Tag: depression

Like a Phoenix

After being burnt to cinders, the Phoenix of lore, rises out of the ashes and soars with renewed grace and exuberance. However, in none of these stories do they say how long it takes. Nor do they mention, how many times, exactly, this can or will happen. Does the Phoenix have nine lives, like the cat? Or is this rebirth continual, until it learns some sort of lesson about the great beyond or life on this plane? These are the questions I ask myself in fleeting thoughts when thinking about my own story. As a Buddhist, I believe that rebirth happens, until we reach enlightenment. There are spiritual disagreements in the Buddhist world, about when that can or will happen, and by what means. But the overarching belief is that yes, we can be reborn. 

In this body, I have lived many lives. These former lives I’ve inhabited seem so long ago and hazy, like a lucid dream. But I know that I lived them. I take with me from these lives, the knowledge and experiences in which formed the adult that I’ve become and will help shape the woman I’m becoming every day. It’s strange to think that once I was a child, a rebellious teenager, a young adult, a wife- twice, and now I’m none of those things. But rather, I’m a survivor, a warrior, a mother, a partner, and an empath… just to rattle off a few things that I’ve turned into over the years. 

Much of my mental space has been occupied by manifesting the life I am meant to live, since for entirely too long, I lived a life that did not excite me. I created things that excited me, a business, a network of friends, a family, but I was stuck in the doldrum of a life without fire and passion. I cannot think of a slower, more exhausting path toward death. So, in my spiritual practice, I’ve decided to focus more on meditation. I’ve committed to meditating every day for 40 days. Spiritual leaders of multiple faiths have all come to this “40 day” thing, as a means of connecting with what I will call the Universe. Some people call this God/dess, or Source. Regardless of the choice in word we use to describe the same essential things, for some reason in many texts, 40 days is the sweet spot. Therefore, I’ve chosen that length of time for this initial phase of my practice. 

In addition to the meditation challenge that I’ve set out for myself, I’ve decided that I need to up my game. I have very much gotten lazy in a number of ways. Instead of taking the 40 days to just do a single challenge, I’m going to create my “Life Overhaul Bootcamp”. In this challenge, I’m not just going to meditate daily for at least 5 minutes. I’m also going to write at least 500 words a day (almost there right now). But wait, there’s more. Since I’m 100% a glutton for punishment, I’m also committing to do a little bit of exercise every day too. I’m short on time these days, because kiddo and work, and home, and life… but I’m committing to do all these things in like, 30-45 minutes a day. A quick workout, some meditation, and a little writing (blogging, in this case). 

I’m over feeling stagnant, like nothing is changing (despite quite literally everything changing recently). I want internal growth, maturing, and conditioning. Outwardly, I’ve got shit together. Everything’s coming up Millhouse (for all you Simpsons fans), but I’ve got a lot of things that I want to make better, and that starts with me. I want to feel calmer and more confident. I want to feel more secure in myself. I want to have better self-mastery. I want to hone my writing and develop my “brand” better. This will force me to do exactly that. I’m excited for this challenge, and I’m so grateful for where my life is at. My kiddo is happy and thriving. I’m challenged and successful doing what I’m doing. I can’t wait to see what’s coming up next.

Be sure to check in on my progress with not just the writing portion, but also the meditating and so on. I’ll be holding myself accountable here as well as celebrating my successes.

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Long Division

How does one separate something that has taken years to build? It could have taken 2 years, or 20, but each day you added bricks and build a foundation, walls, windows… it develops into a fortress to protect you from the world. This fortress is supposed to be impenetrable. It shields all the inhabitants inside. So how, and where, does one even start to take it down? Do you burn the drawbridge? Trebuchet the shit out of the exterior? It’s hard to know, I guess. Circumstances often dictate the destruction of your fort.

But what do you do if you’re not mad, but have simply decided that this fort is shit, and you don’t want to live there anymore? Do you attempt to keep the status quo until arrangements change? Do you still burn the drawbridge and trebuchet the exterior? What about a volatile situation? What then? When inside the fortress is nothing but pure chaos, and there’s fires everywhere? How does one process getting everyone to safety? What does safety even look like, when you’re bed is in flames? Are there really any survivors? Nobody escapes totally unscathed, right?

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And there’s the long division. Strangely enough, if you never unpack, it’s easier to move. But now, we must sift through every. single. thing. to determine what belongs to whom, or who gets it in the dividing process. Then, there’s the others in the fortress… what becomes of them? The friends? You know everyone chooses sides, whether or not they consciously chose a side. Even family chooses sides, despite best efforts. It’s like we drew a line, and everyone decides which side they’ll forever stand on.

