Blank pages

I love a blank piece of paper and a pen when I feel the freedom to write whatever I want.  Really a blank blog screen and a keyboard has almost the same effect.  There is something about writing that inspires me.  Something about it that speaks to the creative juices inside.  I feel like I could conquer the world with a stroke of my pen.  Or write something small that has no effect on anyone except me.  And yet if it affects me, in some small way it will affect others because who I am affects others.  

Maybe I do like a blank page and a pen better because there are more options there.  I could use crayons, or markers or glitter pens.  I could write or draw or doodle.  I can write sideways or upside down.  It can be legible or not.  In the end I can go with my muse, as the saying goes.

Ok, so this is not really about my journey with depression or anything of the sort.  But it is what is inspiring to me tonight.

Pay it Forward

Someone posted pay it forward as their status on facebook this morning and it got me thinking.  There are so many things in life that people do for us that we will never be able to "repay" or thank them enough for.  There are many people in my life that have been there for me over the last year and a bit that are like this for me.  They have been there when I needed to talk, cry, rant or have a comfortable place to go and relax, or to go and not be alone.  I am so grateful to these people, more than I could ever tell them.

So, what can I do with this?  Pay it forward.  Pay it forward by taking care of myself better, by helping other people when I can, by giving of myself when I can, by healing.  People have helped me out because they love and care about me, and want to see me better.  The best way I know of to express my gratitude is to continue on my path of getting better and to love and care about others.

Struggling

Lately I have been struggling with how to fit some of my new understandings about me into my life.  The big one of late is how to show kindness and generosity to particular people.  For me it is people whose pain I understand, whose situation I understand and yet people who I need to be away from to honour myself.  These people are the ones that completely drag me down and threaten to take me back to a dark place.  When I am around them it takes so much energy just to keep myself level.  And so, on one hand, I know I need to stay away from them to take of myself.

On the other hand, I also know that is part of me to feel compassion and to want to be kind with others, no matter who.  And so I struggle with this.  I have never been good at setting boundaries and often just plain didn't.  This was definitely one of the sources of depression for me.  So now, I try to set boundaries, and yet sometimes, particularly with these same people, I feel like a big meanie by setting them.

Some of it perhaps is that I am still working on really believing that I have a right to put myself first.  But I also understand, at least on some level, that if I don't do this I am going to end up back in the black hole also.  And then, I guess not only am I not able to help others, I will need to crawl my way back out of it.

No real resolution on this blog.  Just a lot of conflict and struggle.

Hard work

I was talking to a friend recently about depression.  She has come out the other side and lives with her depression and anxiety everyday.  Most days I feel like I too am on my way there.  We were talking about the process and how hard it is.  It's hard work to get to this point.  It means accepting responsibility for our own emotions.  It means looking at the root causes and figuring out what makes us unhappy.  It means accepting that there are places of hurt inside of us and figuring out what to do with those.  It means accepting our strengths and weaknesses for what they are. Its work.  Often it is terrible.  It means somehow holding onto hope that things will get better in the end, that the terrible times are worth it.  We both know people who want to be better but seem to want an instant cure.  They seem to want someone to save them, to give them the magic pill or cure.  It doesn't exist.  At least, not in my experience.  There is no real way to deal with things other than to deal with them.  No one can save another person from these things.  Without committing to doing the work ourselves, nothing ever changes.  It's hard.  For me, and for my friend, it's been worth the effort.  I am sure I have further to go, but I am getting there.

Everyone has stuff

The more I am able to open up to people and share of myself, the more I get to see of others as well.  I'm realizing more and more that we all have our own stuff to deal with.  A friend of mine calls these projects, not a bad term.  No one's life is perfect and everyone is carrying around happiness, sorrow, joy, anger etc...

My particular thing to deal with is depression and anxiety.  At least right now.  I'm still in the healing process and while I want to be all good and go hard, I am not yet able.  But, slowly I am able to do more and more.  Slowly I am able to see outside of myself and be a part of the world again, instead of only being able to focus on myself and my illness.  I will continue to take the time I need to.

In the end, it's what we do with our stuff that matters.  We all have good and bad experiences.  How do we react?  Do we let the bad make us bitter, or do we find ways to move through it?  For so long I didn't really have any way to cope with the bad experiences and they nearly destroyed me.  Once the depression set it, there is no real way to manage.  Now I am able to look at them, process them, and move through it.  It's pretty bumpy still and the skills I need to do this are not very well practiced, but I keep on trying.

I guess for me coming to terms with the fact that I have depression has been one of the biggest steps.  It's let me better understand so much of the way my life was.  In a lot of ways it gives me a way to give myself a break.  So often I feel like I should have handled things better, but really I wasn't able to.  And, I can't change that.  I can take what I know now and move with it.  Learn a new rhythm to my life.  Find a new pattern where things work differently that before.  Draw on the strength of those around me when I don't have enough of my own.

