Daily Archives: October 8, 2010

Surviving depression: Part 5

Posted on by
20

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

As I drove my mom home from the hospital, I wondered exactly how I was going to ask her the question that wouldn’t stop ringing in my head.

We pulled up to her house. I hadn’t been inside since she was taken to the hospital, and the blood spot in the center of the living room where she had been found by the ambulance sent a chill up and down my spine.

Mom sat down on the couch and looked up at me. She was ghastly. She looked so small, and yet she also reminded me of the mother that used to call me Princess and rock me to sleep when I was little.

I remembered for the first time in a long time that she truly loved me, and that she always had. As negative a picture as I can paint of her here, the one thing I could never accuse her of was not loving me.

It was what she had ben battling, what we both had been battling, that had ripped us apart. I wanted to say these things to her, but years of unspoken emotions quelled my voice.

Instead of speaking, I found a box and started boxing up every bottle of alcohol in the house.

I knew it was harsh, but I couldn’t deal with it any other way.

My back was turned away from her, but I could feel her eyes on me. I wondered how this was going to go.

Suddenly she was beside me, gingerly lifting bottles of chardonnay and setting them into the box.

She promised me that she was done and asked me not to worry about her anymore.

It was a huge relief to know that she finally understood that she couldn’t continue living the way she had been for so long, but I had to keep her at arm’s length.

Nothing would have broken my heart more than if she had started drinking again.

From that point forward we slowly started healing but it would be a few years before I would finally be able to put everything behind me.

Growing up the way that I had damaged me in a way that I’ll never be able to erase.

But with what I hoped was the worst of it in the past, I felt ready to focus on the other areas of my life again. At only 20, I felt old and tired.

I resolved that I would start acting my age again and try to put the past behind me.

I wasn’t strong yet, but I wanted the experiences I’d been going through to mean something. I wanted to truly learn and evolve instead of continuing to spiral down depression’s dark path.

A few months later… I fell in love again. Talk about a distraction.

My journey towards true happiness has always been one step forward, two steps back. However, I truly believe that the most important survival strategies I learned were when I was walking backwards.

My relationship with Trevor was a whirlwind. I had just turned 21, and more than anything I wanted to move on from where I had been the previous three years since leaving home.

I was ready to settle down and focus on the things that really mattered, and since I was in love and things were going great – why not get engaged?

The engagement and the following weeks were definitely happy times. I was finally starting to mend my once non-existent relationship with my father, who used the wedding planning process as a means to bond with his estranged daughter.

For every reason imaginable, I should have been the happiest girl in the world.

I had a newly healthy mother who had moved closer to where I grew up, lessening the strain that we’d both felt after she followed me to college.

I was getting closer to my father, brother and their significant others and finally felt like I had a real family again.

I had a hot fiance, big diamond ring to show off and a beautiful wedding almost 90% planned.

And still… I wasn’t happy.

In fact, my depression was the worst it had ever been.

Thinking that maybe I was just overwhelmed by all the recent life changes, I headed to the therapy yet again. This time, I got on medication.

I waited and waited for it to kick in, all the while feeling more confused than ever.

I was in love. I was supposed to be happy! What was going on?

Sure enough, things quickly fell apart. For a host of reasons I’ve discussed here, I realized that things with Trevor were not what I thought they were and we parted ways.

As another relationship washed down the drain, I suddently felt halted. I wasn’t moving forward or backward. I was stuck.

I went off my medication, which I don’t believe ever truly helped me (although I have nothing against anti-depressants and believe they can be very helpful to some) and settled into another cycle of self-destruction.

Author’s Note:

I know what you’re probably thinking… I promised this story had a happy ending and yet it keeps getting sadder and sadder, right? I promise I’m getting there.

I just feel that it’s important to really take a look at the circumstances that lead up to depression.

Depression can occur for no reason at all, but most of the time there’s a sequence of things that gets you to that point. This was story was it for me.

After my engagement broke off, one other really bad thing happened. I’ve been 100% candid here, but I can’t really go into details about that – it’s just too personal.

However, we’ve come to the point in my story where I’d reached my ultimate low point. I had just graduated college, moved out of my college town and I was at a precipice.

I was either going to keep getting worse, or I was going to get better.

