Running away from depression

Nita Sweeney was a lawyer, a writer, a wife and a meditation and mindfulness coach, but it wasn't until she found running that she discovered who she really was.

Nita Sweeney

WARNING: This story contains discussion of suicide. Please use good judgment and self-care in deciding whether to read it or find someone you can share and discuss it with. If you need help call 988, the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255 or text Crisis Text line at 741741.

It was 2009 and Nita Sweeney, then in her late 40s, was still trying to find herself.  After career stints as a lawyer and an assistant to the renowned writing coach, Natalie Goldberg, she’d just completed a mid-life master’s degree in creative writing in the hope of catalyzing her career as an author, something she’d thought about since majoring in journalism in college. But instead of embracing the fresh start, she felt the same dark cloud of depression descending upon her that had sabotaged her since childhood.

“I just felt like I was back in that place where I couldn’t get anything going,” says Sweeney, a warmly friendly woman with short gray hair and the pragmatic nature of someone who’s lived most her life in the Midwest. “I wondered, ‘How much longer can I take this? Why am I here?’ I’d have days where I’d actually feel like the knives in the kitchen were going to come and get me.”

Sitting on the sofa in the central Ohio home she shares with her husband, Ed, she read a social media post by a friend from high school who’d taken up jogging, though, like Sweeney herself, she had never been athletic nor particularly fit.

“Call me crazy,” the woman wrote, “but this running is getting to be fun.”

Sweeney, much heavier than she is now and not remotely athletic, thought it was “the most ridiculous thing I’d ever read.” But seeing her friend’s joy and commitment, out of curiosity, she looked up her training plan. It called for an initial “60 seconds of jogging.”

“I swear, if it had said, ‘One minute of jogging,’ I would have closed the laptop,” Sweeney confesses. “But something about that clicked. I thought, ‘You’re on four medications, you’re in therapy, you don’t drink anymore, you meditate….But you haven’t tried exercise yet.”

Sweeney took a digital kitchen timer, headed to a ravine near her home where no one could see her and jogged for 60 seconds, “very slowly.” It wasn’t much fun, but she did experience a sense of accomplishment. It took three weeks to convince herself to leave the ravine. By the time her sister called several months later to encourage her to run in a 5K charity race devoted to raising funds for the cancer that had killed her daughter, Sweeney’s niece, she could actually run that distance, but her first reaction was still, “Oh no! I’m a private runner!” Still, in honor of her niece, she “got over myself” and entered.

“When I showed up there were people of every shape, size, color, outfit, some with dogs, some with strollers,” she says. “It blew my mind that this was the running community. It was amazing.”

That first race eventually led to 36 half-marathons in 23 states, three full marathons, two ultramarathons and Sweeney’s first book, “Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with my Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink,” a running and mental health memoir, which details how running helped her overcome the mental health challenges she’d experienced her entire life.

“I attribute all of that to the running, and so does my psychiatrist,” she says. “When you know you can run 10 miles, somehow that carries over into the rest of your life and you know that you can endure…whatever.”

That realization was a long time in coming. Sweeney grew up on a farm in rural Ohio as an “almost” only child, since her sister and brother were 8 and 10 years older respectively. Mental illness and alcoholism were prevalent in the family, if unacknowledged.

“A lot of things that seemed normal to me at the time I found out later just weren’t,” she admits. “Like we measured distance by how many beers it took to drive to a place. Or tasks…Was it a three-beer job or would it take a whole case?”

Although never diagnosed, she suspects her mother was bipolar; her father, on the other hand, was structured and disciplined with a resolute work ethic. A sensitive child, Sweeney felt pressure from both sides – walking on eggshells around her mother, trying to measure up around her father.

“There was this radar of ‘What’s Mom’s mood?’ ‘Am I living up to Dad’s expectations?’” she recalls. “We were an achieving family and I definitely grew up feeling like I had to perform. But I always felt there was something wrong with me, something different about me -- and more importantly, that it was my fault and the solution was for me to just work harder.”

Even as a young child, Sweeney was subject to “melancholy spells,” days when her limbs literally “felt heavy” and she spent too much time in her head or in bed. Though back then she couldn’t label it, the depressions continued throughout college and increased in law school, where she often was forced to skip classes. Being “pretty good at figuring work-arounds for things” she “ploughed through,” eventually earning her law degree, though it took considerably longer than normal. She was driven by the sensibility that “I had to be able to take care of myself” which she presumes derived from the constant arguments her parents had about money, despite their financial stability.

After graduating in 1985, she “created a life that looked like what a lawyer’s life should look like.” When she met her husband in 1992, she was trim, well dressed, owned a large home and a fancy car and seemed to have it all together. But inside, she was still trying to find out what might make her happy. As the only female in the firm, her partners encouraged to go into family law, though it didn’t appeal to her in the least.

“It was the last thing I wanted to do,” she says. “But again, I didn’t have a strong sense of sense or a good ability to set boundaries. If someone asked me that now I’d say, ‘I’m really not the one and I don’t want to do it.’ But back then I was very young emotionally, immature.”

Eventually the veneer of having it all together cracked. One day, while sitting in the conference room of the law firm for a meeting, Sweeney looked out the window and saw a young man in jeans drive up to the vacant lot next door, pull a box kite out of the trunk of his car and proceed to joyously fly the kite, exuding a sense of freedom and relaxation Sweeney couldn’t fathom.

“I have no idea why that broke me,” she says, “but that was the moment where I thought to myself, ‘If I don’t get out of here I’m going to die.”

