It's been a long time since I posted on this. A LOT has changed. I'm going back through my old posts and I cringe. I really thought I had it all figured out, and I also hate the way I talked about mental health. The truth of the matter is that although making good choices can help mental health, sometimes it's impossible to make those good choices. My brain chemistry is not my fault, and it is also not yours. I want to apologize for my past words, because nothing about depression is easy. I will fight it my whole life, and there is no shame in that. I was arrogant because I was in a good place, but I know better now. Depression is a monster, and sometimes I don't have the strength to fight it.

Keep moving forward.  Work the plan.  Practice your coping skills.  That's what you do.  Talk to people.  Get help.  Reach out. 

I made a counseling appointment. 

I'm writing.

I bought myself a toy.

I'm surrounding myself with rainbows.

I spent some time laughing.

I put new sheets on my bed.

I took a shower. 

For now it's enough.

I know it's been awhile since either of us has posted.  There have been a lot of times when I thought of something I wanted to write about, but by the time I was home and could spend the time to write, I no longer had the energy to devote to ordering my thoughts.

I am battling the same monster.  Depression.

With that comes shame, that I'm STILL fighting the same thoughts and feelings.  Shame over the way the words of encouragement and "this is how you beat it" fall so easily from my lips but now they seem so stupid.  I read my words and cringe.

Last weekend I broke down to my parents.  I'm in a place where it seems like my faith isn't even a consolation anymore, and that scares me.  It scares my parents too.

I'm planning on talking to my doctor about some medication, and seeing if I can get into some counseling, but honestly my job leaves me so wrung out that all I want to do is...sit.  Not think.  Not feel.  Not plan.  Just...exist I guess.

And today of all days, one of my supports is not available to me, and it's even harder to function.

Happy Birthday to me.

I'm not even going to publicize this, but I just had to get it out somewhere.

Taking out the thorns--Leslie

When you’re a survivor of abuse, sometimes you feel like there will never come a day when you’ll be really and truly free of the effects of what happened.  Sometimes weeks—months—years will go by without anything, and then WHAM.  You realize that something is wrong, and you realize it’s connected to deeply-ingrained feelings from your past.

I had that happen twice in the last week, and in both instances it was like discovering thorns had been poking me in the side for so long I’d gotten used to it, like skin had grown over the wounds and the thorns were sealed inside.  So I had to reopen the wounds, and draw them out, and it hurt badly.  

The first incident involved Elaine.  She is home visiting for a few weeks.  I’ve never liked conflict.  I get an anxiety attack when people I love shout at each other, and when someone close to me yells at me I feel nauseated, lightheaded, and my heart races.  I’m totally ok when it’s strangers, or a client, but for some reason with my friends and loved ones, it’s different.

Elaine and I got mad at each other over something really, REALLY stupid, and she started shouting.  I went into fight-or-flight mode, and I shouted back at her, said something mean, and ran out of the house to the safety of my car to cool off.  She came out a few minutes later, crying, still angry, and in panic mode, to try to find out what the heck was going on in my crazy brain.  

 

I wasn’t ready to talk to her.  She stood five feet away from the car, shaking and clenching her fists, and my panic levels began to rise.  I spoke quietly and said, “If you want to talk to me, can you please come sit down in the car?”  She said no, and I said, “Well, then will you please go get one of those chairs and sit down to talk to me?”  She said no, so I said, “Well, then I think you better go call Adam or something and calm down before we talk about what happened, because otherwise we’re both going to say things we regret later.”  I should say at this point that I was so close to a panic attack I was having trouble breathing.  She walked away, thank God.  

After I had calmed down I started praying…and analyzing my behavior and the way I’d reacted.  I remembered something crucial at that moment.  When MaryAnn was about to beat me, she’d scream in my face, and stand there shaking with rage, clenching and unclenching her fists.  That’s when I knew she was about to hit me.  That’s where the fear, the anxiety, the “I’m going to say something mean and run so I don’t get hurt” reaction came from.  It was like a light shining in my brain. 

When you connect those things and realize where they’re coming from, you can start to change the behavior.  At least for me, I will be able to remember where the feelings are coming from, deal with them, and not lash out.  It will take time, but the first step is over with.  

The second incident happened Saturday night.  It takes a long time for me to feel comfortable with touch.  I don’t like being touched unexpectedly.  I don’t like for strangers to touch me.  If I ask you for a hug, or I touch your shoulder while we’re talking, it means I feel extremely safe with you.  On the flip side, it doesn’t take much at all for me to run away from you if I feel like I’m being rejected.  And I’m ALWAYS expecting to be rejected, because I have been so much.  On Saturday night I went to touch someone close to me, and they tensed up.  I felt like I’d been slapped and I’m pretty sure I physically flinched.  They turned to me and said, “What?” and to my ears it sounded angry, which only hurt worse.  I sat there next to them, trying not to cry. 

Thank God this person knows my history, and at the soonest possible time they asked me what was going on.  We worked through it and I realized the tensing up had nothing to do with me, and I’d totally misinterpreted the whole situation.  But it was another instance of my brain connecting past events to present realities, and realizing that it was another thorn to remove, another behavior to correct. 

It makes me so frustrated.  I don’t want to be this person who’s afraid of loving someone.  I don’t want to be this person who doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.  I don’t want to have these fearful reactions at a loving touch, I just want to enjoy them.  I don’t want to be a mess.  I don’t want to run away from situations that I need to discuss and work through.  I want to be better.

