Depression Chronicles

It's been no secret that I struggle with depression. At times, it is debilitating. 

We moved this summer, and I had high hopes that with a fresh start, the depression would abate some. The four kids began three different schools and as my dear husband said, I was "launching." Getting the kids to school, dinner on the table, taking care of homework and any extracurricular activities. That first week of school was so busy that I was running on adrenaline.

The second week of school rolled around and I was back in bed--the hallmark sign of my depression. It came back in full swing. I would drop off the boys at school and then climb back in to bed until my eldest came home from school. Then I would quickly try to clean up from breakfast and get everything ready for dinner, on top of homework, etc. I was playing catch-up from 3:00 until 8:30 when I would fall back in to bed from overwhelming exhaustion. 

Day after day of being in bed was leading to unhealthy thoughts and causing the sadness to run deeper in to my veins. I could barely get up to bathe and it was a sheer act of will power to make it to the grocery store.

This has been going on for a month. Actually, it has been going on for years, but I try everyday to fight through the fatigue and darkness in my head. However, lately it has been impossible to pull myself out.

The upside: we have been going through counseling with our oldest and I've been realizing that I have a lot of the same issues he does, especially with tiredness and focus. I am starting to wonder if this is just not a fatigue issue, which is in turn, leading to the depression.

My doctor put me on a new medication. It has only been two days. But yesterday, I stayed out of bed all day. I joke that our bed needs ropes and chains tied around it to keep me out of it. But I did. I stayed out of bed. I went to the store and bought flowers for my front porch and white string lights for a plant in my house. I lit all of the candles inside. And there was life. I know it sounds silly. But the lights were on, the blinds were open. Mom was awake.

When I told my kids that my doctor was going to give me something that would hopefully give me more energy, they were all elated. How depressing is it for my kids and husband to come home everyday to a severely depleted woman who has no energy for anything?

I know that depression has a stigma and it's difficult to talk about, but I would like this to be an open forum where people can talk about what it's like living with this crippling disease. What do you do when you can't get out of bed? What do you do that brings you a sense of joy? How do you find purpose when all of your kids are at school? These are all things I wonder about, when I feel like I am the only one.

Thank you for reading. I hope this helps someone else who is struggling.

The Door Girl, Continued...

The crickets chirped from inside the bushes. I stood there, five-years old, hiding with the car keys. My mother's boyfriend at the time was banging her head up against the wall. They had both been drinking and somewhere in the frenzy, my mother grabbed the keys and told me to hide outside until she came out.

It was dark and the needles on the shrubs scraped my skin. I could see the streetlights glowing on the building where I went to kindergarten. I listened to the sound of my breath and I knew that I was still breathing...I was okay.

I wasn't new to this. Mommy gets drunk. Mommy fights. Junie hides in the bushes with the keys. I knew this game well.

When she finally ran out of the house, she was clutching a white garbage bag full of clothing, I presume. We got in to the car and drove two and a half hours to my grandfather's trailer in Detroit.

The next day I started a new school. New classmates. New lunch ladies that didn't know my name. I didn't mind these escapades much. They usually only lasted a few days and I got to swim in the pool at my grandfather's trailer park. There was Vernor's to drink which you can't get in Indiana where we were living.

I was oblivious and full of wonder, like any child. I had no idea of the weight being thrust upon my bony little shoulders. Hiding in bushes, starting new schools, making new friends only to leave them behind. Watching my mother be beaten. Driving down dark roads and back alleys in the middle of the night. It was all a part of the games that my mother played.

On those days, mom was fairly peaceful and semi-present, which was better than usual. She wasn't drinking as much. She sat on the couch and talked to my grandfather a lot. I was just happy to be there...in a place where there were no blackouts and no glass breaking.


Within a few days, we were back in Indiana--and we continued to play the game again and again, like Candyland on a rainy day.

I Will Rise...

Many people have reached out to me since my last post to see how I'm faring.  More people have reached out to say, "You're not alone." Thank you to all of you.

I wish that depression was linear. It's not, unfortunately. It's more like a graph of Michigan weather--unpredictable and all over the place. One day I'll feel "good." 

Let me define good for me right now: good is staying out of bed, making dinner, feeling quasi-normal. It's getting out of my comfort zone and making a phone call. Good is making sure I'm taking all of my meds and spending time in prayer. It's writing in my journal with a hot cup of coffee. Good is getting shit done and not obsessing about what doesn't get done. It's looking my beautiful children in the eye when they are telling me a story because I want them to know they are more important than anything else in the world. It's being vulnerable with my husband. It's going to my therapy appointments and working really hard to heal old wounds.

