When you're running out of breath

Lessons from Sylvia Plath, nature and the underworld

This essay is about depression. If you know someone who struggles with it, please share it with them. If you struggle with it, I hope you will read it. There is mention of suicide and suicidal ideation, if you’d rather avoid those topics right now, it might be wiser to skip.

I often write about feeling everything, but before I became someone who feels everything, I felt very little. Years without tears. Years trapped in a dry numbness that pervaded most moments. Reading the modern classic The Bell Jar brought me back to the memory of this experience.

In The Bell Jar, poet and novelist Sylvia Plath chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a bright, young college student. Esther is accomplished, but after a hard-won internship at a New York City magazine, she begins to lose her desire to stay. Wherever she goes, she’s living “under the bell jar”.

In Plath’s words:

“I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

Plath’s visceral prose takes you into the intensity and immediacy of her protagonist’s despair. Many find her autobiographical novel dark and depressing, and it is. It is the story of a woman who was getting ready to end it all, and she did. Less than a month after The Bell Jar was published, Plath committed suicide at the age of 30.

Ten years ago, I was living under the bell jar, too. Day after day, I pressed my body up against the glass hoping it would move even just an inch. Year after year. After much effort without meaningful progress, I, like Plath, was getting ready to give up.

It remained a passive giving up, I was quiet quitting my life. Each week, I got on the plane and realized how little I minded if it crashed. Two planes a week that were shipping me back and forth into a life that looked perfect from the outside. Except it wasn’t mine. And so I had little fear for it.

The tricky thing about the bell jar is that it feels so finite and invisible. It is not situational depression. There is nothing in your life you can point to as the root of your suffering. All your needs seem to be met. You might even have great success in your career or relationships. You should not feel this bad. You couldn’t grasp what the barrier between you and the world is made of, no matter how hard you tried. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to feel. Just the knowing that something isn’t right, that there is a life to be lived and it is not this.

And so, for as long as you can, you live underneath the jar as if everything is normal. It is glass, everyone can see you, after all, and so you smile back and do your dishes and put on nice clothes and you finish your work. You always finish your work.

And day after day, you deplete your oxygen. The suffocating doesn’t happen suddenly, it happens slowly over a long period of time. After one too many days, it feels impossible to do anything but lie yourself to rest.

I don’t know how many breaths I had left before I found my way to the work that would save me. The work that would lift the jar just enough to take a life-saving gasp of air.

It all started on a mattress in the Costa Rican jungle. Over 70 of us had gathered, many with their own bell jars in tow, to drink ayahuasca. It had taken me a year to commit. I was scared and skeptical, but I was also running out of options and time. The week I decided to go on an SSRI, The New Yorker landed on my doorstep with a cover story about the risks of psychiatric drugs. I took it as a sign.

I’d already been skeptical about the prevalent disease model of depression, which points to serotonin imbalance as the root cause. Was there something off in my brain? Most definitely. Was this the root cause or rather the biological manifestation of something deeper? I believed it was the latter. (The serotonin theory, which laid the scientific foundation for SSRIs as the primary course of treatment, has since been debunked.)

The fear and doubt dissipated as soon as I arrived in Costa Rica. At dinner the first night, guests from the prior week were saying their goodbyes. They all looked like they’d just stepped outside after years in a cave. They had rosy cheeks and fireworks in their eyes.

Two days later, we were lined up like sardines to purge our guts out. The medicine, a plant concoction from the Peruvian Amazon that no words could do justice, lifted our jars, one by one. By the end of the week, we were all able to breathe again. It was a miracle.

Esther Greenwood, too, experienced this relief after receiving shock treatment:

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

And to go from this breath of fresh air to suffocating again is the real torture, because now you’ve tasted freedom. The kind of freedom you’ve never known. They call it the afterglow in medicine work. But it always passes. The bell jar always returns. That’s because the medicine is not supposed to remove it. It’s supposed to help you remember, and it does. And it’s supposed to show you another path, and it does.

The path into the underground.

Because here is the happy ending Plath didn’t get, the happy ending that, every year, 720,000 people all over the world do not get. The happy ending I know is possible not just because I got it, but because I’ve seen so many others get it, too.

You go into the underworld and dig a tunnel. You dig, and as you carve pathways through the corners of consciousness, you eventually find parts that have been left behind down there, buried alive.

Parts that once felt helpless, unsafe, neglected, shamed, frozen. You had to bury them—at the time. And then, through the very survival mechanism that saved you, you continued the neglect—unconsciously. The real threat is long gone. But the parts don’t know that. Because they are stuck in a coma. Knocked out by the trapped energy from the emotional processing that didn’t occur in the moment, or over many moments. Trapped energy that is now shutting down your system.

How do you make them come alive? You give them what they lacked all these years ago: a loving witness and the opportunity to safely process whatever they are holding on to. This is what healing comes down to—making the unconscious conscious, freeing the trapped energies, and building a loving, life-long relationship with the parts of you that hold unconscious beliefs about the world and yourself.

Don’t give up before you have done this kind of digging. You can use a shovel, there are different kinds of shovels. You can work with parts work such as IFS or nature-based frameworks, you can work with somatic therapy, you can explore your subconscious through breathwork. Plant medicines are a kind of super shovel powered by nature’s divine intelligence. But they are often misunderstood because you still have to dig, the plant will guide you but you have to dig and you will get dirty and it will be the hardest work of your life.

I promise you that this world wants you to be free. If you feel trapped, there is a perfectly reasonable reason for it and it’s not that something is wrong with you. If you don’t know the real reason it simply means you don’t have all the information yet. Don’t give up. There are ways to unearth it. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. Symptoms are the language of the soul, and depression is a cry for help from a soul that is mourning parts it lost along the way.

On the deepest level, depression is exhaustion. As Jeff Foster teaches:

“We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own false story of ourselves.”

Depression is the exhaustion of living a life that is not fully yours. A life that is led by the parts of you that had to fight for your safety and survival, the parts whose only job it is to make sure you don’t get hurt again. Those parts are only fragments of yourself. Important ones—they once saved your life and continue to do so—but not your totality.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, it’s expression. Expression of your most authentic self. Expression of the deepest facets of your being.

If you don’t know what they are—you know where to look.

If you dig long enough, you will eventually emerge above ground, next to the jar. You will be tired and covered in dirt, but you will be free. Your lungs will feel the limitless stream of fresh air. You will no longer just look at the sun but feel it kissing your skin.

Don’t exhaust your energy trying to lift the jar. You could take little oxygen pills and they could save your life but they do not solve the root causes of your predicament in the long run. You could talk all day, every day, to someone on the other side of the glass, no matter how qualified and well-intended they are, and your jar may still never move. This is not a matter to be resolved by your conscious, thinking mind.

It doesn’t matter how but you must find a way to descend into the deeper levels of your consciousness. Carl Jung never had a psychedelic super shovel and he went all the way. But if you’re not Jung and your soil is too firm, that’s okay. You can drink or eat a little bit of plant medicine, that’s what it’s here for, this is one of our many gifts from nature. Nature wants you to be free.

In the end, you might realize it was nature’s intelligence all along that placed the bell jar above you. It was put there to stop you from running, and to prompt your descent.

Dig deep enough and you will set yourself free.

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