My Eclectic Mess

This morning wasn’t one of those fabulous Happiness Hangover kind of days. I was struggling. I am struggling. But I’m okay.

I had a busy weekend. Had to work Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Went to a friend’s birthday party Saturday night and stayed out too late and had maybe a bit of the bad kind of hangover Sunday. Drove 8 hours round trip to Michigan and back to pick up my daughter from visiting her sister at college on Sunday. She was sick by the time we got home so even though she didn’t have school Monday morning, I had to get her up early to go to a doctor so I could be to work on time at 10:00. The doctor found nothing wrong with her and sent us home. By the time I was about ready for bed last night I felt rather frazzled.

I decided to do a short yoga session before going to bed. I had a real hard time silencing my mind and relaxing my body. My neck hurt. My middle back had been in and out of spasm since Sunday morning. I lit a candle, put on some music and rolled out my mat. It wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t mind expanding, it wasn’t anything special. It just was. It was just what I needed and I went to bed and slept soundly until dawn.

But I wasn’t “all better” this morning. I knew I needed to go walking. I hadn’t been out since Thursday or Friday. But it was dark and cold. I was tired. I had a chiropractor appointment at 9:00. I just wanted to take Emma to school and come home and fart around online for an hour. But I knew that if I didn’t go, it would be even harder to find the motivation the next time I was tired or cold or depressed. I put on my warm clothes, put my iPod in my pocket and drove to the forest preserve. It wasn’t a perfect day. The trees weren’t brilliantly bathed in autumn sunlight. The forest animals didn’t come out to scamper and play at my feet. I took a path I’d never taken before and it was kind of desolate and creepy. I even got a little lost but just ended up turning around and going back the way I’d come because I’d literally ended up on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

After getting back on a familiar trail I pulled out my iPod and put on a podcast that I’d been wanting to listen to all weekend. Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly Read Along. I devoured this book last week and it has had a profound impact on me already. I’ve decided to go back and reread it with the Read Along. I’m also reading one of her earlier books; I Thought It was Just Me (but it isn’t). I think I may be on the path of becoming an apostle or groupie or something.

In these books she talks about shame and how it effects us and how we can become resilient to shame experiences. We can never be shame-proof but we can learn to recognize the signs and know the triggers and learn to cope and bounce back from those things that send us into a shame cycle. I’m also learning how to become more empathetic and to recognize the signs of shame reactions in others.

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

“Shame is hating yourself and understanding why other people hate you too.”

When we experience shame, we feel disconnected and desperate for worthiness. When we’re hurting, either full of shame or even just feeling the fear of shame, we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors and to attack or shame others.”

Reading the above words in these books stopped me in my tracks. I could feel these words in my gut and in my heart. I have lived shame for most of my life. I’ve hated myself and other people. I’ve lashed out and attacked others all because I was feeling shame or was afraid of shame. A few times I had made myself vulnerable and opened up to people and was hit full force by the Shame Train. I need to get a handle on this if I am ever going to become wholehearted.

In Daring Greatly she talks more about vulnerability and how true greatness and creativity come out of moments of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. This is scary because we want to avoid shame and opening ourselves up to being vulnerable also opens us up to the possibility of experiencing shame.

Over the years of writing a blog I’ve struggled with vulnerability and shame. I’ve found it difficult to know just how much to share in order to make my writing interesting and engaging without going too far and opening myself up for ridicule and shame. When I look back however I do realize that the posts I’ve written that have gotten the most positive response have been the ones where I was very honest and told stories that have elicited a “thank you for writing that, I feel just like that sometimes. You are so brave.”  I don’t know about that but I do know that all I can do is write what I know. And often what I know is painful and embarrassing and sometimes it is enlightening and positive.

“The power of owning our stories, even the difficult ones, is that we get to write the ending.”

I think it is important to share our stories and to let each other know that it is okay to struggle and it is okay to celebrate our successes. Shame hides in dark places and in the silence. If we bring it out into the open and shine the light of compassion on shame, it can’t survive.

So the last few days haven’t been bliss-filled days that have moved me toward enlightenment. So what? It is still part of my story and I think it is important to share that too. I’m living in the moment and appreciating the now. It’s all I can do sometimes.

I had another post planned for today and hopefully I will have the time and the words to type it out tomorrow. It’s one that had been percolating in my mind for over a week. But I just realized that it was National Suicide Prevention Week and today, September 10th is Word Suicide Prevention Day. This is a topic that touches the deepest parts of my soul. I had to share my story. It is time.

