Otherwise titled: "Crippling Depression, But Make It Festive".
Hey, I am allowed to be sarcastic about my suckage. I suggest you do the same.
On a more serious note, I can't shake the constant sad.
There is a reason that I haven't written a full blog post about my life for the past couple of years. There has been a lot of suckage. There's also a lot of good, however, this is not what this is about. I definitely am not one to expect, or even wish for, puppy dogs and rainbows all the time. At least one a week would be fine.
We are stuck right smack dab in the middle of a "Pan-Demi-Levato", as one listener of my favorite podcast calls it. Other wise known as COVID-19. I understand that these are "unprecedented times"; learning all new catchphrases like, "social distancing" and "masking" and "vaccine passport". We have lost some very good people this year.
My seemingly wonderful relationship that I allowed myself to freefall into is over. Which one? Do you ask. Because over the past few years there have been a succession of ones that I thought were the "forever kind", and yet here we are. There is so much I don't want to write about because I've spent so much work to put it behind me. In fact, I am currently the most single that I've been since I was 10. No crushes, no dating, no random hook ups. I have had a lot of random hook ups. I haven't had sex in the longest stretch that I've been in for years, and I am also the most okay with it than I ever thought that I would be.
Reighan graduated, had 6 med changes in 4 months, was hospitalized, went to Job Corps and is currently on medical leave until she can get herself stabilized.
Jesse graduated, had a legal scare, suffered unmeasurable depths of depression, didn't leave the house for months. He and I received our college acceptance letters on the same day.
I cut ties with a couple of very significant people that I believe that I can't live without, but I can't live with them the way things were at the time that I decided that I needed to move on without them; and I don't know what to do about it.
I moved. In September, my landlord brought to my attention that he was selling my house that I've rented from him for the past 12 years and 9 months. I was devastated. At first. It's not a huge secret that I don't make changes without being forced to. What can I say? I like consistency. Then I kept finding reasons that I should have seen a long time ago as reasons to get out of dodge. I live in the big city now. It's honestly like Green Acres in reverse. I am certain that I'm going to be spending the next century unpacking, but I'm happy. And seriously, Door Dash is the best!
All of these above subjects I am planning at some point to write about in their own post.
This pressure cooker that I've been in containing these and so much more is the what brings us here today.
It's Christmas. I know that I wrote in a previous year that for the most part since I was a kid the holidays have been the same. Except for that one time I won't talk about right now. Maybe never. Last year, none of us got together and as hard as it was, it was also wonderful because I did basically nothing. This year, it went back to being pretty much status quo, but there were so many things that stuck out like a sore thumb.
At the start of the week, I had made an emergency therapy appointment because I am so, so tired. Exhausted from not sleeping, moving, nothing is where it belongs, no routine. The kids are so excited to be living in the city now that every night I've had to be out of the house until late most nights and up watching TV because I can't relax right now. Monday at 1730. I sat right in front of my counselor, my group co-facilitator of a support group that I have fostered for three years, and verified when he asked me if we had group this week, that we didn't. Wednesday, I got an email from my advisor at NAMI with the title "Are You Ok?" She brought it to my attention that another group facilitator had joined my group in need of support, and once I didn't join in, she just facilitated it for me. Nobody called or emailed me about it. That, right there, was the clear and final indication that I have reached the breaking point.
For Christmas this year, I gave the kids each $100. I couldn't shop. I can't make decisions. There is a Christmas miracle that happened though: Jesse needs a laptop for school and he didn't want to spend almost a grand for something that he could get at Walmart for $300, but he would have to wait for school to be over before he could get his student money, so he was stuck in a pickle. Last Saturday evening, Jesse and I were in my bed watching a show and something told me to look at the Walmart app on my phone. THE SAME computer was on sale, for $120!!!! As he was sitting next to me, venting away about how worried he is about the situation, I ordered it and had it shipped. He is STOKED!! He won't stop thanking me.
This fall, I was partially devastated that my kids wouldn't both be home for Christmas for the first time in their lives. Reighan told me that she wasn't planning on coming home for the holidays, but it was her choice and I found a way to deal with it. Growing up is a thing children have to do, for some reason. Over the past few years, I have come to the realization that it's going to be awhile before she is ready for independence. Everything in it's own time. I've been going through this grieving process since she was three. You'd think I'd be better at it by now.