I will have a good day or even two and then the bad days come in like someone sneaking in my back door while I'm asleep. Sometimes there are triggers, and sometimes there are none. 

The bad days are embarrassing to talk about. All I think of is sleep and how I can escape these feelings that just took up residence in my heart. I can't seem to find the energy to read a recipe to make dinner. I hear my kids, but I'll admit that sometimes I don't really see them. I don't make a concerted effort to cuddle with them because I am so focused on just breathing in and out. I set my timer for 15 minutes at a time and think, "I can make it through the next 15 minutes." And then I set it again and again. I feel all of the walls inside of me rising up and cutting off any measure of affection or joy. Those days are dark.

And so I fight. Because it's all I can do. I don't know why I have this cross to bear and it sucks. But my choices are to succumb to it or continue working as hard as I can to get better--even though the days aren't linear and I never know what I'm going to get.

Some people may read this and think, "My God, she shares her shit with everybody." And I do--and I'll tell you why. Because I want to live an authentic life. I want other people who are suffering to know they don't have to be ashamed of it or embarrassed by it. 

https://www.vevo.com/watch/katy-perry/rise-(nbc-olympics-video)/USUV71602005

On Depression

To write is to be vulnerable. You bleed your soul out on paper for others to point and laugh. But maybe you find that one person who gets it-who gets you.

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle." (Alice in Wonderland)

I fell down the rabbit hole without knowing how I got there. One day, I found myself in bed and didn't get up until six months later. The storm had been raging for about two years before that, and then the rabbit hole just grew deeper and deeper.

Depression is a mean bastard. It creates noise in your head that you just can't shut out and a deadening silence all at once.

I thought about all the things I should be doing as I laid in my bed, but my legs wouldn't work. My mind wouldn't work, or it would be screaming at me to just do something and that was really overwhelming, so I just went back to sleep.

I begged for death. I didn't care how. I prayed for a car accident so my family wouldn't have to deal with the awful burden of my depression. I had suicidal ideations.

"Who in the world am I?" I was a shell. Broken and feeling as though I would never be anything more.

By the grace of God, I have a loving family and amazing friends who supported me and got me the help I needed.

Every step, every action is a victory. Yesterday, I ran outside in the sunshine and cleaned my house. The medicine I take causes me to shake, but I journaled in my kindergarten handwriting. And I was thankful. I still lay on the couch and tell myself that in fifteen minutes, I am going to get up and do something productive, but I do it. Another victory. I haven't cooked in months. Friends brought us food (God bless them!) and my dear husband cooked almost every night. But I cooked yesterday which still feels like a giant task, but I did it. I picked up my kids from soccer instead of my husband taking off work because I couldn't get out of bed to drive there. I'm getting stronger everyday.

You might wonder why I've chosen to write something so personal, and it's because I believe people suffer in silence. I have never felt so isolated or ashamed of the way I was feeling and I was too scared to reach out.  Reach out. To someone. Anyone.

"The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die." -Juliette Lewis

The Door Girl, Part 41

Did I miss her? God, yes. She could’ve slain millions of people with her bare hands and I would have loved her still. But she never came back to me to love. And that was her choice.

As an adult, I had to learn to accept that. Everyone has many doors they can walk through. And sometimes the darkest doors overgrown with weeds are exactly the door we need to walk through to gain our humanity.

We are human. We want things to be pretty.  But life is dirty and messy. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we become what we were created to be, and that is authentic, powerful warriors.

I will tell you a little story, however, that I keep in my back pocket when I am feeling low on my love supply.

I was 9-years old and we were living with Tommy the child molester. I walked through the back alley to the corner store where they sold chick-o-sticks in giant plastic containers for only five cents a piece. I bought two and a coke. Back in those days, coke came in glass bottles. As I was walking out of the door, I tripped over the brick holding it open. My mouth was bleeding. Oh my God, my teeth were covered in blood. The store owner ran out and carried me in his arms to my mother.

Tommy ran to take me and I kicked him as hard as I could. I can remember it like it happened yesterday. She said something to the effect of, “No. She only wants me.”

And that summed it up. I only wanted her. In that moment, she showed me love and I have kept it with me all of my life.

That door I tripped through, the threshold, the brick…in a back alley of Detroit. It was ugly. But it was my beautiful. Because in that moment, I knew I was loved.

