Wait so Long -- Trampled By Turtles

[originally written Sept of 2017. I’m going to publish these older blog posts because, although largely unfinished, they do contain some meaningful messages that may be relevant to people who might be able to relate. ]

In our yearbooks we would always write, "stay the same!," or "don't change!" sandwiched between the typical "you're cool!" and "good luck!" phrases that littered whole pages of a yearbook. What we really should have been writing to each other in our yearbooks was, "Change, grow. Learn from your mistakes. Be responsible and hold yourself accountable." But, somewhere in all that schooling, we missed a crucial lesson.

When I spoke of transformation in my previous post I did not intend for it to sound so...silence of the lambs. It bothered me. Long after I published the post I mulled over my word choice. Rather than change it, I thought perhaps explaining why it bothered me would be more helpful.

I don't see myself as the same person I was before Mom died. There is a clear severing of who I thought I was when Mom was alive and who that person is now. It's not that I am a completely different person, it's not like becoming someone else. It's like...the lens through which I viewed my entire life shifted so sharply, so distinctly and so rapidly that I could never view the world in the same way again. When something like that happens, no matter what the event, you cannot possibly be the same.

After Mom died I had to change. Adapt. Grow. I had to challenge everything I thought I knew about life and look at things from a different perspective. For a long time I languished in grief. I fought my way back from depression.

And then things began to change. Had to change. I was no longer able, or willing, to ignore the misery of the environment in which I lived.

And that's the crux of it, isn't it? Put a happy person in an unhappy environment and the result is either an unhappy person or change. I chose change. I chose my own happiness and changed my entire life. And the lives of my kids.

And I would do it all again. Because I can look at my kids--happy, healthy, and growing--and rest assured that I did the right thing.

My word choice isn't always the best but I hope that my meaning is clear; changing is good. Adapting positively to changes in life is necessary for survival. Striving for things to remain exactly the same is what's wrong. We must all embrace change and step out from where we've been sheltering in our comfort zones for so long.

Hurricane -- Panic! At The Disco

Two years ago I had mastered the skills necessary to carry out one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make. Leave my husband. Start my life over and make a better future for my daughters.

Earlier this year I decided that I wasn't really depressed anymore and that I would like to come off the antidepressants. There was a slow process of weaning off the medicine and then a whole new process of learning began. Something the medicine helped me to do was utilize the skills that I had gained in behavior therapy and when the medicine was out of my system I had to start all over again. The knowledge is still there, of course, but now I just have to learn to adjust my use of the skills that I had mastered before coming off the medication. This isn't a bad thing. Not at all. I was on antidepressants since the year that Mom passed away and now that I'm not taking them anymore it's not just my body that has to adjust. It's also my mind.

The best description I can come up with is that it is like antidepressants numbed just enough of my emotions to get me where I needed to be in my life to fully take charge of it. And when I got here, and I realized that I didn't need the numbness anymore, I released emotions that had been locked in there for over seven years. That's not easy for anyone to deal with, but it's been especially difficult for me because my life has changed so much from what it was before the separation.

Some days I feel like I have gone backwards in my recovery from depression. I cry, I rage, I dwell on things that I cannot change. However, there are moments of clarity hidden in those whirlwinds of emotion. I drag out a pen and paper or pull out my laptop and start writing. I write the emotions and you can feel it when you read those stories. I decided to channel all of that into the book--I would fill in all the missing stories that I never got around to sharing for whatever reason and at the end I would have it. I would have this book.

In my mind, the book I thought I would write and the book that I've actually written are completely different. There is no cohesive story between what my intentions were when I dreamed up a memoir and the story I ended up telling. The book I intended to write doesn't yet exist. It might not ever.

I always thought, since Mom passed and I started this blog, that the end result would be a memoir about the tragedy of my Mom dying and coping with life without her in the immediate aftermath. That's not what it is, though. I have only just now begun to realize that the story that I have been trying to tell for so long is the story of my own transformation.

People often assume that I have some idea what it is that I'm writing. The truth is this: I don't decide. It just flows easily. And the things that don't--those are the things that I don't feel when I write. I can write anything. I can try to do any job you want me to do. The feelings I share, the stories I write when my fingertips dance across the keyboard--those feelings flow through my words into you as you read. That's what makes this such a gift. I can do things with words on a page that make me feel like I reach a dark corner of the world and spread a little light. And if I don't pursue that, then what's the point?