Heliotropic
BY AMY ESTES
Theano Giannezi, Commensalism, drawing, collage, pencil on paper, 39.4 x 19.7 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
HELIOTROPIC
AMY ESTES | MAR 2022 | ISSUE 14
Sunflowers are heliotropic: when they are young, they turn to face the sun as they grow.
Heliotropism, also called phototropism, is most apparent in immature sunflower buds.
— S.F. Gate’s “The Heliotropism Of A Sunflower”
***
I am told that I was a happy child, and I believe it. Even now, when I feel myself drifting out to sadness, I recall one of the sweetest memories of my childhood: a summer evening running through sprinklers with my brother and laying down to sleep, bathed in the pale yellow of setting summer sun still streaming through my window while reading Ramona Quimby, Age 8, my lips stained cherry-red with remnants of a popsicle, listening to my mom and dad laughing together downstairs. It was easy to face the sun when I was young. I had everything I could want—a loving family, friends, and, most importantly to young me, a relationship with God.
Growing up, I felt the most at home at church. My mom was the director of children’s ministries, and I was as involved in my church as I could possibly be. I grew up wide-eyed among the pews, performing in Christmas plays and being loved by the adults in the congregation. As I got older, I taught children’s church on Sundays, attended youth groups during the week, and participated in every activity offered. I memorized Bible verses and did my homework for Sunday School, trying my best to bring what I’d heard called a “joyful spirit” to everything I did.
Christianity preaches about the importance of joy constantly: rejoice in the Lord, be patient in affliction, present requests with thanksgiving to God, the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, and peace.
Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam, and if that’s what Jesus wanted, I was going to be one, god dammit.
***
As the flowers develop, they lose their flexibility of movement.
During growth, sunflowers tilt during the day to face the sun but stop once they begin blooming.
***
I started middle school in the era of Delia’s catalogs, happy faces, chokers, and denim everything. I had a special affinity for sunflowers, the official flower of the 1990’s. I set out purchasing t-shirts, jewelry, and babydoll dresses covered in the perky yellow flowers. I used some babysitting money to purchase a journal, covered with sunflowers. I used this journal as a space to write long, meandering letters to Jesus. I told Him everything, figuring myself out a page at a time in loopy purple penmanship with the help of a God I dedicated myself to pleasing with my cheerful spirit.
My friends were obsessed with the idea of being perky, an act that involved wide smiles, high-pitched voices, and endless false cheer. We knew one another well enough to know that our lives were not always perfect. Each of us had typical teenage problems like not making the soccer team or being rejected by crushes, along with the ones we were too ashamed to discuss: fighting parents, eating disorders, money woes that adults whispered about late at night. Despite witnessing one another’s secret struggles, the artfully folded notes we passed back and forth always ended with “Don’t worry, be happy!” and a litany of smiley faces.
At the beginning of eighth grade, something shifted. While I had experienced fleeting sadness before, this darkness was different. It lingered.
I don’t remember when I learned that a human being could take their own life. I remember talking with my mom about it and her strict instructions: don’t even think about it. She told me that people who killed themselves went to hell, and also, that if I did it, it would ruin her life. I don’t know if she somehow knew that sadness was taking over my body, and suicidal thoughts were lurking in my bones, but the idea of hurting my mom and being relegated to hell was more than I could bear.
I was trapped by my inability to ask anyone for help, save for begging Jesus for mercy in the letters I wrote Him. I told Jesus that I was a burden to others, that the world would be better without me, and begged Him to take me from it. In one entry, I pondered stealing money from my parents so that I could pay to have someone murder me; another considered which of my friends’ parents have guns I might consider stealing so I could shoot myself. I repeatedly asked God for forgiveness for each of these terrible crimes and thoughts:
Dear Jesus, I’m so sorry I said I would steal from my parents. I swear I wouldn’t do that Jesus.
Please forgive me, God. Jesus, please help me feel like myself again.
Jesus, I don’t want to be this way. Please make me happy again.
I pressed so hard that the pen left indents on the page beneath, and multiple entries were tear-stained and smeared. I promised to do anything, to be a better Christian, to be a perfect big sister, to get better grades, to be kinder, to be more grateful for the life I had if he would just absolve me of my sadness.
To everyone but this deceptively cheerful-looking journal, I was untroubled. The sadder I felt and the more desperate my entries became, the more I counteracted it by pretending to be happier. To my childish understanding, being sad meant that I didn’t love God enough—that something was wrong with me. I wrote and memorized Bible verses on joy. I tried to be a human sunflower: sunny and warm, standing brightly for all to see.
This is why I’m sure it was shocking for my youth group Bible Study leader when I asked her if I could speak to her privately one night and told her that I had been considering taking my own life.
I sat across from this woman who was ten years my senior, who I adored and looked up to, and told her that I had been depressed, and sometimes, I wanted to die. I’d chosen her because I thought she could help. She wasn’t my parent, so I expected her reaction to be measured. She wasn’t my friend, so I wouldn’t be socially ostracized. She was older than me, so surely, she’d know what to do.
I envisioned her folding me into a hug, offering to help me find the words to tell my parents that I needed help.
I wanted to hear that my life mattered, and that I shouldn’t do it.
When I squeaked out the words, “I’m depressed and I’m thinking about killing myself,” I was met with an eye roll.
“You’d never do that,” she said. “You don’t seem sad to me and you don’t have anything to be sad about.”