And so, I guess if I had anything to say to you, dear reader, it would be, “Don’t be afraid of the ugly doors and the broken places. Don’t be afraid to die in order to be brought back to life.” Life is there on the other side of that door.

The Door Girl, Part 40

As a child, I had to act in survival mode, and I recognize that I often still operate out of this place of fear. It’s a place of mistrust because it is the belief that the Universe/God won’t provide and She always does.

I felt abandoned. Alone. And I was alone.

Am I asking you to feel sorry for me? Hell no.

Because my dis-ease is what makes me glow.

This madness, these demons, they make me restless until my hands shake and I know I have to wring the words  from them.

It’s time. The craze will make you insane or make you raw and genuine.

Am I looking for a shoulder to cry on?

No. I have worked hard to wear my big girl pants.

So, is it wanting you to feel sorry for me I tell you my own story? No.

But. There is a single reason why I write.  

Because I am a survivor. I’m an overcomer.

The Door Girl, Part 39

I would always let her back in, my mother. No matter what she did or who she did it with, she was my mother.

It was late one night and we were living in Detroit. On Florida street, if my memory serves me well. It was dark and all I could see was the glow of the streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement. I sat in the backseat like a pet. I was my mother’s pet. 

I tried not to touch her too much because I had seen the ways that cats got under their masters' feet and then began to annoy them. They wished they’d never shown the cat any damn attention in the first place. I would not make that mistake. 

I was well-educated on the behaviors that suited my mother. Stay out of her fucking way. And if she touched you, stay as still as possible because a miracle is currently taking place and you don’t want to screw it up. I never wanted to surprise her when she stroked my hair, so I sat like her toy and let her do whatever she wanted to me. I didn’t care if I was like a bag she threw in the backseat as she drove down the back alley. 

I just cared that I was her toy.

The Door Girl, Part 38

I can remember that day vividly. We had been at the neighbor’s house who had a big inflatable pool in her backyard. We spent a lot of time there.

                  She was high as a kite. I watched her climb in to the pool with all of her clothes on. She was wearing a flimsy navy blue top with a full length skirt. She was stunning and elegant.

I watched her lower herself slowly in to the pool. The sun was an endless fire that day. I watched the look on her face and you would’ve sworn she had died and gone to Honolulu. With a drink in her hand and her body saturated with pool water, she became someone else. I don’t think my mother was ever happier than when she was not herself.

Again, from her journal:

Because that’s the thing. I’m happiest when I’m not myself. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can…I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems.

The Door Girl, Part 37

So, what was the unspeakable thing I did? This crime I committed that I likened to a suicide of the soul?

I became someone I wasn’t. I lived inauthentically. And when it’s all said and done, that is my goal—to be me.

To live as though you are someone else is the greatest crime one could ever commit. Just think of the art we are not seeing, the words we are not reading, the songs we are not hearing because people aren’t living authentically. It is, in fact, a suicide of the soul to prostitute your life to the highest bidder. I refuse to be that girl anymore.

This was found in my mother's journal:

What gets people is the damn monotony of the everyday—wake up, fill in the blanks, go to bed. It is those fill-in-the-blanks that get me. I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I have sex with random men. I break things.

And so, I know it’s better for everyone if I just sleep. I take whatever pills I can find and whatever weed I can smoke and I just sleep and hide from my child. Because the best thing for her is when I am asleep.

It's like Ernest Hemingway says, "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

I don’t want to be this way. The mediocrity of life and the fear of failure paralyzes me.

Sometimes, I just want to get in my car and drive…

The Door Girl, Part 36

I have been given beauty for ashes. When we buried one of our sweet babies, the preacher, said, “The seed that goes in to the ground bears much fruit” (John 12:24). It brought me to tears. I didn’t want to bury my baby in the ground. But what I wanted and what I got were very different things. What I didn’t understand at the time is that graces come later.

The gifts I’ve been given are remarkable. Grace, humility, compassion. My baby that I never once held in my arms bore so much fruit in my life and consequently, in to the lives of others. We planted a peach tree for them. This year was the fullest it’s ever been. Each summer I am reminded that something always needs to die in order to come back to life.

The Door Girl, Part 34

Here is what you are asking yourselves right now. Did the little girl survive? Did she get married and have children? Go on to have a successful life? And the answers are oh so many.

I did have children. Six beautiful children. I have loved fiercely and suffered pain that feels unbearable at times.

But I know I'm not alone. I know there are others out there who have suffered like me, even if it is the secrets that we keep.

