Waking up to sad news is never a good thing

28 May 2014 Leave a comment

by jes in Depression, Faith, Knee surgery, Life Tags: , , ,

Maya Angelou passed away this morning. I didn’t know her, except through her writing, but she always felt like a friend to me. I can’t say that I know what it’s like to grow up dirt poor as a black girl in the south during the heart of the civil rights movement, but she made it come alive for me in a way that other writers never could. Maybe because there were so many incidences that we both shared in our lives; it made me feel less lonely. I will miss her voice.

This entire past week has been a rough one for me. I’ve slipped back into my depression, but I’m fighting hard. One of my Pandora stations is a country station that I’ve put together, which is limited to songs that were released prior to 2006 (with a few exceptions), because that’s when I stopped listening to country for the most part. It started to get too personal. I like relating to my music, but I don’t want it telling my life story. A few days ago, I made the mistake of tuning in to that particular station, and a string of songs came on that reminded me of happier times, when I had fewer worries, I still enjoyed life and spending time with my best friend, and my life hadn’t yet unraveled.

I don’t know how other people react, but when a song reminds me of a happier time, and I know I’ll never have that moment again, it puts me in a sad mood. So basically, the entire theme of my week is one of sadness. I’m trying to break out of it and trying to find my inner peace and happiness again, but it’s been rough.

On Friday afternoon, just before my surgeon’s office closed, one of my incisions reopened after having the stitch removed the previous morning. I did what any sensible gear-head/field doctor would do and re-sealed it with super glue until I was able to get in to see my doctor yesterday. He’s not concerned about it, except that it’s going to leave a scar. Honestly, what’s one more scar to add to the hundreds I already have?

I’m trying to decide on a tattoo for my right arm to camouflage many of the scars on that arm. I’m thinking of a climbing rose, to honor my paternal grandmother, as my orchid honors my maternal grandparents. I’m not sure yet, so it won’t be happening any time soon. It will definitely be flowers of some kind. I’d like it to be bright and colorful, so maybe just wildflowers. I’m in no hurry, and it’s best to not get something permanent done while depressed anyway.

Breaking down walls

09 Apr 2014 1 Comment

by jes in Depression, Panic Disorder, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve spent a good part of my life building walls around myself, to keep people out. I think everyone does that to some extent, but some people build better walls than others. One of my biggest problems is that I feel too much. I don’t know if it correlates to my issues with depression and panic disorder or if it’s a separate issue. All I know is that everything from a misspoken word to an unintentional act can cut me like a knife and make me bleed internally. So,  I build walls. I hide behind them and try to pretend that I have a good life, doing things that make me happy. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes it isn’t.

The first wall I consciously know that I built was to protect myself from my father. He was not physically or verbally abusive towards me, I just didn’t matter to him. I was always the quiet one because my sister was always so boisterous and always had a group of friends around. Anything she asked for, he gave her. If she wanted to go out with friends on Friday nights, she was allowed to. I was given books and told to stay in my room and not bother him. I tried to be a good daughter and offered to help him with projects like working on cars and repairing things around the house, and he’d let me, but I never got a thank you for my help and I never felt like I was appreciated for my contribution. After my parents’ divorce, he started dating and I started baking as a way to pass the time because I hated being alone in the house by myself every Friday night while my sister was out with friends and my father was out doing whatever he was doing to find a new wife. I told myself that it was okay that I was alone, because it gave me the freedom to experiment with baking recipes, but honestly, I’d rather have spent the time doing something with my father. Every time one of my friends mentions that their daughter was going to a father/daughter dance, it made me wonder if I just wasn’t good enough for my father to go to a dance with me. So, up went a wall; one that I could hide behind and convince myself that I didn’t need my father in my life.