By this time she was married and regularly experiencing panic attacks, physical pains and “black days” where she couldn’t get out of bed, despite the meditation practice she’d begun with her husband’s encouragement.

The week after celebrating her first wedding anniversary, she found herself on the living room floor, cuddling her two dogs and planning how to end her life. Nevertheless, for reasons she has never understood, when the phone rang, she answered it. It was her therapist, calling about a missed appointment and asking her to come in immediately since she had a cancellation. Remarkably, Sweeney did, arriving not in her usual “lawyer attire” and utterly disheveled. The therapist took one look and told Sweeney she was going straight to the psychiatric hospital.

“It wasn’t until week later when I realized I came a phone call away from actually killing myself, because my mind was so messed up,” Sweeney remembers. “At that moment, my mind said I was a burden to everyone and the best thing I could do was just disappear so everyone could get on with their lives. I was in so much pain, I really believed that.”

Her hospital stay was short, but it was followed by months of a “partial hospitalization” outpatient treatment program that not only stabilized her with medication but educated her about her illness and provided some tools to help manage it.

Though it took almost a year for her to reach the conclusion, for “self preservation” she ultimately decided not to return to her law practice. It was a relief to know she was freed from a stressful job she disliked, but she was left feeling untethered and despairing about what she would do instead.

Not long thereafter, Sweeney’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to his bones. He chose to forego treatment in favor of spending his remaining healthy time playing golf, a game he loved. Sweeney chose to join him and for months they relished the precious time together as she reveled in the “the green” of the Midwestern grass, a color she says doesn’t exist anywhere else. When he became too frail to play and entered hospice, Sweeney and her husband took both her parents into their home until her father’s death.

Once again, Sweeney needed direction. Years prior, she’d discovered “Writing Down the Bones,” a hugely popular book by Natalie Goldberg, who held writing workshops four times a year at her home in Taos, New Mexico. Sweeney decided to attend one and “fell in love,” returning repeatedly until Goldberg asked her to become her assistant. Sweeney and her husband -- a CPA who stepped away from finance to focus on meditation and mindfulness and work with prisoners and men in treatment on “alternatives to violence” -- hastily decided to move to Taos.

“Unfortunately, I mistakenly thought I was in love with Taos when I was actually in love with the workshops,” Sweeney says. “It was my not really paying attention to what I was getting myself into again, thinking other people should conform to my standards and this not knowing myself. I think I did what a lot of people do: I found a guru and put her on a pedestal and figured she would solve all my problems.”

After three years and a growing realization that Taos was not the right place for them, Sweeney and her husband moved back to Ohio. That was 22 years ago. But the many unresolved chapters of her life continued to fuel a slide into deep depressions with thoughts of suicide. Her medications increased to six; her search for a psychiatrist included one doctor who told her “You just don’t want to get well, so there’s nothing I can do for you.” She left the office sobbing disconsolately.

Graduate school seemed a high mountain to climb, but operating on her father’s philosophy of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” she decided to go back to school for her MFA. Shortly before graduating, she learned her 24-year-old niece had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. She died less than a year later and in short order, Sweeney lost five other loved ones in less than a year; the last was her mother.

“I was a wreck,” she admits. That was a horrible year.”

Though she finally found a psychiatrist who helped reduce her medications and a good therapist, for the next few years Sweeney went into “not a holding pattern, but a plateau.” She continued writing, doing freelance magazine articles, trying unsuccessfully to sell a book about her final days with her father and starting a newsletter she continues today called “Write Now Columbus,” which lists area events in her area of Ohio.

And then came that fateful day, when she was sitting on the sofa scrolling through her social media feed and happened on her friend’s post about running. It was the one therapy she hadn’t tried and it ended up being the one that not only chased away the depression, but helped her find herself.

She realized her new self image on the day she visited a physical therapist to get some help with an ankle issue she thought might be related to her running. In addressing her problem, the therapist shook his head and muttered, “Oh yeah….you endurance athletes…”. His words took her breath away.

“I was like, ‘What? What did you call me?’” she says. “It blew my mind to think of myself that way. So I started to take on that sense of self identity. For me, the exercise has given me a different option that I didn’t think I had because I didn’t think of myself as athletic person.”

Today Sweeney takes “one tiny dose of one medication” and has experienced no deep depression or suicidal ideation for 12 years. Her first book, “Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with my Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink,” a running and mental health memoir, was published in 2019. She has since co-authored a writing journal/workbook, “You Should Be Writing: A Journal of Inspiration and Instruction to Keep Your Pen Moving”; written a free e-book (available at nitasweeney.com), “Three Tools for a Happier Healthier Mind”;  and published her most recent oeuvre, “Make Every Move a Meditation,” which explores how running, or any movement, can be a form of meditation.

Better yet, she has finally discovered that the therapy essential to her mental well being was actually within herself all along.

“For me, the big three things are writing, meditation and movement,” she says. “Sometimes I feel very much like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ You know, where the good witch says, ‘You had the power all along.’”

If you or someone you know is interested in sharing a personal mental health journey on FMI, please reply to this post or write us directly at faceingmentalillness@gmail.com. The process involves a Zoom interview, the audio of which will be edited for a podcast, and a photograph. Thank you for helping to spread the word by sharing this post.

FACEing Mental Illness podcasts can also be found on Spotify, Stitcher and Apple Podcasts. We are grateful to anyone who chooses to submit a review or share a podcast.