I have experienced joy unabounded.

My life...my life has been reckless at times. I have been foolish. I have gone mad. Literally. I have died and come back to life. I have fallen in love with the Universe, God, whatever you prefer to call It. 

Mark 5:41

And he took the damsel by the hand, and said to her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say to you, arise. I'm crazy, confused, beautiful. So at the end of the day when you ask me if I came out okay, I give a resounding, "Yes!!" with a smile on my face because I am a survivor. My life is art. It is imperfect because all of art is. If my life were a hand-knit scarf, you would be able to detect all of the blemishes in it, but the scarf would still be beautiful and provide what it was meant to give: warmth.

The Door Girl, Part 35

Here is what you are asking yourselves right now. Did the little girl survive? Did she get married and have children? Go on to have a successful life? And the answers are oh so many.

I did have children. Six beautiful children. I have loved fiercely and suffered pain that feels unbearable at times.

But I know I'm not alone. I know there are others out there who have suffered like me, even if it is the secrets that we keep.

I have experienced joy unabounded.

My life...my life has been reckless at times. I have been foolish. I have gone mad. Literally. I have died and come back to life. I have fallen in love with the Universe, God, whatever you prefer to call It. 

Mark 5:41

And he took the damsel by the hand, and said to her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say to you, arise. I'm crazy, confused, beautiful. So at the end of the day when you ask me if I came out okay, I give a resounding, "Yes!!" with a smile on my face because I am a survivor. My life is art. It is imperfect because all of art is. If my life were a hand-knit scarf, you would be able to detect all of the blemishes in it, but the scarf would still be beautiful and provide what it was meant to give: warmth.

The Door Girl, Part 33

She was drinking food through a straw and unable to get to the bathroom by herself by then. I was soaking her feet, brushing her hair, holding her to sleep. She woke up coughing in the night with no relief except for codeine cough syrup. And yet, she found the joy in sneezing.

Grandma’s trailer had been dingy from the outside, but the inside was immaculate. She had one of those old radios that looks like it’s a dresser and she only played classical music. Because of this, I thought she was rich. She lived in poverty, but she found the joy in the simplest of things: piano, cold coffee, serrated grapefruit spoons, hot tea and sneezing. She smoked cigarettes, but not pot.

However, she did grow it in the backyard when my mom and aunt were younger because she said she didn’t want her kids buying shit off the streets. Gigi was classy like that.

In a day when divorce, was a scarlet “D,” she was a single, working woman. She wore high heels every day and waited at the bus stop. She never talked about Grandpa that much except to say that he had had a metal plate in his head and “wasn’t quite right.”

I wanted to grow up to be just like Gigi. In between fishing and fantasizing about conquering the lake, I listened to classical music and learned to play “Nadia’s Theme” on the piano.

We had everything and nothing. I told myself that I was a warrior and that nothing would have that much power over me. Not even my own mother. 

The Door Girl, Part 32

I am roughly 10. I am sound asleep in my room. All of a sudden she comes tearing in and flips the lights on.

“I lost my fucking drugs,” she screams. Before I know it, the opening part of the headboard is sliding across my forehead like a sailboat over placid water.

She doesn’t find her drugs. I am bleeding. She leaves the room.

        The next morning, she wakes me for school and seeing the gash gasps, “Shit. You’re not going to school looking like that today.” And so I stay home until my head heals and we can go back to playing pretend like we always do without ruining our good family name.

My grandma was my refuge during those years before foster care. Gigi, we called her. Her last name was Graham, so it only made sense. She did not, however, find the humor in it when we started calling her “Grandma G-String,” because she was too high-class for bullshit like that.

Gigi was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly after she retired for her job at the county clerk’s office. Everything shook, including her lips. We put food on a spoon and scraped it below her top teeth to just get something in her mouth to eat.

One day we were sitting there and I sneezed.

“Excuse me!” I laughed.

“I’ll never understand why people try to hold their sneezes in. It’s one of the greatest joys in life,” she quipped.

The Door Girl, Part 31

There were two doors. One was narrow and jagged. The other was round and open. My mother chose to go through the open door. It hurt her like hell, it ripped her wide open, but she knew it was the only way to survive. Do I approve of it? Do I think she did the right thing? I’ll never know, because the life I had and didn’t have with her are all I knew. It’s impossible to imagine what my life would have been like with her presence.