What I’ve determined is the worst of all, is the feeling of sudden emptiness. Loneliness. You once had a sounding board to share in your trials and triumphs with. Now, there’s friends or family, but it’s not the same. I want to share my joys and sorrows with someone who is in the fortress WITH me. We are fighting on the same side, in the same battles. People outside the fort, they just can’t appreciate the inner workings of your brain and heart, without first having to explain yourself. That is fucking exhausting. Constantly going over the same stuff, all the time. I just want to have my heart safely in the hands of someone I don’t have to “preface” with. New is positively exciting. Electric. But old, it’s comforting, familiar. That’s not to say I want a damn thing to do with this decaying rubble, but there’s something to be said for the familiar.

My heart aches for what it doesn’t have. My mind longs for a simple life. My intuition knows that this has expired and that it’s no longer home for me. Now what do I do with myself?

 

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Love is a choice

Life, like love, is messy and complicated, difficult and flat out hard. We want it to be fun and exciting, but things bog us down, make us heavy. The trick to love, is to fight through that hard and find the things that are beautiful.

There have been times where I’m at my heaviest, and I see something so simple, a glimmer in time, and it makes me feel weightless for just a moment. It’s the breadcrumb that keeps me going. The trail leading me to the next bend in the pathway.

My life has been particularly heavy as of late, and it’s got no chance of lifting in the near future. I’ve been seething with anger at people who could have chosen love. I’ve been shattered by words and deeds, crushed by apathy and indifference. Everything has been flipped upside down.

However, just like love, hate is a choice. I can choose to be angry, sad, and destructive toward myself and others. But what good would come of it? My child would see a mother who is consumed by loathing and frustration. A mother set on destruction- destroying the ones who hurt her, and all the bonds for both sides.

I choose love. Through the fear and anger, the betrayal and malice. I choose love. Letting the anger consume me isn’t doing anyone any favors, especially my kid. I need to be a whole person, one who models the life I want to teach. I need to find the grace in what is otherwise a heartbreaking situation. For me, for my daughter.

Am I still hurt? Sure. Pissed off? Yup. But am I going to waste another moment of my life hating someone? Nobody got time for for that.

Ironically, the year of forced growth has put some important things into perspective for me. The last several years have been a bizarre re-enactment of a previous chapter in my life, but instead of playing the “me” role, I’m the other person. I see now, with glaring clarity what I did to completely derail and sabotage my own life back then. It’s taken much longer than I’d like to admit for me to come to that conclusion, but I got here.

Not only do I now recognize my shortcomings in great detail, but I perfectly understand how they felt during that time. I’ve been beating myself up for more than a decade, because I didn’t completely understand both sides of the equation. But here we are. Lesson learned. Because life is messy and complicated, it couldn’t be quite so easy to extricate from as the first time, since, it took me so fucking long to learn it. However, I’m here now in the right place. It feels terrible in every way. Lesson learned. And through it all, I choose love. It’s all I’ve got left.

Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: wordporn

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Social media unrest

I’ve been sort of back on fb just over a week now. It’s exactly the same as I left it. The same bullshit politics and tragedies. The same people lamenting or embracing where they are in life. The same pictures of food, memes of animals, and photos of stupid people being themselves. 

Several people I know have recently taken breaks from not just social media, but all media and even become reclusive. Because of the terrible things, the bullshit politics, and the really awful things being spread, they simply had to take a break. These individuals are some of the strongest people I’ve ever known. That’s how you know the environment is toxic. When the people who can withstand the most get out, you know it’s beyond time. 

Social media has been an exceptional tool in our modern world. It’s successfully brought closer the furthest corners of the world. But at what cost? Are we truly to believe that spreading vitriol, trolling, cyber bullying, and hate crimes online are what these tools were meant to be used for? I certainly can’t imagine the creators could have even considered to what lengths human beings will go to hurt others, even in virtual spaces. It’s almost easier in these arenas because there’s an element of anonymity. 

While I’m absolutely not the first person to posit these questions or make the ties between hate and being anonymous, I am discovering the true nature of things for myself. I can’t say I’m a fan of what I see. It’s actually really sad. Moreover, it’s frightening that so many people are misinformed (probably myself too) and spreading hate and lies. It seriously makes me wonder if it’s worth it. 

My husband has gone about a week after removing all his friends from his friends list. He only still has his account because a couple of the groups he’s part of are really important to him. A couple car groups, an insect group, and a plant group- all of which he uses to ask questions about things that matter. The insect group is for our garden, and the plant group was for him to figure out what ‘weeds’ we had in our backyard. Both have proven quite helpful. 