By understanding and seeing that other people also have their own stuff I can see ways that they are strong also.  This allows me to see new ways that things can happen.  Change is always scary, but for me, the way things have been is not a viable option so change is the only way forward.

Deep breaths

Deep breath in, deep breath out.  Remember that some things are not your problem to solve.  You don't have to be responsible for everything.  Let other people have their stuff to deal with.  Keep breathing.  Tell yourself this as many times as you need to, to believe it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat...

Making my mental health a priority

I've been thinking a lot lately about what exactly it is that I want out of life.  I know a lot of what I don't want, but still working on the what do I want.  The one thing that I have come to is that my mental health has to be my priority, no matter decisions I make about my life.  If my mental health isn't good, then nothing else matters.  In the middle of depression I am unable to enjoy anything else.  There are lots of things that are good for my mental health and I need to focus on those things in my life.  It means being around people that build me up and spending less time with people that bring me down.  It means being more disciplined with exercise and eating.  It means finding those things that give me energy, strength and enjoyment and focussing on those.  It means worrying less about what I should be doing, and more doing what I want to be doing, or trying things to see if I want to be doing them.  But mostly, it means evaluating things against how they make me feel.  Do they help with the depression and anxiety or do they cause more of it?

No more elephants in the room

I had an email today from a friend, telling me that she and her husband know that I am gay and they love me anyhow.  (On an unrelated note to this post, that was such a lovely thing for her to do).  In her note she said she hates elephants in the room, and she was writing me so there wouldn't me one between us.  Recently, I was telling my counsellor about an incident where someone had used the fact that I live with depression as an excuse for something and didn't actually deal with the incident.  My counsellor said that that is a reason why it is good not to tell people things.

These two things got me thinking about being true, being real, hiding or keeping things to myself.  I realize that not everyone needs to know everything about me because it is not relevant to the relationship I have with them.  But, hiding is problematic too.  I have spent so much of my life hiding.  Hiding from myself, or more importantly hiding myself from myself and others.  I'm tired of it.  It's exhausting and for me leads to depression.

There's risk with letting people in, with telling people things.  They may use that information in ways that I don't like.  But, hiding it when I think it is relevant is worse for me.  There are rewards too.  The same person who used it as an excuse, has also been super supportive in a lot of other ways, partially because she knows.  At this point I am feeling ready to handle the consequences of people knowing things.  I am tired of hiding and trying to protect myself in that way.  I am learning to protect myself in other ways.  I am learning to handle the risk of sharing.

I am done with the elephant in the room.  If the truth is out there, people can deal with it how they want.  Hiding for me denies me of so much happiness and it not a good way for me to live.  Hurt, sorrow, negative reactions are at least real.  They at least still acknowledge who I am, instead of putting on a happy face and dying on the inside.

Moving

I love this picture.  It is a good reminder for me that things have changed.  In the middle of depression I was stuck, all the time.  Depression was paralyzing, I wasn't able to move on, to let anything go, to do anything except survive (sometimes barely) another day.  No progress, no growth, no anything really.

Things are better now.  When things are good or neutral, life doesn't seem so hard.  When things are bad or hard, it is still tough for me, but not paralyzing anymore.  I can move one way or another.  Maybe the way I go is not the best, maybe it is, but at least I am not stuck.  Moving is a good thing, it's the only way to grow and change and make things better and live the life I want and deserve.

Lifestyle

I was talking with a friend yesterday about lifestyles.  She has chosen to work at a company that pays her a lot less than the last one, but with a lot less stress.  I have chosen to work 0.8 time instead of full time.  I sometimes get questions about why I do this, but generally people say that if they could swing it they would do the same thing.  My friend was saying that when things were so stressful for her she had to decide what kind of lifestyle she wanted and what she needed to do to get it.

Choosing to work part time was the first time I ever really thought about this question.  It is so easy to go along and let our income determine our lifestyles.  For a long time for me, this meant finding ways to keep the spending down as my income was pretty small.  Since 2002 when I started my so-called "career" path, I have really let my income determine my lifestyle, but the truth be told, for most of that time I was a lot less happy then when I wasn't making very much and getting by.

So, let's talk about my life since 2008 when I moved to a new city and got a job I like.  I was still working full time.  I also was spending money without really thinking about it.  When I crashed out last year and started on the process of looking at what I really want from life, work was a big part of that.  I do like my job, but I was finding I was till taking a lot of sick days from the depression, or healing process.  Work was till taking up all my energy and I found I didn't have much left for other things, other things that I value a lot.