I built a wall to shut out my mom as well. Soon after the divorce, my mom went back to school and got a job to help support us. I don’t begrudge her that. Then, she decided to go to law school. All of a sudden, every spare moment of the day was spent with her nose in a law-book, studying whatever courses she was taking that semester. I never had that caring mom who helped me with my homework or talked to me about boys or taught me how to create a budget and balance a checkbook. I figured if she didn’t have time for me, then I didn’t want to make time for her. Instead, I started making sure that dinner would be ready when my mom and sister got home, and struggled through my homework as best I could without help. Of course my sister wouldn’t help me because she was older and had more important things to than to help her stupid little sister.

As I got older, I built more and more walls to hide behind. I created a persona in high school that allowed me to get by relatively unscathed and mostly (I thought) unnoticed by the majority of classmates. I was never the top of the class, but I was never at the bottom. I was never in the popular clique, but I wasn’t outcast. I just existed. At the time, I harbored the dream of going away to a college out-of-state, earning a degree, and beginning a new life away from everyone who knew me. That dream came crashing down three weeks before college was scheduled to begin when my father told me that he decided that he couldn’t afford to pay for my college, and it wouldn’t be fair to my sister, since she was only attending community college. So, instead, I also enrolled in community college and passed three unmemorable years there without making a single friend or feeling like I had actually learned anything.

It was around this time that my depression started. At first, it was just dysthemya. Chronic, long-term, mild depression. I had several bad experiences in high school that may have triggered it, or it may have just developed on its own. I don’t know, and I don’t have the self-will to examine it any closer. I learned to live with it, because I had no one to talk to or share my problems with. Eventually, it morphed into the panic disorder, which I still have, and eventually into full-blown Major Depressive Disorder. Any time I tried to talk about it, I was told that it was all in my head and that I just needed to snap out of it and be happy. The depression would go away if I let it. I was accused of being an attention seeker, trying to get people to feel sorry for myself with my mood swings and crying jags. In reality, I needed someone to explain to me that depression is a disease, just like cancer or Parkinson’s. Some people eventually get past it with the right combination of therapy and medication, and others don’t. So far, I seem to fall into the “don’t” column.

I was terribly ashamed to ever admit that I had depression or panic disorder, so I always blew it off as just having a bad day. I didn’t want to be seen as weak or helpless. I just wanted to be a normal person with the occasional bad day. There was a new wall around me, to keep my true feelings to myself so that no one could make fun of my weakness. That was a good wall. The people who knew me best never realized I had any problems, and I never shared my scarred life history with them. I was just another slightly strange person who never quite became friends with anyone.

Then one day I decided I was tired of hiding behind my walls. I decided that I wasn’t going to be stigmatized for my mental illness. It’s not contagious, so explaining it to others wasn’t going to cause an epidemic of new sufferers. I slowly started talking about my issues to people who seemed to care, and I found out that the people who are my true friends don’t care that I am not perfect. They see my flaws as making me unique, not broken. That’s  not to say that there aren’t still times when I hurriedly put the walls back up and hide behind them when everything is going wrong, but I’m getting better. I still won’t talk about certain events in my life that have shaped part of who I am, but maybe someday I’ll be able to do that. In the meantime, I’ll work on tearing down my walls and sharing my hurts and pains, explaining what depression and panic disorder is actually like to people who ask, and trying to be accepted for being me.

It’s taken 39 years, but I’ve discovered that I like me, cracks and all. I’ll never be a completely whole person, and I’ll never be able to guarantee that I won’t slip back into the major depression that causes me to curl up in bed for days at a time, crying for no reason. I’ll still have panic attacks for no known reason, but it’s okay. It’s just part of who I am.

Panic attacks are not fun

08 Apr 2014 Leave a comment

by jes in Depression, Life, My health, Panic Disorder Tags: , , , ,

I have Panic Disorder (in addition to Major Depressive Disorder), and most of the time, I’m able to control it through medication. Unfortunately, a few days ago, I hit the perfect storm of running out of Xanax just before my delivery was scheduled to be delivered by my mail pharmacy, only to go check the mail and realize that someone had pried open the box and stolen all the mail, including my medication. I went into a full-blown panic attack on Sunday, knowing that I had to suck it up and try to just get through it using willpower alone. Fortunately, my best friend understands my condition and asked me to call him, and stayed on the phone with me until I could breathe again.