But isn’t this what social media was designed for? Sharing information with people sometimes a half a world away? It seems like we’ve come a long way from that aspect. I’m hopeful that we can get back there before it’s really too late. 

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Happiness and Depression

Hello again!

Today I would like to write about something that I know I’ve touched on before, but has sparked me to make some changes in my daily life. First let me begin by saying that I have battled depression for most of my life. I was 14 when I asked my mother if I could go to therapy because I was so unhappy, but by no means did it begin then. I think it started when I was 8 or 9 years old, largely in part to my parents splitting up. Prior to that, I was an excellent student, outgoing and participatory. I will add, that I was also bullied because I was extremely tall for my age and we were very poor, so I was picked on A LOT. I then became a bully, because, well, I wasn’t going to let someone get the jump on me.

Anyway, by the time my parents finally split up I immediately internalized it, believing that there was something that I could have done better to keep them together. They should have probably never BEEN together in the first place, but then I’d never be here to share my story either. So there’s that. I started to withdraw from things I once enjoyed and came very close to failing out of elementary school, though writing was probably what saved me because it came easy to me. I was in gifted programs and special classes, but I struggled to even care. I did everything I was supposed to because my family would accept nothing less and honestly, they could be scary.

My mother was largely absent due to working 80-100 hours a week, putting herself through nursing school and everything. My father had a new wife, so we were more of an obligation to them. So in the care of our babysitter, who was also our grandfather, my brother and I basically only had each other. My grandfather’s version of babysitting was not letting us out of his sight, which meant many, many days and weeks of watching TV game shows and the news.

When I got older and was able to care for myself, I began to be rebellious probably because I had rarely been let outside. I need do stretch my legs, so to speak. I drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, did drugs, partied… you name it, all before I was out of high school. Granted, I was one of the most responsible people I knew (and still know), because I have spent the majority of my life taking responsibility for things that are not mine to internalize. But that’s what I do. I have to be honest here and say that since I was a kid suicide always seemed like a viable option, but my failed and ignorant attempts only made the depression I felt worse.

When I was 19, I did not drive a car because I could not afford one. I borrowed my friend’s car to take my driving test. I had driven her car once, maybe, before then and the transmission was failing. I’m surprised I passed, and so was the person administering the test. He said “given your equipment, you passed with flying colors”. Anyway, I was working two menial jobs on opposite ends of town, along basically the same road. I relied on the bus to get me places or walking, which I did a tremendous amount of. One day I was getting off my day job and had to time it perfectly so that I could catch my connecting bus later, and I failed. When I got to my connection, the bus was already driving away and I immediately started freaking out. I had my first full fledged panic attack that day, though I thought I was having a heart attack. When I stumbled into my apartment, sobbing uncontrollably, I called my mom who was a nurse. She could barely understand my inaudible words through the wheezing and hysteria. This was all because I missed the bus and I couldn’t get to my night job. I went to the hospital to make sure I wasn’t really having a heart attack, but that started the regular attacks.

For the next several months, I would wake up in such fear and dread that I would throw up before I went to work every day. I became more and more depressed, money was tight so I was even more worried. I was stuck in this cycle of dread and fear and depression and hopelessness. Since that time, I have had more freak outs, as I call them, than I could possibly count. I have been medicated, self-medicated, and worse to cope with the dread and sadness I have experienced.

So what does this have to do with happiness? I’m sure you’re asking by this point… I have determined that happiness is elusive, and I’ve kind of mentioned this before in previous blog posts. But beyond the elusiveness of this thing that we are trying so hard to find, is that even through all of the hardships, heartaches, struggles and worse, I am still looking for sources of happiness and I’ve also learned to manage my anxiety and depression to where I can still sort of function. I’m no longer sobbing uncontrollably on my bed in the dark with someone silently (or not so silently) judging me for being “weak” or “pathetic”. Instead, I wear my ability to endure like a badge of honor. Not only is the world against me, but so is my own brain, and I’ve still managed to make it this far. Some days, that’s all you’ve got. But I will say that even in my darkest days, which I’ve been experiencing a couple of lately, I still find sources of happiness everyday. It could be something so simple that will make me smile, like a picture of a baby hippo someone tagged me in on social media, or a text from my husband about nothing at all.

This is where we find our happiness on a daily basis. The simple things that make you smile in the darkest times and our ability to endure the storm of life.

Thanks for reading!

 

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