Blogging the Feels

Let's blog the feels.

The world woke up this morning to the news that Anthony Bourdain had passed, most likely from suicide. A lot of us that are suffering from depression see this and are like, "Well, fuck. If Anthony Bourdain, a host of great food shows, can't make it, then fuck.
Let's also make it clear that I've been in my depression for approximately 3 months now -- unable to feel anything. Even when hubs and I have our discussions, I am unable to feel anything at all. I can't even cry.
Couldn't. Couldn't even cry.
Until this morning.

Woke up to the news stories about Anthony and then I hopped on Twitter. I don't know what I expected. PocketTribe is always so supportive, but I wasn't expecting all of the stay messages.
My depressed brain has been passively eyeing suicide ("if it happens, no big deal") and to read all of those messages, all of those small pieces of care and love and support, it felt like every one conked me on the head.

I was not expecting it.
So, now, I'm full of these messages (and gifs of cute critters because of The Bloggess) and I find myself fighting to get out of the empty I've been in.

That took me away from the point I was originally going to make. I suppose it is better this way -- the original message was very negative and was going to touch on some things I probably shouldn't touch on in such a public place. Hmm.

Chronicles

I'm a mess.
Depression is messy.

Hi. I'm EoS. Today is May 26, 2018 and I hate myself.
I feel detached from my body and only feel the pain.

I keep destroying things. I want to have friendships and relationships but I sabotage them because I hate myself more than anyone else could ever hate me.
I don't know what happened. Maybe it was the argument with hubs. Maybe it was him telling me that we either needed to see a therapist or get a divorce. That was the thing he said to me that hurt the most. We can't work this out ourselves?
I've already been divorced. I don't know that I wanna do it again.

What does that say about me, though?
That those are our options.
I didn't really cry while we were arguing. Even when he was standing up shouting at me, I didn't cry. I feel like, in the moment when things are happening, I forget to emote. I heard everything he said to me, I just didn't feel anything about it.

I don't feel anything about anything anymore. I could die and be fine with it. That isn't to say that I am in any way suicidal -- I'd just be cool with it if it happened.

But the kids. I smile for them. They fill me with genuine joy. Nothing else does as much as they do.

The people I chat with can get me to smile. Hubs can too, sometimes.

This is all a mess.

It's a mess.

I'm a mess.

Talking Back To My Depression

I feel like it is necessary to put a trigger warning here. I talk a lot about what my depression says to me and how I feel about it. But, I'll put a page break of asterisks for where I talk about that so you can read around it.

Hi, I'm EoS and I have depression. I have had it for almost 20 years -- my first episode or spiral was when I was 14. I've battled it since then, sometimes giving in and wallowing and sometimes able to claw my way out from the depths of it. But most of the time, it's a dull ache, a quiet roar inside my head. I call it my voices because it is the easiest explanation:

****************************************

It's one voice, usually my voice, that whispers things at me.
You're not good enough.
No one wants you here.
Why are you talking? No one is going to listen.
Your problems aren't problems at all. You're just dramatic.

Sometimes the things it whispers are worse --
Just do it already.
No one's awake. Do it.
It likes to try to sound like it is being helpful. The kids will sleep until he comes home and they won't find you, he will. It'll be alright. You'll be past this. You won't hurt again.

**************************************

Depression is absolute garbage. I have dealt with it for as long as it would take to raise a child to adulthood. I've survived this long and I'm still not sure how.

But I told you all that to tell you this. I have spent the last year in the company of people I've grown to like and respect. In some cases, I could tell them I love them and mean it. Last night was rough for me. I've already been depressed -- deeply or not-so-deep -- for about 3 months. When I figure out I'm spiraling, I've been asking for help, asking for attention, or just plain reaching out.
Last night my depression told me to leave the room. It told me that I had nothing to contribute and that the people there weren't really listening. That I needed to shut up or they'd hate me.
My depression told me that someone I've been talking to doesn't really care about me. It told me that it was all lip service, that I'm a mess and that I just needed to leave the room and not come back. Delete the link. They won't miss you.
But for the first time in a long time, I told it no. I stayed. We laughed about something -- I laughed so hard I cried -- and we were laughing together.