I don’t know what other people’s panic attacks feel like, but when I’m having one I get super-overheated and start sweating profusely, my heart rate goes way up (from my normal resting pulse of 55 bpm to as high as 150 bpm) and I feel like I’m going to die of a heart attack. My senses shut down until my eyesight gets so blurry I can’t see, my hearing turns into a whooshing sound like I’m trying to hear underwater, and my head feels like I’m spinning in circles too fast and can’t get my bearings. On top of this, I start to hyperventilate and can’t speak in complete sentences without concentrating really hard.

It’s a horrible feeling. One moment you’re fine, and the next you feel like you’re going to die at any moment. My doctor and I have tried to figure out what my “triggers” are for many years, and I don’t seem to have any. I just get random attacks. Thankfully, I was able to explain the situation to my mail order pharmacy and they are going to expedite a replacement shipment to me, and my doctor ordered enough at my local pharmacy to get me through until the mail order comes in.

The biggest problem with mental illness is that those who don’t have it don’t understand that it’s not a choice. I can’t just decide to be happy or decide to not have a panic attack. That would be the same as trying to not be female or not have brown eyes. Yeah, I can mask the brown eyes with colored contacts, but beneath the contacts, my eyes will always be brown. Same with mental illness, I can mask the symptoms but the underlying disease is always there. Having depression and panic disorder is not anything I would wish upon anyone, much less myself. It’s extremely stigmatized still, and it’s hard to control.

If you know someone who has depression or some other mental illness, please don’t tell them to just be happy and it will all get better. Ask what you can do to help them out. Sometimes we just need a person to cry on until the worst of it passes. I’m okay today, for the most part. I can’t tell you how I’ll feel tomorrow. Each day is a surprise as to whether it’s going to be an easy day or a difficult one. Thankfully, I have some great friends who understand me and don’t make me feel like I’m some sort of freak.  Next, I need to get my family to understand it.

May is “Mental Health Awareness Month”

21 Jan 2014 1 Comment

by jes in Depression, Life, My health Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I’ve never understood the reason for dedicating certain months to certain “causes” or “illnesses.” Shouldn’t we be a more vigilant and caring society where we are aware and understanding of others every day? I’ve gotten a lot of private messages from people lately who have lauded my openness regarding my mental issues. For many years, I was taught by action and word that depression is something that you have the choice to either have or not have. THIS IS NOT TRUE. True depression (not just sadness – everyone gets that occasionally) is an actual disease that is caused by an imbalance in your brain. Yes, trying to be cheerful may be of some help, but deep down inside, I know the depression is still there, and it’s fighting me to get back to the surface and cause more grief.

I am completely open and honest on this blog. I’m not out to change the world, but I do sincerely try to educate people on depression, and other anxiety disorders, because if no one talks about them, then no one thinks there’s a problem, and then no one works to find a cure or a solution. Burying your head in the sand is not going to help anything, except perhaps to give you a temporary reprieve.

Here are some facts about me, that may or may not come as a surprise to anyone with depression, as there are certainly “triggers” that can cause a mild problem to blow up into a huge, life-threatening situation.

In 1991, 19 days after my 16th birthday, I was raped. He was renting a room at my friend’s house, and I was spending the night over at her house when he attacked me sometime in the early hours of the morning. He told me that if I told anyone, he’d kill me. I believed him. At the time, I was living with my grandmother, and when I went home to her, I told her what happened. She took me to my pediatrician (whom I’ve always disliked, because he was very misogynistic and obsequious). He told me that it wasn’t rape because I knew the boy who did it, and I must have given him some indication that “I wanted it.” I believed him. He told me that I should never spread such lies around, because it could ruin the boy’s reputation. I believed him. I was just 16 years old. I didn’t know any better. There was no such thing as date rape back then.