There's a slight twinge of I told you so where I feel like the family is finally understanding what's been going on all these years. After going through what I did this summer and cutting ties with most of my family, I got invited to family Thanksgiving and again to our get together Christmas Eve. My brother asked me if both kids were going to be home and I verified they were, that Rei was on medical leave. He asked about that, and I told him exactly what was happening. Naturally, he tried to blame her brother, and I verified that it was happening not just at home, it was happening at school too. I also threw in the fact that she has had 8, count them, 8 evaluations since preschool, and not a single member of my family has bothered to ask me what is happening or read them. Blind judgement is much less work, you know. What a surprise to understand that maybe, just maybe, I'm not the villain.
So, back to what bring us here today.
The stress and grief has gotten so bad to the point where before this past weekend, I was sleeping at best three hours and crying almost constantly. When I was moving, before it actually came time to do it, I had planned on having all this help, that at the time it actually came time to do it, I got crickets. I sprained my arm. For every three amazing things that my daughter was doing to help, there were eighty things that would send us back to purgatory. Namely the furniture placement in our new place is sending her into a panic just looking at it for a week straight. For every five minute pleasant conversation, there was twenty of acting like something out of the Exorcist. I sent a very strongly worded email to my daughter's counselor, who has yet to respond because he's on vacation, and CC'd my counselor. It included the line that I couldn't get out of my head:
"This is the reason that people like me kill themselves."
The strong ones. The ones who don't need anyone on a regular basis and when they need it the most still don't have it in the ways that it's needed. The ones who are tired of constantly being in warrior mode and fighting just to have the basics of everything that comes naturally to everyone else.
It got to a point that something as dumb as using the spoon that I found at Goodwill that is the same pattern as what I used as a kid at my grandmother's house on Verona sent me in a tale spin of tears. If someone had asked me how I was doing, I most likely would have dropped to the ground and ugly cried like a kid when they need a nap. Update: I slept. A lot. And I unpacked a bunch of stuff which helped my sanity. My new place is finally feeling like a home versus a Labyrinth of daunting tasks.
I miss Jack. My car buddy. The sharer of cheese popcorn and watcher of movies. The giver of zero fucks. My stinky from rolling in dead things and proud of himself buddy. The one who wouldn't cuddle, but would sleep on my feet, every night for eleven of his fifteen years.
Last summer he stopped jumping up on the bed when it was bedtime and I just figured that he's almost fifteen, it's natural. That his depth perception was just off when it was dark. When I would lift him up to go to bed, he'd do this little jump and push his feet off the floor like he thought that he was helping. And help me, he did more than he knew.
His blanket is in the same trash bag that it was in when I brought his cremains up from the vet's office back in March. When I told Jesse what the bag in my car was, he said "That's okay mom. I'll take care of it." He brought it down cellar to be washed. Two days later, I saw that he put it back in my car. We aren't ready. Someone brought it in the house when they were helping me move. I put it on the fridge. I am not ready. I can't open the bag to smell him and see his hair on it. His cremains are in the car, where they should be. He was my car buddy. He would go with me anywhere, and from now on he will.
Whether we like it or not, life goes on regardless of how we feel about it. I have found that when you are open about depression and anxiety as I am, people mark you down as a miserable person. I'm not a miserable person, I'm a realistic person. When I feel emotion of any kind, I feel it realistically. It's not all about "Better Living Through Denial" all the time like I used to believe it is. Today was a good day. I'm okay today and I can say that and mean it. Sort of. I think it just takes a little acceptance and a little time. I am learning what is within my control. I don't want something out of Pet Cemetery, as much as I wish for Jack to come back. Like I said in my previous post, I don't want someone to try to unpack me that wasn't getting paid to do so, so dating is on the back burner for now. I don't want to continue being treated the way that I was by those I chose to take a break from.
And with that, I will leave you with this:
You do not need to solve your entire life in a day. You do not need to fix everything tonight. You do not need to, nor will you be able to. So instead of feeling as though the mountain in front of you is so huge you could never scale it and give up entirely, just focus on taking one step. All you need to do today is take one step in the right direction, and then tomorrow take another. Your life is not transformed in one sweeping motion, it is changed bit by bit, ordinary moment by ordinary moment, when you decide to stop waiting for perfection, and start doing what you can right here and now to move yourself forward.
~Brianna West
