magnifying glass

When I was nineteen, I took a medical leave of absence from college to go on suicide watch. Most people know that already. If you didn’t, I realize that’s a whole lot in one sentence, but bear with me. 

I was deeply unwell at the time, no doubt about it, and very ashamed to boot. I think there was a 48 hour gap between the time the decision to leave school and when my maroon Scion turned left out of campus and headed toward the interstate. I didn’t tell many people why I was leaving, but I did have a core group of friends who I knew needed to know. 

“I’m going home,” I told them one day around our usual round lunch table.

“Like, for Thanksgiving break? Early?”

“No, like…for a while. I don’t know how long, actually. But I’ve been having trouble, like, with life. Wanting to live. I don’t really know how to do it anymore, or who I am anymore. I can’t see a way out. So I’m going home to get help.”

The words were really hard to get out, but I stammered through them. I didn’t want to say the word “suicidal” because the word had been said about me an uncountable number of times by other people – the Wofford doctor to my Dean of Students, the Dean to my parents over the phone. Nobody said it hopefully, like they were certain things were going to be okay for me again. 

I don’t think anyone at the lunch table really knew what to say back. I didn’t want them to have to keep making the face you put on when something isn’t okay but you feel like you have to make it be, so I stood up.

“I’m going to get some more Diet Coke,” I announced. But one of them stopped me, followed me, walked with me over to the coffee kiosk lined with cushioned bar stools. We sat back down. 

“Can I pray for you?” he asked me, and I let him. I was a person of pretty prominent faith, but all that hadn’t really been my thing lately. I didn’t feel connected to myself, much less God or the greater good. I was in a room where the lightbulb had burned out, but I appreciated that other people wanted to sprinkle some hope on the situation. I didn’t really believe that it would work, but I held my hands out for it anyway. I needed all the help I could get, even if I couldn’t feel it.

I spent the rest of that day packing – shoving my entire dorm room into that maroon Scion box, as we didn’t know when, or even if, I’d be coming back to school. Medical leave for not knowing how to be alive wasn’t really a thing people did at Wofford. My peers were some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met still to this day, and I’d been running right alongside them for a time – but now I couldn’t even figure out how to make myself get out of bed or stop crying most days, much less spend six hours on Genetics problem sets. 

I closed the trunk of my car. I’d leave first thing the next morning and drive back to Virginia, which I wasn’t ready for. Leaving school felt like I was giving up on my future. Wasn’t that going backwards? Weren’t we supposed to fix this? I didn’t see how shutting everything down would make things any better, but it was the thing I had to do anyway.  

“Is it going to feel like this forever?” I gasped to my mother through tears on the phone later.

“No, baby. No, no, no. It won’t be; it won’t be,” she repeated over and over while I sobbed.

I decided to go for a walk as the sun started to go down, eyes still puffy, not quite ready to lay in bed for my last hours on campus. I headed up a hill, past the library where I’d tried so hard to study myself out of depression, past the soccer field where I’d go sit because I knew at some point I felt joyful there, past the science building where I’d once been a gunner answering questions in BIO 101 but now skipped the classes held there because I was failing them. 

I made it all the way to the senior apartments, where some of my friends lived. I’d gotten a text from my friend Tyler asking me to stop by before I left for home. He’d been one of the people at the lunch table earlier, so I figured maybe he’d found some things to say to me before my departure. 

He was sitting on some brickwork outside the two-story Charleston-style house where he lived, holding something behind his back. I sat down beside him, and I started to cry again.

He put one hand on my shoulder and used the other to present his gift – a giant blue magnifying glass. 

“It’s to help you while you find yourself again,” he said, holding it up to one eye and letting out his iconic laugh. 

I felt the corners of my mouth curl into the closest thing to a genuine smile I’d made in weeks. It was precious to me that people cared, even when I didn’t see a way out of the dark. I didn’t know how to receive that, but I held my hands out anyway. 

I started back to my dorm room, where my bedding and essentials for the night were, a magnifying glass to be soon among them. I passed Old Main, Wofford’s most iconic building, whose front steps I’d climbed hundreds of times, and paused on the sidewalk, gazing up at its tall twin towers.

I didn’t know in that moment that less three years later, I’d be sitting on its lawn with a graduation cap on. I didn’t know that my mother was right – that I wouldn’t feel like I did that night on a loop forever. I didn’t know that ten years later, I’d be speaking about my story up on stages, telling about how I did find myself again. And I didn’t know that new self I uncovered would be the woman who the nineteen-year-old me’s of the world needed. I didn’t know then that it would all be for something later. 

But I did know that I’d keep the big, blue magnifying glass, and I held it up to my eye a time or two as I made my return trip. It sat in a cupholder on my drive home, on my nightstand back home as I continued to battle my depression and search for what was beyond it.

I still have it to this day. And I’ve never told anyone this, but at every single one of those speaking events, I’ve got that magnifying glass somewhere in my bag close by. It has a special place in my home, and is a talisman of sorts, reminding me of that night sitting with Tyler, when someone told me, “you’ll make it out of this, even though you can’t see how right now.” 

Magnifying glasses are $9.99 on Amazon, and I’d send one to everyone in the world if I could. I don’t know where you are right now – if the room is flooded with natural light and a fresh breeze from an open window looking out over possibilities, or if your lightbulb has burned out, too. And even if it hasn’t, I can almost promise that it will. And when it does, I believe that the light will come back for you. Even in the things you can’t see the way out of. Put your hands out anyway.