Most of all, I don’t want to hurt anyone else.  

I’m getting there, and I don’t think there are many thorns left, but it’s discouraging at times.

Choosing to live

I want to talk about making the hard choices.  Battling depression is really all about making hard choices and then following through on it. 

Choice number one for me:  to sleep or not to sleep.  Sleeping was my drug.  It was so much EASIER to just lay down, cover my head up, and sleep.  When I slept I wasn’t feeling.  I wasn’t hurting—emotionally or physically.  Sometimes I would escape into a dream…sometimes I would pray that God would let me just die in my sleep, because I was at the bottom of this pit and I couldn’t see a way out of it.  

Choice number two:  to trust or not to trust.  When you’ve been so hurt by people, the easy thing is to shut yourself off from people.  You just decide you’d rather live alone than ever open yourself up to being hurt by anyone, ever again.  

Choice number three:  to believe that you’re WORTH something, or to just accept the negative voices in your head that keep you down. 

I chose not to sleep.  It was hard at first.  Sleeping is much easier.  I didn’t FEEL like getting up and going to class.  I didn’t FEEL like doing laundry or taking a bath.  I didn’t FEEL like dragging myself downstairs to eat.  I didn’t FEEL like going to work.  I was exhausted by just breathing.  It literally hurt to breathe.  

I discovered life cannot be lived based on feeling alone.  It doesn’t matter if you FEEL like taking a bath.  Take a bath anyway…and you discover it feels better to be clean.  It doesn’t matter if you FEEL like doing laundry.  Do it anyway…and you remember how nice towels feel straight out of the dryer.  The hard thing is DOING IT ANYWAY.  You discover that your feelings lie to you.  Your feelings are what keep you down in this never ending cycle of “I feel terrible and don’t feel like doing the things that, if I did, would make me feel better.”

It was like learning to be human, slowly, all over again.  I chose to get out of bed, even if for the first month it was mostly a zombielike existence.  Yes, it was hard.  Yes, it was exhausting.  Yes, there were days I slipped up and went back to bed.  It was Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill. 
DO IT ANYWAY.  

You’re rebuilding yourself.  If you need to start with something small, like making your bed every day, start with that.

I chose to trust people.  This was difficult.  I could never trust people who said nice things to me.  I never believed they really meant the things they said.  I didn’t FEEL like I was any of those things they said, so I always assumed they were lying to me.  Not because I thought they were terrible people, but because I thought it was perfectly obvious to everyone else how worthless I was, but because they were polite, they’d say something nice to cheer me up.  As I’m writing these words, I realize how ridiculous that sounds…but depression really twists your thoughts. 
I started believing that maybe people were talking to me because they WANTED to be my friend.  Instead of having my defenses up and lashing out first so I wouldn’t be the one hurt, or looking for the slightest sign that someone wasn’t who they seemed on the outside, I began to relax and just let people BE. 

I began to realize that people aren’t perfect, and that people aren’t thinking about me half as much as I thought they were.  Depression can be very self-centered sometimes.  If I heard someone in a restaurant near me laughing, I assumed they were laughing at me because I was fat and eating.  Slowly I began to accept the fact that perhaps they just found something funny, and hadn’t even noticed me.  Now I’m at the point in my journey where, even if they are laughing at me I don’t care.  It shows THEIR worth, not MINE.

I don’t want it to seem like I never got hurt.  People still suck sometimes.  But I learned that I didn’t HAVE to let it take me back to square one.  I didn’t have to retreat all the way down to the bottom of the pit I had come from.  This was an excruciatingly slow process, and it’s directly tied into choice number three.

I choose to believe I am WORTH something.  I say all the time, “It’s as easy as that, and it’s also as hard as that.”
There is nothing more to it.  BELIEVE YOU ARE WORTH IT.  The actual practice of believing, however, is the hardest thing.  There is no quick road to this step.  It is a decision of the will, wrapped up in ALLOWING yourself to be vulnerable enough to let people in to show you.  It comes with great risk, because people will still hurt you.
Ultimately for me, it was a matter of faith.  I am a Christian.  When I say that, I mean my life would be nothing without Jesus in it.  When I was at my darkest, He sat with me in the pit and waited.  He was at my side for every step out of the mire, and when I would get scared and retreat back into the shadows He would walk back and speak lovingly to me.  He coaxed me back into the light.  He sent good, loving people my way just when I needed it.  

And then one day I decided to take Him at His word when it says things like, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”  (Psalm 34:18) 

It says in James 1:17 “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”  

EVERY good gift?  Does that mean EVERY good gift?  Well, I like butterflies.  So I asked God to send me butterflies.  I chose to LOOK for gifts.  I chose to believe there are no coincidences.  ANYTHING good happening to me was God telling me “I love you.  I LOVE you.  I love YOU.”  Soon there was wonder all around me.  There were butterflies flitting across my path every day.  I saw and felt so much love it was unbelievable.  

I CHOSE TO BELIEVE.

That was where healing really began.  Allowing the miracle of the Creator of heaven and earth to love ME.  Allowing Him to show me I am NOT garbage.  I am NOT worthless.  It doesn’t matter what I look like.  It doesn’t matter what I can or can’t do.  It doesn’t matter what others think or say.  I ground my belief of who I am, of what I’m worth, in what the Almighty says of me, and nothing else really matters.

That’s the real secret.