I think the hardest thing I will ever do is tell my depression "no". It is so hard because it is so easy to give in. It's easy to stay in bed. It's easy to ignore my health and my physical wellness. But it is so hard to look at it and say, "No. These are people that I like, and if they didn't like me, they would have told me already. I'd get teased mercilessly. I'd feel bad about myself when I leave here and I don't. I literally spend every night with them. If they hated me, I'd know."

It lies to me about how I am as a parent. That I am fucking them up. They're going to hate me. They want to be with their dad when he's here because I am so awful at all this.
But that's not true either, is it? I work so hard for them -- to keep them fed and rested and happy and to teach them how to speak and how to listen. (She's in this thing right now where she loves to ignore when I tell her something and go and do something else and then tell me she didn't hear me.) But I do the best I can and get complimented on my parenting style all the time. But it doesn't stop my brain from whispering at me.

It lies to me about how I am as a wife. I work my ass off to make sure he can just relax at home and be calm and not have too much expected of him. I make sure we thank him for working as hard as he does and I make sure he knows the kids love him (and I do too, sometimes).

The point I'm trying to make is that my depression is a liar, and yours probably is, too. It, like Voldemort with Harry, wants us to be as alone as possible so we feel weak and unsupported, but there are people in our lives -- usually those who have been through similar things and similar feels -- who want us to not be as alone as they've been. They want us to feel loved and supported because we are.

What other people take for granted -- a healthy support system with people who are honest with you and listen to you, offering advice or just lending an ear -- is something that people with depression are convinced we don't deserve, so we push it away, telling ourselves that everyone else always has an ulterior motive. And a lot of the time, this also ties in with the fact that we have abandoned ourselves because we didn't have a choice: someone somewhere along the line told us that we weren't depressed and that we were being dramatic or exhibiting attention seeking behaviors, so we cut off the part of us that should have been dealing with the depression, causing us to spiral.

Pro tip: Don't ever tell someone they're not depressed. Don't mock their hurt without ever sitting down with them and discussing what's really going on. Don't belittle their experience.

I end on a TL;DR and this note: Last night, I told my depression No and decided to believe that people love me. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, and it felt so good, I think I'm going to do it all the time.

Anxiety

I am so anxious all the time. I just deleted 600 emails that had accumulated in my inbox because I was afraid to check my email. Do you realize how awful that sounds? What was I afraid was in there? An oogy boogy monster waiting to eat my brain? A gigantic shiny crustacean - a decapod at that?

I am in a constant state of concern and fear that one word I say or think is going to fuck up my entire life. Let's talk about this. I hate phone calls. I go over and over and over and over (did I mention and over yet?) What I've said, what I've thought, how it could impact who I am talking to --

There are maybe 8 people (being generous here) that I am not terrified to be on the phone with. I haven't gone back to school because I'm afraid to finish my FAFSA. I'm afraid I'll break things if I try to fix them. It is so exhausting.

So what do I do? Do I try to swallow it all and just bootstrap it and hide the fact that I am one pluck away from breaking my strings because I am wound so tightly? Do I keep meditating and talking to my Buddha and hope that I can talk myself through? I meditate every night (not afraid to talk to my Buddha on the phone) in the hopes that when I wake up, I'll be calm enough to make a phone call or go into the store or not avert my eyes when someone smiles at me. But lately, I'm crumbling.

Crumbling.

Father's Day Post

I wanna say Happy Father's Day to father figureheads.

Y'all know my story with my dad - a man who had interest in my sister and brother but never in me. I worked through a lot of the abandonment that I experienced because of my belief I was worth abandoning. It was a hell of a kick in the teeth when, at almost 30, I realized I had worked hard to be abandoned because I thought I was worthless. But I digress.

I invited my dad to my wedding in 2010.

