking out into a slightly butchered but good-spirited version of Wagon Wheel. We sang until the bugs got the best of us, and we threw handfuls of sand on the already-dying blaze.
My step-sister turned to me, she asked me, “did you see any of your friends on the beach?” I told her I’d looked earlier, and found none, I was glad to have seen them at all even if they were now gone. “No way, let’s look again.” Humouring her, I followed along. For a few minutes, there really was nothing to see, the sand was as dark as the sea.
“Em, look, there!” she said, pointing at a single, faintly glowing blue speck. I picked it up, and handed it to her to set free. We both bent down, and saw that under the top layer of sand were a few more, slightly more faintly glowing spots. I dragged my fingers across the surface, and in the trails they left, flecks of light filled the space. We kept scratching, looking for more. We found handfuls of blue, hidden but faintly beating. Some of them spewed small trails of light when they were set back into the water, the tiny creatures rocketed themselves back towards the depths faster than the tide was pulling them. We laughed, delighted, aged 30 and 25 but feeling like the children we had long forgotten being. We kept digging, finding, freeing.
After we had watched a final flurry of blue recede into the ocean, we began quietly walking home. I thought for a moment that our small friends had turned on me when I felt my fingers tingling, but I realized they were just raw from having clawed away at so many layers of sand. We said little, but I could feel my sister smiling. I was smiling, too. When we made it back to the floodlit main beach, I said what had been thinking since we had found our first landlocked blue friend.
“I guess there’s always light, Brookie, even when we can’t see it.”
So keep looking, digging, and fighting. I hope that this year, you find the light you need.