31 July 2026
When depression takes over, time dissolves; I’m me, but I’m going back in time, minute by minute, a little younger, a little younger. I’m no longer at home with my husband and ten-year-old son, but in another house, far away, another bedroom, and I am small. The hands of the clock wind backwards. I’m not reacting to what’s happening now, I’m reliving something old that felt like this. I’m back there as if I never left, alone and scared where no one who loves me can reach, seized by the ghost of an event that replays itself like a residual haunting. I’m trapped in that moment, hyperventilating like a sobbing child, forever young.
Even when I come out of it, there’s a part of me that never grows up, and as the years pass, I notice more and more how young I continue to feel. A part of me, like Peter Pan, will always live in Neverland, where the days are an endless loop of play, no responsibility. But if you skin your knee one afternoon in Neverland, you’ll skin it every afternoon. And every time you trip on that same tree root lying across the forest path, you’ll fall to the ground again, hurt and sniffling, bleeding a little, while Peter and the Lost Boys, those eternal children, run off without you. They can’t help you and here in Neverland, there are no grown-ups. Though I’ve spent years talking it over in therapy, though my husband leans in to help me up, a child’s emotional vulnerability is perpetual. Every bruise is a mortal wound, every disappointment, the end of the world. The seeds of depression, so often sown in the timeless Neverland of childhood, grow gnarled roots.
The real world is full of traps and triggers, skinned knees that take me by surprise, and the work of therapy, at least in part, is to look out for tree roots. We practice staying in the present when our Peter-Pan-self is being pulled back to Neverland where today’s trouble is a problem that can’t be solved and endless childhood is not a blessing, it’s a curse. We’re forever seeing the Lost Boys disappearing into the Neverwood, feeling the helplessness of being too hurt to follow, the tress around us suddenly dark and forbidding. I wasn’t good enough then. Nobody stopped. Everyone leaning in now is a ghost, someone who wasn’t there, who doesn’t know. To find my way out, I stay with that little self, cry with her again, put a Band-Aid on the knee of the child inside me. Slowly, the spirit of my husband becomes real. The hands of the clock move forward, but I’ve missed time, stayed young when others grew up and left the woods. Yet if my pain is always a child, so is my hope that with time and patience, the youth I can’t leave behind might finally conquer her fear and sadness, might someday live forever in a world of joy and wonder.
Jennifer Frost Writes 