You can see my dad in the background, there. White shirt, khaki pants, striped tie. He was there in the capacity of my father, nothing more. My brother gave me away. There was a good reason for that. To this day, I cannot talk on the phone with my dad without him being drunk or without arguing with him and it is better for my mental health to not talk to him at all. Building bridges has been attempted. Crossing the old rickety one, falling apart from misuse, was a struggle, but I tried. When I got to the other side, I found a man that insists on reminding me that he simply has no ability or want to love me as much as he loves my siblings. That's it. There's no more.

Part of me wants to call him. Part of me wants to say happy father's day to the man who is my biological father, without whom I wouldn't have Reneé and Matthew (arguably the best siblings ever). But I know it's not worth it. It's just not.

I had men that were /sort of/ in my life that showed me what dads were supposed to be like by interacting with their own kids. I'm not gonna tag them because it makes me anxious but their dads were clear reminders that mine wasn't doing the right thing.

Then we have men like Alan Matthews [William Russ (Boy Meets World)], Dill [Stanley Tucci (Easy A)], Mel Horowitz [Dan Hedaya (Clueless)]. It's men like them who allowed me to expand my expectation for the man I would marry and have children with. They're (a little) weird, hardworking men who love their children fiercely even if they were figments of someone's imagination. That was important to me.

I didn't have a father. I didn't have a father figure. I had men who weren't real. I had watching-from-the-sidelines-as-my-friends-interacted-with-their-dads.

I had my mom. I had a woman who was fiercely protective of us, a woman who worked her ass off to keep the roof over our heads.

But no man. It just wasn't meant to be.

Ellie is 3. Kain will be 6 months soon. The man I married is a father, not just in the figurehead sense of the term. He's a boo-boo kisser. He's a shoe-putter-onner. He's a makes-a-bottle and doesn't-call-it-"babysitting"-when-he-watches-his-own-children kind of guy. He's the kind of father I prayed for as a kid back when I thought God was listening. He's a "let's-give-them-a-great-Christmas" kind of father and a "Well-let's-go-see-what-you-saw" kind of father. He's even a great father to our fur baby.

So Happy Father's Day to the uncles, the grand-dads, the family friends. Happy father's day to the imaginary and the real, the Thomas Wayne and the 2nd-grade-best-friend's dad (I remember you). Happy father's day to the step-dads and the uncles-by-marriage and the men who love and protect children that weren't theirs. Happy father's day to the teachers who are like dads to kids who don't have them -- I remember you, too.

And Happy Father's day to my husband, who is the best father a girl could ask for for her children. Turns out the Universe was listening and took its dear sweet time.

Today

Today I am not serene. It has been about 3 days since I felt a genuine emotion around people other than the kids. The kids are happiness all the time. They are the embodiment of joy and light and sunshine and right now, I'm a bottomless pit. I am the abyss.
I can only hope they don't see my abyss when they look at me.

I don't want anyone to touch me. Or look at me. Or come near me. I can't. I just cannot.
I know that none of it is true. I know I'm not awful. I know I'm not a steaming pile of shit. But that doesn't stop my brain from telling me that and it doesn't stop me from listening.
I'm wandering through music. Have been for an hour now. Listening to music that is lyrics and no music -- like when people remove the music track and just leave the vocals.
It is making my heart a little lighter.

Especially if it sucks.

writing when you're depressed is a battle. You do write but all you can think is, "well, this is crap."

or, "my handwriting is awful."
"no one would read that."
"pick a better word."

But really, it has nothing to do with your writing. That little voice is an asshole

- and a liar.

So you think, "let's try green ink" -- "maybe that will help." So you try.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes you get the beginning of a blog post that seems almost publishable. 

Other times you get papers ripped out of notebooks or deleted letters off a notepad because BY GOD, THAT'S SHIT.

Sometimes you just wanna punch
yourself in the face.

But then you pick the pen up off the floor by the door where you threw it and sit back down, doing breathing those meditative breaths that sometimes help. You buckle down and you do it. You do the thing. Because you have to do the thing. 

Even if it sucks.

Especially if it sucks.