I’ve been very open and honest about my depression over the years. It is something that I feel needs to be brought out into the light of day and talked about. Like cancer, diabetes, asthma, etc. it is a disease that kills people. There is nothing to be ashamed of about it. The stigma needs to be removed so the healing can begin. Although I have been open and honest, I’ve never told my whole story. Some friends and family have heard it or parts of it. I’m telling it here now so that if someone else out there is in that same dark place they may hopefully see that there is a light and that things can and do get better.

Looking back I can identify middle school as the point at which I now know I had depression. I hated myself and as an extension anyone who had anything good that I didn’t have. I would cry at the drop of a hat. High school things got better in some areas and not so much in others. I had friends and a social life. Even a boyfriend or two. In college things got a lot worse. But I’d learned to hide my pain really well. I got cynical and snarky. Being angsty and “punk rock” was cool. I was miserable. Happy people pissed me off.

My family had gone through some very hard financial times while I was in high school due to the farm crisis of the mid-80s. I felt a lot of pressure to succeed and work hard. I didn’t want to be a burden on my parents. I put aside a lot of my big dreams like going to an out of state college or moving to the big city to pursue acting because I was afraid. I compromised and went to an in-state university where I got lots of financial aid because of my need and my good grades. I also started working and by sophomore year was working 40+ hours a week. I had very little on campus social life. I never went to a football or basketball game while I went to school. I didn’t have time, I was always working. I was also partying and making bad choices. I was trying to bury my internal pain in superficial “happiness”.

By mid-winter my freshman year I was a mess. I was living in a dorm with a roommate that was all cotton candy pink rainbows and sunshine. She had been a beauty queen. She was from a well-to-do suburban home. She had attended a private all girls Catholic High School. In short, she was everything I wasn’t and she was happy. I was miserable. I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated my classes and my school. But I was too stubborn to quit. My parents had made sacrifices so I could go to a Big 10 school. I had been a very good student in high school but now I was almost failing some of my classes. I didn’t want to be a statistic.

But one night I broke. I couldn’t take it anymore. I now joke that I almost killed myself because of Whitney Houston. As stupid as that is it isn’t far from the truth. My roommate loved Whitney’s album and played it over and over and over again (along with a lot of other treacly pop music). The night in question I was in a particularly crappy mood. I probably had to work late, got no dinner because I was broke and got back to the dorm after the caf was closed, didn’t have time to do my homework and couldn’t just go to bed and pout because Little Miss Sunshine was blasting “How Will I Know” until midnight.

I had had my wisdom teeth out earlier that term and had a half a bottle of Vidodin or Tylenol 3 left over. I don’t know why now but for whatever reason at the time it made sense to me to take it and then go try to sleep in the elevator lobby of my dorm. I think my thinking was that it wasn’t enough to kill me, just enough to make a point. I was desperate. I felt invisible. I felt like nobody knew my pain. That if “they” just knew how miserable I was “they’d” be moved to help me and have sympathy for me.

I took my comforter and pillow and found a quiet corner to lie down. Nobody noticed. Nobody stopped to ask what I was doing, why I wasn’t in my room with Little Miss Sunshine (LMS). Looking back now I can understand; Little Miss Doom and Gloom is lying in the corner, let’s just steer clear of that mess! LMS never came looking for me. She was probably glad that my funky ass wasn’t in the room anymore. Or she thought I’d left to go spend the night with some random guy. Either way, I was alone and in emotional pain and it appeared that nobody cared.

Eventually I started feeling very weird. I was dizzy and a little nauseous. I started seeing double and hearing a buzzing in my ears. I think I passed out for a little bit. At some point I made it back to my room. LMS was asleep. Whitney had been silenced for the night. I crawled up into my loft bed. How I managed that ladder I don’t know.

I woke a few hours later and my heart was pounding out of my chest and weird lights were flashing behind my eyelids. I was scared. I realized what I had done and I was so afraid that I would die and my parents would get that phone call. I couldn’t do that to them. I loved them and knew that they would never be the same again. I thought of my sisters and my brother and his very young children. My grandparents had already lost one grand-daughter tragically years before and I couldn’t do that to my family again. I crawled to the bathroom and made myself vomit. Repeatedly. I puked until I almost passed out on the bathroom floor. Then I crawled back to bed.

The next morning I was very wobbly. For whatever reason I forced myself to go to class. I remember sitting in class looking at all my classmates and thinking to myself that they had no idea what I’d just been through. I felt so alone and lonely. I walked home from class and stopped a couple times to vomit into the bushes again. Passers-by probably thought I was just another stupid freshman that couldn’t handle my liquor and was paying the price with a mid-week hangover.