Soon after that incident, I attempted suicide for the first time. I downed an entire bottle of Tylenol (because that’s what we had in the house) and chased it with a bottle of tequila. Bad combination, because it made me throw up and it obviously didn’t kill me. To this day, I cannot stand the smell of tequila.

That began my downward spiral into depression. You know you suck at life when you can’t even kill yourself properly. I started engaging in dangerous behaviors like driving fast (at that time, I think the fastest I ever went was 120, but cars just didn’t have the horsepower then that they do now) and shoplifting. Since I never got caught, I figured that my behavior wasn’t that bad.

In 1995, I got engaged (much too young) to a man who was several years older than me. We moved in together, preparatory to actually getting married. One day, I came home sick from work and found him in bed with a girl whom I thought was my best friend. Obviously, she wasn’t. I turned around and left and went to my mom’s house to sleep for a while. When I came home, he was gone, and so were his belongings, and I haven’t seen him since. I did eventually forgive her, and we did become friends again for an all-too-brief period of time before she passed away.

That was my first realization that I suck at relationships. I expect truth and honesty, and open communication if something is going wrong, and that just doesn’t happen – at least with the men I’ve dated. I’ve had a horrible history of dating “the wrong men.” I’ve dated men old enough to be my father, and 10 years younger than me, and everything in between. They all have the same thing in common: they are unable to commit. Somehow, subliminally, I always choose men that I know will not commit to me, because subliminally, I’m looking for someone like my father, who did not want to commit to me. I was the antithesis of a daddy’s girl. He would probably describe me more as daddy’s pain in the ass, entirely too much trouble to deal with, girl. When my parents separated, I was about 7* (yes, I know I’m jumping around) and for the first time in my life, my father chose me over my sister as the child he would list as his dependent on his taxes. I later figured out that it was because I was the younger child, and so he’d get the child tax break an extra two years than if he had chosen my sister. My father was always deserting me, either to spend time with my sister, or to go out on dates, or whatever he chose to do. When he wasn’t going out, he wanted to watch his TV shows and didn’t want to communicate with me at all. I don’t remember a single meaningful conversation with him that didn’t relate to cars in the first 13 years of my life. When he decided to marry his current wife, we all sat down together to have a “family meeting” and discuss the issues that we had, because our “family” was very warped by this time. One of the things I remember telling him was that I don’t ever remember him telling me that he loved me. He told my sister, and he told his wife to be, but he never said it to me. He said that I should just know, and it shouldn’t have to be said. Somehow, this is the type of man I kept finding and dating. Men who could not or would not love me, and would not commit to being even semi-permanent in my life.

Around this time, I attempted suicide for the second time. I tied a rope to the bar in my closet and tried to hang myself. I managed to suffocate myself to unconsciousness, but the rope broke, and I ended up falling back to the floor. Yeah, I have either really good luck or really bad luck.

After the fiance incident, I dated several other men who fit my profile. A couple of them were already married, some just had girlfriends, others weren’t looking for any kind of commitment, and then there were the abusers. Some were verbal abuse, and some knocked me around. One held a knife to me neck and told me he’d kill me just for the fun of it if I didn’t do exactly what he said. I tried going the Tylenol route again, but this time, I chased it with straight water instead of tequila. I ended up throwing up again instead of dying, and I’m sure I’ve done irreparable damage to my liver by now, even without heavy drinking.

By this time, the pediatrician that I hated had his practice taken over by a new, younger doctor who had more modern sensibilities and was open to listening to me. In 1998, I was diagnosed with Dysthymia, a chronic, low grade depression. I was prescribed an anti-depressant, and it worked for a while, and then a different one, and then a different one; each one working for a few months or a few years before I’d be back to suicidal again. By this time, I’d learned that trying to kill myself is obviously futile, so instead of actually attempting it, I’d just fantasize about it. I’d think of all the different ways I could do it, and what I’d need in order to accomplish it. I think if I had access  to a handgun at that point, I would have actually succeeded, finally.