“Well, I am.”
She repeated her sentiment: “You’d never do that.”
She closed by reiterating that I didn’t have anything to be sad about.
“I bet that if you prayed harder, you wouldn’t be sad anymore. Here. I’ll pray for you now.”
We prayed to close out our meeting and I kept my eyes open, numb and lonelier than ever.
I left her office, defeated. When I crawled into the front seat of my mom’s van to drive home in the dark, she asked me what I’d been talking about behind closed doors.
I smiled and said, “Just praying for some kids, mom.”
Desperate for an outlet, I decided to test the waters in a different way. I “invented” a friend who lived elsewhere and who sent me letters (written by me, using my left hand) about how sad she felt and that she was considering taking her own life. I showed these letters to my friends, asking them what they’d do if they had a friend who was that sad. What I really wanted to know was what they would do if they knew that I was that sad. They reacted with faux concern and sympathy, telling me that I should like, totally, ask an adult for help and that if it were their friend, they’d want to know so that they could help and tell them they were loved. I warmed to the idea of talking to them, preparing myself to confess that these feelings they were reading about were actually mine.
Before I could tell the truth, I was caught in the act. During fourth period history, my friend Heather noticed me hunched over binder paper, writing with my left hand, and spied the contents of my letter. I tried to explain myself to no avail. I was temporarily banished from the group for being a liar and for “needing so much attention” and “being a drama queen.” It wasn’t the last time I’d hear those things.
How human of me: to want and need to be seen and helped in the darkest days of my despair.
It’s hard to explain suicidality to people who don’t experience it. There’s no better way to bring down a room than saying that you’d prefer not to be in it. Suicidality is viewed as an immediate crisis—a taboo in discussion, and cause for an immediate trip to the mental hospital. To me, it’s background music—an ever-present hum in the middle of my days.
I liken it to looking at a perfect menu full of your favorite things to eat and seeing “kill yourself” at the bottom of the page, written in neat script. Even if you don’t order it today, it’s both comforting and terrifying that it’s always on the menu, the way creme brulee or chocolate cake stares up at you at the end of the meal, tempting and ever-present. Even now, when I tell people that it’s something I struggle with, most are confused, and unable to reconcile the fact that the person standing before them—a person who teaches, writes, loves her dogs, has a shockingly loud cackle-laugh, has a spouse she loves, and friends and family—can simultaneously be someone who is so sad her body aches, who sobs, who beats her steering wheel out of the rage of depression.
***
A mature sunflower doesn’t move with the sun throughout the day; rather, it just faces east.
***
I recently unearthed a box that included my sunflower journal. As I read the old entries, I saw a young girl desperate to capture joy—chasing something that could not be caught, the way a child chases their shadow.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that joy comes and goes. I treasure it when it makes its appearance. In truth, it is the moments in darkness that give me light and the sense to appreciate it. Depression is a ghost that haunts me—I catch it out of the corner of my eye and find it lingering in my thoughts, but I know it will not stay. I no longer follow joy from room to room, begging it not to leave me. Instead of youthful searching for perkiness and manufactured joy, I wade into the darkness. I go to therapy, I care for myself, I chase contentment and consistency rather than perkiness. I am transparent about the struggle—no personas needed, no lengthy prayers for relief.
Jesus no longer wants me for a sunbeam. Thank God.
The world is full of darkness and cruelty, but in spite of that, I have found the happiness that once felt elusive. It is not the childish joy I once sought with its smiley faces and sunflowers, but instead, the sort that sneaks in around the mundane edges of real life.
I stand and face the east, experience making me certain that even after the darkest of nights, the sun will come again.
I've come to trust the light.
Amy Estes is a writer, storyteller, and educator from Sacramento, CA. Amy’s humor writing has been featured on McSweeney's, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, Weekly Humorist, and others. Amy’s essay writing has been featured on the Huffington Post, Catapult, Evocations Review, The Financial Diet, PULP Mag, Livability, POPSUGAR, and others. Amy’s live storytelling has been featured in Mortified, Cliterary Salon, Greetings From Queer Mountain, and on SoulPancake. Currently, Amy teaches satire writing for the Second City and middle school English for a bunch of rad students. When she’s not writing or teaching others, you can find her drinking coffee with her wife and dogs, reading books, and watching her murder stories. Or napping, if we’re being real about it. Amy completed the first draft of her memoir, Let The Love Surprise You, in 2021 and is actively seeking literary representation and publication.
Theano Giannezi (Θεανώ Γιαννέζη) is a visual artist, born in 1991 in Thessaloniki, Greece. After completing her studies at the AUTH University of Fine Arts in 2016, she exhibited her first professional pieces at the Gallery Zina Athanassiadou and the Macedonian Museum of Art. In 2019, she won the Indonesian Scholarship Darmasiswa and majored in traditional puppetry while completing her studies in ISI Yogyakarta. She attended a residency program in Papermoon Puppet Theatre in Kasongan and, in 2021, created a solo project in Krack Printmaking Studio in Yogyakarta. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and cultural institutes in Europe and Asia, and she has participated in art seminars and residency programs. Her art practice focuses on exploring and incorporating various elements of nature and human psychology. These elements helped her observe the close relationship of culture with fine art and the transmitted human mindset, by creating artworks consisting of naturally occurring repetitive forms and conceptual figures.