The happy part is that I did, in fact, get better. It took a lot of hard work and a lot of time, but I got there.

In the next (and hopefully final) installment I’ll tell you how I did it.

Thanks so much for following along with this. I’ve been so touched by everyone who has reached out, and more than that - I have received an incredible amount of mental clarity from finally owning up to this story. I finally feel completely free from it all.

In the past I would have been ashamed and terrified to disclose all of this information, but I feel that I’ve come to a place where I can be open and honest and I truly hope it will make a few of you out there feel a little less alone.

I encourage you… if you are going through or have gone through something in the past that has caused you to feel hopeless PLEASE TELL SOMEONE. It can be a parent, a friend, a spiritual advisor even a journal.

You will never learn more about yourself than by just being honest about what has happened to you. In my opinion, this is the first step to true healing.

Everyone has a story, no matter how insignificant it may seem, and the truth will set you free.

Surviving depression: Part 4

Posted on by
19

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

All my life I had watched my mother’s health deteriorate. She was constantly stressed, constantly angry, a heavy drinker and a smoker.

When I was little I would crawl into her lap and beg her please not to die. Even as a child, I had seen how close to the ledge she was. Sometimes it seemed like she was just holding on by a thread.

However, despite all that, I was still utterly shocked when I learned she was sick.

Apparently, she had begun feeling ill one night but hadn’t thought anything about it. The next morning she passed out and woke up in a pool of her own blood.

When I finally made it to the hospital that morning, I felt the world unravel around me.

The emotions I felt were insurmountable. The strongest of which was fierce, violent rage.

I had told her over and over again that she was killing herself, and she had never listened.

I’d begged her not to make me sit back and watch her die in a hospital bed, but still she didn’t listen.

She had her reasons. Her problems started long before my life began. She grew up in a household where her sister was the star and she was the shadow. She suffered from extreme social anxiety and insecurity, and no one had ever believed in her enough to tell her that she was beautiful and special.

She says my dad married her because he didn’t have any other options.

Both of her parents were deceased before she turned 40, which I believe was the last straw.

I was only a baby when her mom died, but I remember how different she was after my grandfather passed away. They had been extremely close and he was her last life line.

To tie it all together, she only had one remaining living relative, her sister, who never visited her in the small town she was sequestered to.

I had always understood that she had a reason for being the way she was, I just couldn’t understand why she didn’t love me enough to get better. Why weren’t my brother and I a good enough reason to fight? To live?

That question burned over and over again in my mind as I listened to the doctors telling me what was wrong. That they didn’t yet know how bad it was.

In addition to the anger, I also felt dizzy with guilt.

I was the only person she saw on a day to day basis. I was the only one who had known how badly she was treating herself.

This was my fault. I should have tried harder to stop her. If I had done what she needed me to do, then this wouldn’t be happening.

I fought every urge within me not to flee from the hospital and never look back, just like I had fled from my childhood home. I needed someone to help me through this.

I went to the bathroom to cry and then to steady myself. I had to face this, my worst fear realized. I had to go in there.

When I walked into the hospital room, I was too angry and scared to even speak.

She was awake, but covered in blood. My breath was still out in the hallway, I was sure there was no oxygen provided in that tiny space.

As we made eye contact, I could tell that she knew exactly what I was feeling.

She’d been sick for over 24 hours, so I was seeing her sober for the first time in two years.

She was too weak to say anything but I knew she finally got it.

To say that I released my anger at that point would be a lie, it continued for a long time. But we had reached a breaking point.

Over the next few days, I spent every hour possible at her bedside. I skipped work, skipped class, cancelled doctors appointments and just sat there.

I remember one night, I was in the waiting room between visiting hours and Grey’s Anatomy came on the fuzzy TV in the corner. It was the episode where George’s father died.

As I sat there all alone in the waiting room, thinking of my mom all alone in her hospital room I nearly lost all hope.

What kind of world did we live in where these things happened? Where people had to go through heartbreaking tragedies likwithout a hand to hold in the world.

I realized that we were alike, my mother and I. We were both alone because we refused to see anything good about the world we were living in.

I knew something had to change.

So did she. When she was finally released from the hospital after a week in the ICU – she stopped drinking.