After having my son, I suffered from Postpartum Depression, although I was unaware of it. My husband was not very good at helping me with anything. He didn’t clean, he didn’t cook, he very rarely took care of his son (and when he did, he called it babysitting, which pisses me off. You don’t BABYSIT your own child, you PARENT them.) And yet, he was constantly critical of everything I did. The house was never clean enough, I didn’t have dinner ready for him, etc. It didn’t matter that I was only getting 4-5 hours of sleep every 24 hour period. During my entire pregnancy and through the end of breastfeeding my son, I wasn’t allowed to take any of my anti-depressants, which didn’t help at all.

Skipping forward over several years and more of the same, I separated from my husband and he and our son moved to a different state, which made all of us happier. Around this time, I started getting really bad headaches. My doctor diagnosed them as migraines and put me on migraine medication. Just like with the anti-depressants, they’d work for a little while, and then the next time, they’d do absolutely nothing. It took 5 years to diagnose the reason for the severe headaches is a bone spur in my spine that’s slowly pinching off the nerves. Eventually, without my even trying, it’s going to likely kill me.

2012/2013 were terrible years for me. I once again got involved in a relationship that didn’t work out. Things seemed great in the beginning, even to the point where we moved in together. Unfortunately, it was the moving in that caused the undoing of our relationship. On the day we were scheduled to move, we ended up spending the entire day moving his belongings, and then had to return the rental truck. I ended up having to move my own belongings to the new place a few boxes at a time, whenever I had the ability, because he wouldn’t help. Then, I went up to Fresno for a friend’s wedding, and was coming home on New Year’s Eve. He knew I was coming home that day, and we had planned to go out and do “something” although that was never defined. I sped down from Fresno only to get a message from him when I was 20 minutes from home stating that he decided he was going to go hang out with his friends and he’d see me the next day. He pulled a similar stunt on my birthday  6 weeks later by refusing to ask for time off from work to spend any time with me. I didn’t even get a card or a “Happy birthday” from him. The closest I got was, “well, you knew that I close on Saturdays, so if you wanted me to be able to go, you should have planned on  Sunday instead (with him in full knowledge that I was starting a new job on Monday and didn’t want to go out partying the night before I started). After that, it all just fell apart. He decided he didn’t even want to sleep in the same room with me, so he took to sleeping on the couch in the living room. When it came time to move out, again, he moved all of his belongings and left me to take care of all my belongings by myself. I am pretty capable, so I did manage to move all of my stuff, a couple boxes at a time, to either storage  or to my mom’s house.

November came around, and for some reason, all of a sudden, the depression came back like a major slap in the face. I went back to see my doctor, and he said that I’ve now progressed to Major Depressive Disorder.

* I’ve actually blocked out most of what happened in my life for several years, and haven’t been able to get those memories back, because they are too painful for me to face, still. What’s the difference? With the Dysthymia, I was always just a little “bummed.” All of a sudden, I hit this wall where it took all of my energy just to get through a day without crying, and as soon as I got home from work I’d crawl into my bed and cry myself to sleep and stay there. Some nights I never got up at all, until I had to go to work. On my days off, I’d stay in bed all day, sleeping or reading, and trying to ignore the outside world. My doctor gave me a new prescription to see if it would help me, and it has. I still have days when I start crying for no reason, or don’t have the energy to get out of bed. I’d binge eat. Some days I wouldn’t eat anything at all, and other days I’d gorge myself until I felt I couldn’t move.

This is probably more information than you’ve ever wanted or needed to know about me, but this is who I am. I have depression. I have panic disorder. I have mental illness. Not just in the month of May. This is a battle I fight every single day. I know I’m not alone. I’m tired of the misconceptions surrounding depression. “Just be happy” is not an option. I am a generally happy person on the outside. You just can’t see the cracked container on the inside that I’m desperately trying to hold together. I have attempted suicide 4 times, and thought about it at least 400 other times. I’m no longer at the point where I want to kill myself, there are certainly plenty of times when I want to die. This is what depression looks like from my perspective.

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