Episode 12: The Reach - On Depression, Withdrawal and Daring to Connect

Full Transcript: English

Hello, my dear listening friend. Back at the threshold of my mic…

Every time I record, I feel my way into that acoustic void. No voice coming back. No breath I can hear. And yet… I know you're there.
I sense you. On the other side of the silence ….

I'm still here. Still in a pretty dark place, if I'm honest. And I've decided — again — not to put a veil over it. Not to cover it with absence.
- though I felt tempted, after another rather long break following the last episode, with that old familiar shame hammering at my mind’s door…

but then again it became clear that I’m not obliged to stick to a schedule, that this was never the idea for the podcast itself, that this is the path of my healing, my space which I of course open to you if you sense a shelter for yourself in it, too …
So here I am, once again breaking the silence ….

Because silence, I've learned, doesn't always make the darkness smaller.
Sometimes It makes it lonelier.

One of the cruellest things depression does — and I've been thinking about this a lot lately — is that it pulls you inward. Step by step.
Layer by layer.

You retreat into your inner world. And in itself, that's not always a bad thing…
I've always lived a great deal inside myself — it's where my thinking happens, where language lives, where I feel most at home….
Where I can truly atune to all my senses, their unique way of speaking …

But when you're depressed... and you see no light for yourself... the retreat becomes something else. Something dangerous, dangerous and all the more so for making no noise… (surely you experienced this suffocating stillness …)

Because the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to come back out. Even when circumstances improve a little.
Even when there's a crack of light somewhere.
The muscles you need to reach outward — they've gone stiff from disuse. …. You freeze, and frozen, you are perfectly aware of it, and completely unable to thaw.

And depression knows this. It uses it. The longer you stay inside, the more the outside world feels — not dangerous exactly, but... effortful. Foreign. Like a language you once spoke fluently and are no longer sure you remember.

And yet... something in me reached. I remembered the words, found my footing…

I have a new acquaintance. I'm going to call her G. We'd met a couple of times before ... And a few weeks ago, something in me decided to reach out.

I want to pause on that word — decided. Because it wasn't easy.

It didn’t feel natural. It was a decision made against the current of everything depression was telling me:

Don't reach out.

You'll be too much.

Your darkness will show — through your eyes, through your voice, through something they'll sense without being able to name it.

You'll make them uncomfortable. You'll regret it.

That voice. You probably know it.

And … well … She replied. We made plans to meet — to walk to the river, she said.
Maybe swim, if we felt like it.
I was anxious the whole day before the meeting, the whole way there. Anxious about my low energy. Anxious about my depression radiating through me somehow — from my eyes, from my voice.
Anxious that she'd ask how things were going, what I was doing, whether I was working.
All the normal questions that are not so normal when you're caught up in a web, struggling on every level.

And then something happened before we'd even started walking.

The moment we met outside, she told me she was really glad I'd reached out.
That she'd wanted to herself.
And then she stopped — because I immediately started to wave it off,
the way you do when someone says something kind and you don't quite know how to hold it.

And she said — no. Wait. I do want to tell you that I found it really nice that you reached out.

She wouldn't let me dismiss it.

I don't know if she knows how much that meant. …
Probably not….
It was a small thing — a few seconds, a gentle insistence.
But for someone who has been inside themselves for a long time,
who has convinced herself she is too heavy for others to carry... being seen like that, and not being allowed to push it away — that's not a small thing at all.

… and then we simply walked into it … We met at noon She’d said she needed to be home by four.

We stayed six hours.

None of my fears materialised. The conversation found its own current — naturally, the way it does with the right ones…
family issues, Language. The sense of smell. Exhausting Brain fog … Rabbit holes we both disappeared into without needing to explain why. The kind of talking where you occasionally surface and realise you've completely lost track of time.

She showed me her favourite spot by the river — a natural Jacuzzi, we called it, where the water moves in a particular way over the rocky riverbed…. We sat in it. Floating… The sun was still warm…
And I thought:
I almost didn't come… I almost talked myself out of this….
I almost missed the river, missed the cooling water…

… At the end she told me she hadn't noticed the time passing.
… And I told her that's exactly what it feels like when you're at ease with someone.
When you're not performing. When you’re not forced to…
When you can just... be.

And I was so grateful.
Not just for the afternoon. But for the fact that I’d reached out.
That I’d done the hard thing. That I’d pushed against the current – and somehow ended up … flowing 😊

I'm not going to wrap this up neatly. I'm still in the dark place.
One afternoon by the river doesn't lift a depression. It doesn’t work like that, I know that.

But here's what I keep coming back to.

Depression tells you to stay inside.
It tells you the reach outward will cost more than it gives.
It tells you that you are too much, or not enough, or somehow both at once.

And sometimes... it's wrong.

Not always. Not easily. And the reach costs something — I won't pretend otherwise. The anxiety beforehand, the effort of showing up when every part of you wants to retreat, to withdraw — that’s heavy to hold.
That's … real.

But sometimes, on the other side of the reach, there is a river.
And someone who won't let you dismiss a kindness.
And six hours that pass like cooling water.

And that — that is also a language of healing.

The next day, she reached back.

She invited me to join her for a day in the Austrian mountains.
A trail up to a peak near the Achensee — barely anyone else around ... Just mountains.

I spent about thirty minutes doubting myself before I said yes. Even after Friday. Even knowing exactly how that had gone.
The pattern doesn't break cleanly just because it worked once — that's not how it works. The voice came back. The hesitation came back.

But …. I said yes anyway.

We went up the mountain in brilliant sunshine, a fresh wind, and all the wonderful strong and fragile scents only high mountain meadows can wrap you in….
Barely a soul on the trail…
Afterwards, down in the valley, we sat in a hut — rhubarb Schorle,
and time slowing down again the way it had by the river.
And then a swim in the Achensee to cool off.
Cold and clear and wonderful.

I was just so happy. I know that sounds simple.
But when you've been in the dark for a long time, simple happiness is not simple at all.

What I want to say with this is…… that the reach I made on Friday didn't just give me one afternoon.
It opened something. Not because I did anything extraordinary.
Just because I moved, once, against the pull.

Sometimes that's enough to start.

Would you like to read this episode in German or Polish?
I’ll be glad to send it to you — just reach out.

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