I don’t remember how I got past that night. But I did. I had some friends that really helped. But above all it was by shear will and stubbornness that I hung on. I can’t say that that was the one and only time that things got dark but I never let it go that far again. The next year I met the boy who became my husband and the father of my children. I spent many nights in his arms crying and unloading my pain. He listened and understood. And most importantly, he didn’t walk away.

My message for any young person out there that is going through that dark night of despair is to just hold on. Even if you think that there isn’t anyone in your life RIGHT NOW who understands and is there for you, hold on. If I hadn’t held on, I wouldn’t have met Steve. I wouldn’t have my beautiful daughters. More importantly, the world wouldn’t have my daughters, who I know are right now on the brink of embarking on remarkable lives that will touch other lives and change the world. I also know that I have touched lives and in my own small way made the world a better place. I would not have been able to see my nieces and nephews be born and grow up into amazing people. If you are in that place right now, know that there is a world of people out there that are just waiting for you. Waiting for you to walk into their lives. Waiting for you to teach them something. Waiting for you to love them.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-TALK(8255)   

Trevor Project – Suicide Prevention for LGBT teens

To Write Love on Her Arms – Please Stay Alive                                                                          

I love the show Dexter on Showtime. I think it is amazing how the writers and Michael C. Hall have taken a person/character that for all intents and purposes should be a deplorable human being and made him loveable and sympathetic. If you are not familiar with the show, first of all you should be, go to Netflix as soon as you are done reading this and put all 7(?) seasons in your queue. Okay, now that you’ve done that I’ll fill you in on some of the background so this post makes sense. Dexter is a sociopath and a serial killer. Sounds like a nice guy huh? But it isn’t just a show about a vigilante serial killer. He is also a brother, son, friend, husband (for a while anyway. Sorry, spoiler) and father. He’s fiercely loyal and loves deeply in his own weird way. But he struggles. Because of things that happened to him as a child and the way he was raised, it is almost impossible for him to relate to people in a “normal” way. He studies people and relationships around him to learn social cues and how he is “supposed” to act and relate. He also has what he calls his “Dark Passenger”. This is the part of his personality that compels him to kill. It is that part of his psyche that was damaged as a child (or was he born that way? Hmmmm) that didn’t get repaired through counseling, nurturing, etc.

I’ve also always felt like I have a Dark Passenger. Not one quite as dark and malicious as Dexter’s of course. Mine manifests itself in depression and self-hate. But when it decides it is time to come along for a ride it takes me to a dark place. I get angry, resentful, self-pitying, and ugly. Like Dexter, there are times that I feel like I can control my Dark Passenger. I can acknowledge his presence but not let it take control of me. There are other times when I’m weak or caught unprepared and it just grabs ahold and takes me on a joy ride from hell. Those are the times that in the past have made me want to hurt myself or led me to lash out at people around me in anger. Those are scary times.

Another fictional character that is a good metaphor for what this feels like are JK Rowling’s Dementors.

When this type of Dark Passenger attacks it is more of a soul sucking darkness that overcomes me. It leaves me shaken and weak. There isn’t as much anger directed outward with this kind of Dark Passenger. This one makes me turn all of the anger and hurt inside. But like the Wizards and Witches in JK Rowling’s world I’ve learned to use a Patronus to fight these bastards off. When I was younger my parents were my Patronus. Then it became Steve and eventually my children. When I feel this soul-sucking dickweed trying to take control of me I just hold a picture of these 5 people in my mind and heart until the darkness goes away. As an example I will never forget a particularly dark time when one of my girls was very little. I was alone and the sadness was overwhelming. I picked up that baby and literally held on to her for dear life. As long as I had that baby in my arms and fought back against the darkness with the overwhelming love I felt for that child I was going to be okay. That was also the time that I realized that too  much was at stake to do this alone and I immediately called a Dr. and started taking anti-depressants. I don’t take the medication anymore but it did get me through those critical years and allowed me to relax and be the mother and wife I needed to be during those years.

Right now my Dark Passenger is on vacation somewhere in one of the Circles of Hell and isn’t bothering me. I’m sure he’ll be back. I’m trying to strengthen my defenses. I’m taking better care of myself physically. I’m also working on my spiritual defenses as well. While I’m walking or doing morning yoga I’m meditating and setting intentions for my day to stay aware and centered. I’m also trying to build up my Patronus (what is the plural of Patronus? Patroni?) by building up my relationships with the people who sustain me. I’m working on my marriage, my friendships, my parenting, and even how I look at the most casual people in my world. But most importantly, I’m working on me and my relationship with myself. That’s where it all begins and ends.

Namaste.