Last summer I made the decision to cut my work hours.  A few things have happened since then.  I have had one sick day for depression.  I have energy to watch my nephew once a month.  I visit my parents more.  I get out and socialize sometimes.  And, and this is the big one,  I like my life a whole lot better.  It feels more balanced.  I am managing just fine on the reduced income, without a lot of big changes.  I like my lifestyle just fine.  Finding balance has been challenging for me.  I'm still working on it in a lot of aspects of my life, but at least on this one front, it seems to be working.

This has been a valuable lesson for me in more ways than one.  If and when I decide to change jobs, I need to really think about what I want in a job, and what kind of lifestyle I want also.  For me, it's not about getting the next dollar, or the next raise.  It's about so many other things.

Small things

It's funny how sometimes I notice small things, things that probably would seem insignificant to most people, but to me they are signs of something much larger.  Tonight I did a lot of cooking (casseroles to put in the freezer for lunches).  As I was just finishing up putting one of them into containers, I dumped one of the containers all of the counter.  This made a rather large mess.  My reaction was to say damn, rather calmly, find a bigger spoon to scoop up the food on the counter and then carry-on.  Things like that used to throw me into a huge tizzy.  My anxiety would ramp right up and I would get super upset.  I would have to stop and calm down before I could even start to figure out how to solve the problem.  Truthfully I thought that was normal.  Now I know differently.

I like to see recognize those kinds of moments as they really let me see that things are different.  It is also good to be able to look at these when I have a bad day or a bad moment.

Inner Strength

Throughout this journey with depression I have had a few people tell me how strong I am.  I've been thinking lately about what that means.  I used to think it meant doing everything myself and never asking for help, never accepting help that was offered and never letting other people know when I couldn't handle things.  As things got to a point where I was not able to that any more, I have had to find a new definition.

Now I can see that strength for me is more about being honest.  Being honest about what I need, how I feel and how much I can do.  It's about allowing myself to let others be strong for me when I can't any more.  It's about accepting help, asking for help and being vulnerable.  It's about letting myself be human.  It's often hard for me to admit when I need help.  It's hard for me to say no.  It's hard for me to let others do things for me.  And yet I have had to learn how to do this in order to find my way out of the dark.

In the end it means letting people into my life.  This is scary for me, but also very rewarding.

Perspective

I went to see my counsellor yesterday as there have been a number of things on my mind of late that I felt like I needed to talk out.  It's funny how someone else can sometimes put rambling thoughts into one line and bring new understanding to it.  As a counsellor that is what she is there to do. Shed new light on things.

I noticed on the way to see her yesterday how things have changed for me.  At one point I had to talk myself into going to see her with every step I took on the way to her office.  Yesterday I wanted to talk to her.  I now find it helpful to be able to talk things through and get some perspective.  It is still hard, and it still felt a bit like throwing my guts on the table and then trying to figure out how to put them back in again.  But I really know now that I will get a new perspective and once I have time to process what she is saying, it will help.  I am feeling much better about a number of things and also know that there are a few things we talked about that will take more time to sort out.

Funny how nothing has really changed, but seeing it in a new light is making all the difference.

Risk, Reward, Cost

Starting a relationship with someone is always a risk.  As some of you may have guessed I was in one and it ended last week.  I have learned a few things from that.  And, as I deal with economics and risk etc... as a job here are some thoughts on risk.  When we talk about risk with a business decision we talk about reward or cost that could be a result of that risk.  With relationships, it's no different.  We get into them without actually knowing the outcome, risk.

What I noticed this last time is that before getting into them, I need to know that I will be able to handle it if it doesn't last.  Because, this is a very real possibility.  I view dating as a chance to figure out if something will work or not.  We can't know everything, or even enough, about a person before starting that process to know if it will work.  But, we can't know unless we try either.  In the past I tried so hard to make things work that I would twist myself around until I was not myself at all.  This was brutal on me.  The reward that we see at the beginning is that it might work out, for a short while or forever.  The cost is that we try, invest energy and time, and then find out it is not the right thing.  This is likely to come with some difficulty and hurt or sadness.  And, if we are lucky some learnings as well.

This time I was ready to handle whatever happened.  I was ready to try and I was ready to handle the fallout when things didn't work out.  I knew, I really knew, that I would be ok, no matter what happened.  And this is a new thing for me.  It allowed me to see this relationship in a different light.  I was able to take it for what it was and decide for myself whether it was working for me or not.  When it became apparent to me that it wasn't I ended things.  This was hard for me, particularly because it was hard for the other person, but it wasn't devastating.  I had done what I needed to do for myself and in the end that is the right thing, no matter how challenging it was in the moment.

