What I was missing was me.

Finding joy after depression.

Mar 10, 2025

Hii!

Every week, I’ll share personal essays from fellow Sadgirls in our community. For now, let’s call it…Sadgirl Submissions! This allows us to share our experiences with each other and normalize emotional expression. This week’s essay is from Jessica, a writer and artist living in Virginia Beach. She writes stories and poems filled with eerie and emotion while also blogging about it here on Substack: Jessicaphylicia.substack.com her first book debuts May 12th of this year.

If you’d like your essay considered for a future post, check out this post.

TW for sad things!

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Honestly, I feel selfish just talking about it. Because I chose this life. Didn’t I? So, what am I missing?

As the clock struck twelve, and everyone around me shared kisses with their loved ones, I shared a moment of silence, smiling at my own reflection in the rim of my glass of champagne. Cheers to surviving another year, I thought to myself before mentally rejoining the beloved people in the room with me.

You see, last year, I thought way too often about dying. How it would feel. How I would do it. The relief of nonexistence. The peace of the temporary freedom one might get from falling from the fifth story balcony (is that high up enough to die?) Yes, I thought about death too many times to count, but I didn’t do it. I learned from surviving my last attempt how devastating even nearing death is for the people who love me. And even though I struggle internally, I am well enough to realize that people do, in fact, love me, and there are people I love enough not to want to leave behind.

These words are morbid, yes. So much so I thought about backspacing until this page became blank again, reverting these words back into mere thoughts that haunt my subconscious, and taunt me in my day-to-day life, but if I learned anything last year it’s that words do matter. My words matter. These mind monsters aren’t new to me. I’ve battled them since I was a sparkly-eyed adolescent. I’ve been playing the game of life for 33 years now.

I am a mother, a wife, a friend to a few, a daughter, an aunt, and a sister. I have things to live for, and yet, for some reason, I still feel soul-crushingly sad some days. As most moms can attest, mom guilt is so real. Nothing I do feels good enough for the two precious, perfect, maddening little humans I created. No amount of perfect is actually perfect. At the end of most days, I struggle with feeling overwhelmed, terrible, exhausted, and mediocre.

Honestly, I feel selfish just talking about it. Because I chose this life. Didn’t I? So, what am I missing?

I found my answer early last year during a different time I found my reflection. Only that time, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was still in postpartum recovery after having a second child. The fun fact no one tells you is that 6-8 weeks after having a baby is not at all long enough to fully recover (at least not mentally), yet in the society we live in, women are expected to do it all, be happy with the cards life has dealt to us so long as they’re good enough, and shut up about the things we cry about (because you’re not a little girl anymore. Grow up. Tears are for babies). And so I found myself in front of a mirror, crying privately where my family couldn’t see or hear me. In the reflection, I saw a broken woman, and in that moment, I found the answer to what I had been wondering.

What I was missing was me.

So much external gratification could be observed by anyone looking at my life through the lens of social media, or based on what information I decided to share about myself. But what was missing was internal joy and the sparkle that once called my eyes home.

So, I made it a mission to get my spark back. I reverted to all the simple pleasures that I had the freedom of exploring decades ago- the little things that made me happy- like journaling, reading for fun (I discovered I really like romantasy as a genre), writing poetry, and playing video games way too late into the night. It was through these small exploits that I found myself realigning with my old self.

I treated myself like an ex-lover I missed and wanted back badly. I prioritized my needs again, and not just people pleasing those around me. I rediscovered hobbies to fill my day with instead of only checking off a to-do list that honestly doesn’t even fucking matter most days. I started practicing mindfulness and reciting affirmations. And one night, my daughter came in as I was saying my affirmations and wanted to join me. She put her little hands in mine, and as we chanted self-love affirmations together, I was almost brought to tears because looking at her was like looking at my inner child. At that moment, I realized that how I speak to and about myself matters so dearly, not only to myself but to my little world revolving around me. I needed to love myself, and my daughter needed to see her mother loving herself because my kids deserve a mother who loves herself.

I kept writing down (and speaking aloud) these affirmations, and that led to rediscovering my love of writing poetry, which led to me nowadays writing my own newsletter on Substack and wrapping up my very first manuscript on my first novel. Many, many days are still filled with self-doubt, but writing as a form of expressing my emotions has saved me (again, words matter). It’s been therapeutic. Slowly, before I realized it, my spark started to return.

My name is Jessica. I write the words that haunt my heart. This year’s New Year resolution is to think about death less often and to live more.

Some days are still really, really hard. Some days, old wounds reopen and ache. Some days, my mind monsters want to fight. Some days, I still find myself sad for seemingly no reason.

But other days, I survive. For all the days, I am grateful. Cheers to surviving another day.