        I know I’m strong, however. I have been to hell and back again a thousand times. Day upon day. And I continue to rise from the ashes. Clumsily, yes. I am constantly losing my way and finding it back once again. But I walk through the round, open door as well. I am exactly like my mother and not a thing like her at all. I like to believe the thing on the other side of my windowsill looks different than hers did. I know it’s different in fact. Her door took her to men, drugs, alcohol and the point of madness. I discovered these truths in her journals--what she had been doing all this time she had disappeared.

        My door must be different. And I’ll tell you a secret. I’m deathly afraid that it’s not. And yet, I walk through the door, shaking and scared. I listen to the universe and follow it. I allow it to gently guide me by my jittering hands. I follow it in the dark like a lantern and see nothing around me but stark branches. But I follow.

         

The Door Girl, Part 30

She mailed me her journal after my stay at the psych ward. Maybe it was to help me understand. Maybe it was to remind me that she was still alive despite the absence of me. Maybe it was to hurt me. I don’t know why she sent it, but as I read the entries, my heart ached for her. My mother was not a monster, but she was mentally ill. My mother did the best she could and the best she could was all she had to give.

July 2, 1974

The thing is, I’m happiest when I’m not me. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can. I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems. I think what gets people is the monotony of the everyday. I wake up, make coffee, take care of my child, set my timer for fifteen minute increments just to make it through to bedtime. And during those fifteen minute increments, I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I break things. And after, I feel so bad that Junie has witnessed yet another breakdown, but I can’t help the madness. It’s clawing at me to get out and all I know to do is shatter glass.

The Door Girl, Part 29

The words in my head, the voices, they were quiet at first. They blew through my mind like tumbleweeds on an almost windless night. They didn’t disrupt things.

        But then they grew louder and larger and started to damage my soul.

        They had to be given life, and by life, I mean voice. And that is why I write.

        Because the voices never die. Writing is a lonely profession, but the inside of a writer’s mind is filled with the most vivid colors, people with a million stories unto themselves; it’s the playground that never sleeps.

        But God, sometimes, I wish it would. This is what I was talking about earlier—the haunting and begging for attention, waking me in the middle of the night like a small child for a drink of water. The words are restless, and so I am restless.

        I breathe. Listen. And let you drink this healing balm from my aching hands.

The Door Girl, Part 28

Words are like flowers; when you put them together properly, you can create a work of art.

        I used them to escape the jail I had created for myself. I used them like a dying man pushes his morphine button. They were my escape—my pain killers, and I used them in large quantities.

        Bleeding to death by ink is a fantastic thing. The pain, the fear, the voices and the shadows where they lurk--it all gets washed away with a  pen in my hand.

        It was difficult to write on anything at the mental hospital because writing utensils were seen as weapons (again, understandable). So they gave me short, stubby pencils like you use at the library. But I took it anyway because it calmed me more than the Ativan I begged for.

        I wrote my way to crazy. And that is to say, I wrote my way to sanity. Yes, restored mental health. Which fully includes the crazy and the ugly. Those are the parts that make us beautiful and evolve in to more lovely human beings.

        I wrote until I realized that life is never as black and white as it looks on paper, even though I had hand-crafted every detail. For the first time, I realized that I was in control of everything and nothing. I was invincible with all the fragility of a flower.

The Door Girl, Part 27

My mother was always hot and cold. Always a contradiction. Fire and ice. I blazed with her and froze to death with her, as long as I could stay close. We were a raging fire and a frozen marsh in the tundra, where it’s always too cold for anything to grow.

        That’s how my mother would remain for days, but all of a sudden, the clouds would lift and I would see the embers start to twinkle inside of her. The Magic Woman was coming to life. And she would be lit ablaze, everything around her smoky and on fire. She was lightning in a five-foot-two-inch body.

        And me, well…I just loved to watch her burn.

The Door Girl, Part 26

I am ten-years old and our church is having a revival. I am in fifth grade. We watch videos of dead babies in the streets and people disappearing mid-walk with a friend. The song from the video is “You’ve been left behind.”

I get home from school and the house is empty. Logically, I know that my mother is at work, but all I can think about is that song. And I know that I have been left behind. That all the good people were taken, my mother along with them, and I did not make the cut.

My mother comes home and plops her purse down on the table. “Hey kiddo, good day?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, my heart beating a million miles a minute. “Hey ma?”

“Yes?”
“What if I don’t believe in God or any of that stuff they teach at church?” I ask her fearing for my life.

“Baby,” she says calmly, “you just gotta fake it till ya make it. That’s what you do in this life.”

And I did it well. Until, I didn’t.