Welcome to my public brain dump. Wonderful imagery, I know, but really that is what this is. I am horrible at taking time to really think out how I want to say things and making it make sense to others so I just write literally anything that pops into my head. It is quite astounding how well this has served me in school actually, but I digress, I didn’t decide to open my laptop and tap away at this keyboard to go on about my college habits. I came on here to babble about how one hour you can feel on top of the world, and the next feel like you are worthless and incapable of doing anything. Many people who can relate to this feeling have probably gotten some sort of therapeutic help or been diagnosed with a type of psychological disorder if it occurs often enough to truly disrupt and impair normal functioning. This can be really helpful in overcoming these thoughts and feelings if you have the correct diagnoses or have sought out the right kind of therapy because with the right help you can get your brain to work out those quirks long enough for you to focus on your goals and not let your symptoms take over your life. However, if you are more like me and have been actively seeking out therapy for multiple years and trying to find out a diagnoses for yourself, but to no avail, then sometimes it feels a little more bleak in hopes of coping well enough to overcome these symptoms and accomplish your goals.
Since I am all about being candid here is a very brief snapshot of my mental health journey these last five years. Now, keep in mind I had some problems in my teens but nothing really started to impact my life in such a distressing fashion until adulthood and that is when I started realizing everything that happened in the summer of 2015 had been a long time coming. This was the summer of my wedding. Legally my husband and I had married the summer before, I wanted to share the last name of my daughter and health insurance is a wonderful thing, but we still wanted a beautiful wedding at my grandparents cabin in Willow, AK so the wedding was to happen then. Anyway, family had flown in from the lower 48 and it was supposed to be a wonderful reunion for everyone. However, summer is wildfire season in Alaska and there was a big one burning up right by my grandparent’s home, they even had to evacuate. Now without dragging this on for too long, I will share more in later postings, what we need to know for now is there was a breaking point with the stresses going on during this time that sent me to the hospital for my own safety. I had spent several days planning my suicide and on the last day I had planned on going to work, I was so beyond lucky I had a lucid moment at the beginning of my shift, I went to my boss and told her I needed my husband to come get me and check me into the psych ward. This was the first time I had ever experienced these feelings and the first time I ever really acknowledged that I may have a problem beyond just feeling down every now and then, and that I was just incapable of coping with stress. Let me tell you, that is exactly what I thought then, and I still frequently catch myself thinking now. That all my issues, physical and mental, are linked to stress and my inability to handle it, I just need to toughen up and I will be fine. Please know, this is such a faulty way of thinking and can hurt you and your journey tremendously. Yes, stress is a huge factor in mental and physical health, but to ignore all other possibilities because you just think you are weak and just don’t handle stress well will burn up your fight and kill your soul. I am getting sidetracked, but just remember to not focus on one aspect of what may be causing your distress, there is always way more than meets the eye. Now, to get back on track, I spent three days in the ER psych ward. They wanted to keep me longer but I needed to get home and feel normal again, and honestly there were enough people there who were way worse off than me and they helped give me the major reality check I needed in that moment. I did a little bit of therapy after that but I don’t think I was ready for it at the time, I still felt like I was just being a burden to everyone, including my therapist, and was convinced I just needed to be stronger and that it was my responsibility to figure out how to do it on my own.
Now, nothing truly major changed in my mental health over the years until 2018. Six months after I had my second daughter I went through PPD. Those six months were scary and a very dark time for me. Again though, in the effort to keep this as short as possible, I will share those terrors on a different day. After my time battling PPD is when I started to really see the negative changes in my mental health that obviously had more to do with other things than just PPD. I have been diagnosed with many things since 2015 and as of now, none have stuck and we are starting at square one again. These changes that have been causing me such distress and impairments in my daily functioning are almost impossible to describe but I will attempt to do my best. Some days I wake up like a damn energizer bunny and get my work out in, clean my house, finish my homework, keep up with my sensory sensitive toddler, and home school my first grader without even breaking a sweat. I plan the next ten years of our lives during my free time, finish reading three books in three days, and beat my favorite video games. BUT THEN… Then there are days where I wake up and I think of how much of my life has bee wasted due to bad decisions. How I am such a failure in comparison to every one else in my life and that I just wish I could never wake up because I don’t have the energy to catch up to them. These days I am an emotional wreck replaying my past like a movie in my head while I am trying to do the dishes and make breakfast. Remembering every bad move and heart break I have suffered and every trauma that makes me stand on edge with anxiety everyday. These days I have to sprint to my bedroom at a moments notice because I want to cry in racking sobs because I just snapped at my daughter for spilling her cereal on the floor and now she is scared of the next moment she might set me off.
How can I be this person who is so well put together and self aware one moment, and then this anxious nut who turns into a raging volcano the next? Well that is what I am trying to find out. It may seem counter intuitive to start sharing my story via blog while it is happening instead of after I have discovered the problems and solutions of my challenges, but I want to help others now. I know how lost I feel on my worst of days and I know when I have those days, I want someone to turn to that makes me feel not alone because they are going through something right now too. Today, everywhere I turn there are wonderful and amazing people who are sharing their stories and what they have overcome to get to where they are and I LOVE IT, but it also doesn’t help my loneliness in these moments. I am seeking for someone who is struggling right now, who doesn’t have answers yet and who is just like me ready to quit one minute but also ready to give it their all in the same moment. Someone who has dreams and goals even though their mind is fighting against them every step of the way, I want to see someone meeting their small goals along the way to their bigger ones while I work to do the same because it honestly makes it feel more real, more POSSIBLE, for me. I want to bring that to someone else’s table too. I want to help you by watching me struggle now and watching me take every step forward, and backward, that I take on this adventure of mental health, motherhood, dreams, and self love. Thank you so much for reading this and I hope if any of this resonated for you that you will continue to come back for more crazy, scary, bizarre, and even dull stories that I look forward to sharing with you and in doing so we can turn this chaos into growth by never giving up.
Entropic Mama 