Witching Hour x Fools: Writer Nicole Pagliari
Nicole Pagliari is a junior studying English and Creative Writing. She is also a writing editor for Fools Mag. Her piece focuses on the complications that arise when the people closest to you are unable or unwilling to conceptualize or acknowledge mental illness. “The Similarities Between Small Trees and Mental Illness” was featured in Fools Magazine Volume 6.
The Similarities Between Small Trees and Mental Illness
I didn’t know that my dad had had cancer until I was about 11 years old.
I didn’t know that he had had it twice until I was 18.
He is the type of person who doesn’t fixate on the 40 days he spent sedentary in a hospital bed in his early twenties. Instead, he makes sure to play hockey every single day, sometimes with college kids (which he says keeps him quick). He never talks about the drugs that made him lose his hair. Instead, he rarely leaves the house without a baseball cap broadcasting his support of the Blackhawks or the Hawkeyes.
When I was no more than 6 years old, my dad was teasing me. My dad has a wild sense of humor and he often pokes fun at people. All these years later, I can’t remember what prompted me to call him “baldie” in response. All I know is that a stillness came over the room, and my mom quietly said, He lost his hair when he was sick.
In middle school, my dad and I started running together in the evenings. We didn’t go far, only around the park near our house, which couldn’t have been more than a mile. About ¾ of a mile in, my childhood asthma would start to act up and I’d start to wheeze. My dad would glance over, surprised every time that his daughter, who needed to be taken out of little league soccer games to puff on an inhaler, was having trouble jogging. He would tell me to just keep going.
Looking back, I understand where he was coming from. Leukemia was the ultimate battle, and he fought it twice. As I grew up, I kept in mind the body’s ability to overcome impossible odds.
In high school, I started running regularly. I never was a track star, but I was able to run 6 miles without stopping at my peak. My dad proudly claimed that I had absolved myself of my asthma using sheer willpower and determination. I never contested him. I liked being the wonder kid who literally outran her illness.
My junior year of high school, I started to get sad. I thought that maybe the weight of tests, impending college decisions, and two sports was finally catching up to me. I decided to take more naps. When an unusually high ACT score with my name on it was delivered to my front door, my dad told people that I was destined to do great things. When I told my dad that my best friend was going on medication for depression, he said that she should try exercising more. I didn’t tell him, or anyone, that I was becoming increasingly depressed myself. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of me doing great things.
My senior year of high school, on December 14th, I didn’t get into the school of my dreams. I knew that it had been my reach school, and I know that everything happens for a reason, and that what you get out of your education is about what you put in, but I was destroyed. Suddenly, my dreams of doing “great things” had shattered, and my last leg of high school took a turn. The pressure of a sadness I couldn’t pin down was barrelling down on me, and I started to shut down. It was too exhausting to keep up healthy relationships with my friends, my boyfriend, even my teammates. Unlike when my dad lost his hair, I couldn’t put on a baseball cap to hide what was wrong with me. I retreated into myself, conserving my energy in order to keep up appearances in front of my parents, especially my dad.
I can’t remember a week the last month of my senior year that I showed up to school all 5 days.
When my boyfriend broke up with me, I ran 8 miles.
When my friends got mad at me for not answering my phone, I deleted Snapchat.
When my parents asked me what was wrong, I said that school was pointless this late in the year, and I’d rather spend my time at home with them before I had to leave for college.
Tell them what’s going on with you, my cousin begged me, He’s your dad. He is so proud of you no matter what.
At night, I sat on the bathroom floor while the shower ran and cried.
Eventually, my retraction from the life I had spent close to 20 years building became unavoidable. I refused to admit that my mental health was so precarious.
I have cancer-surviving blood in my veins. I have asthma overcoming air in my lungs. I have a prodigal brain in my head. I also have an ongoing battle with mental illness. One of these is not like the other.
The last 2 weeks of senior year, I was only making it through half of my day. The feelings I had been struggling to identify or cope with were catalyzed by not getting into the school I wanted and my deteriorating relationships with those around me. I became less and less able to keep up appearances even to my parents. I spent months trying to summon enough energy to hold conversations with them. Leukemia, simply put, is when your body produces too many white blood cells, causing the red blood cells to die off. How was I supposed to tell a man who stopped the overproduction of the cells in his blood that I could not stop the bad thoughts in my head? I didn’t. Thankfully, though, he noticed.
One day he called to me from the front door that he needed help with something outside. I’m doing homework, I had said, staring at the open book in front of me. It’ll just take a second, he said. I pulled myself from my desk and went outside. My dad held up a large pair of hedge clippers. He pointed to a small tree behind the shed we had built when we first moved, and said that the tree was dead, and it needed to be cut down. The tree’s trunk was maybe double the circumference of my wrist, its branches varying from the size of my pinky to the handles of a bicycle. He handed me the hedge clippers and showed me how to take down each branch, how to hold the clippers so that when the branch went down it wouldn’t scratch my face.
I wielded the hedge clippers. They were heavy and warm in my palms. My dad said he was going inside for some water and he left me, standing there, with a tool and a dead tree for company. I started to sporadically cut the tree’s branches down. They fell to the ground, tickling my legs as they went down. Eventually, I stopped using the hedge clippers to actually clip, and instead resorted to swinging them at the thicker branches. I liked watching the dents form in the brittle bark.
By the time my dad came back outside, almost all of the branches were gone and I was swinging wildly at the trunk. He stood silently for awhile, possibly to let me continue, possibly because he didn’t want to startle me and take a pair of clippers to the head.
I didn’t realize until much later that he had been inside much too long to just be getting a glass of water.
With a final kick, the tree went down, and I stepped away, pulling my feet out from underneath the pile of fallen branches. My dad nodded. It looks good, he said. I smiled, out of breath.
In the years since, I’ve tried to put together my dad’s reasoning for handing me a pair of hedge clippers that spring. It took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that brains can get sick too.
I don’t know if my dad believes in mental illness.
I do know that my dad believes that the body can overcome almost anything. I’ve stopped thinking of the hedge clippers as a tool, and more of an olive branch. That afternoon, when I was supposed to be sitting in AP Physics, I was offered a physical outlet to try to chop down my depression. I was offered an opportunity to separate myself from my debilitations, and to smack them around for awhile.
I know that even though he didn’t quite understand or want to admit that something was wrong, he did want to make it better.
I know that telling someone who is indescribably sad and lost to cut down a tree isn’t the same as saying I acknowledge your struggle, and I am here for you, but I know on that day they were similar in all the ways that matter.