I was ready to accept the reward or the cost.  I knew that the risk was worth it because it might work, but if it didn't that was ok also.  This is such a new feeling for me.   Knowing that I don't a relationship, knowing that I can survive and learn from whatever the experience brings and knowing that I can take care of myself.  I can be myself and see if it works out, instead of trying so hard to make it work, even when it wasn't right.

Out of the darkness

I was watching a movie tonight on older gay and transgendered adults.  It was touching and sad and hopeful all at the same time.  One line got me though which was "moving out of the darkness".  In a lot of ways this is what the journey to learning to live with depression has been for me.

Life felt heavy and dark.  There were no solutions to situations that were making me unhappy.  Everything was hard and dramatic because I could not think straight.  So much darkness.  I guess you have to be in darkness when you get to the edge of killing yourself.  At that point there is no hope.  Nothing in my world seemed right, everything seemed wrong and there didn't seem to be anything I could do to change it.

Over the last year I have seen some light.  Some days a small sliver, like last New Years Day when my nephew was born.  Other days there is a lot of light, days when it feels like everything is connecting.

Today was one of the good days.  I spent the afternoon and evening with 5 people I love very much.  5 people who accept me for who I am, even when it is hard for them.  5 people who are there for me, always.  These people are my family.

It is good for me to stop once in awhile and remember the good things.  Giggling and laughing with my nephew is right up there, having my dad tell me again today that he cares and that my parents are there for me, having a friend call me last week just to make sure I was ok (even if I didn't talk to her), living in a time where I can talk about depression without being hospitalized and given shock treatment, living in a time where I can talk about being gay, learning to love myself - warts and all, seeing changes in the way I do things, standing up for myself, doing nice things for me etc... etc...  The list is long, if I only stop to remember.

Writing all the good things was enough to make me cry.  I am so grateful to be out of the dark, mainly.  I have days where the dark is overwhelming again, but it seems that these are only days, and not a general trend.   I am so grateful today to the good people in my life that help me to remember that there is light in the world, and in me.

Processing

The trouble with not taking enough time for myself is that I don't take the time to process.  There have been a couple of hard things in the last few months, some new things and some good things.  Today I am starting to process and think through them and it is a bit overwhelming truthfully.  Attempting to untangle all the emotions and figure out what I can do differently to move away from the depression line and back into wellness it challenging.  But, I am trying and that in and of itself is different that what I did for a long time.  I'm holding onto that hope and doing what I can.

A bit on edge

Lately I've been feeling like I am moving closer and closer to the line between well and depressed.  For awhile there I felt pretty good, but I have been pushing myself too hard.  I felt so good that I forgot some of the reasons I felt good.  Taking care of me being the main one.  Exercise, plenty of sleep, eating properly, a balance between socializing and me time.  My balance has been off for awhile now and I am really noticing it of late.  I've been feeling agitated, tired and down.  My energy to do the things I know I need to is also low.  As my sister said to me when this whole thing started, baby steps.  (This is especially appropriate as I spent  today with my year-old nephew and he is learning to walk).  One thing at a time.  Get some sleep.  Go to the pool.  Cook.  Admit to myself that I am not as well as I would like to be and slow down.  Not try to do too much.  Not try to solve everything today.

Compassion and management

Part of being me is feeling other people's emotions with them.  I am not able to be a neutral bystander.  When people are happy, I feel that.  When they are sad, I feel that also.  This is also why I cry at movies, I am emotionally in the movie; I am not longer a person sitting in the theatre watching the movie.

In many ways this is a good trait.  It allows me to really feel compassion for people.  It allows me to be connected to people.  These are good things.  It has it's downside also.  Often I find it hard not to take other people's pain on as my own.  I am working on that.  Compassion is good, but leaving that emotion with the other person is a necessity as well.  Otherwise I will drive myself insane.  I have a hard enough time feeling my own emotions, I don't need other peoples sticking around as well.

I am slowing learning to manage this part of being me.  To see it for what it is.  I need only to be able to recognize when I am taking on other peoples stuff and slowly learn to let it go...

Sometimes it's tough

I did something very difficult today.  I know in my heart of hearts it was the right thing, but that didn't make it any easier.  I won't share the details because it affects someone else way too much, but let's just say in order to do the right thing I hurt someone I care about a lot.  There wasn't any other way, but still, I don't like to see that look on anyones face and especially when I know I was the cause of the look.  It really hurts me to have to do that.

Sometimes things are just hard.  I have been working so hard to better understand my needs and to really believe I have a right to have them met.  It's one thing when you can just ask.  It's another thing when it involves hurting others.  I am really struggling to remember that I deserve to pay attention to myself and that it is ok to do the right thing.  So much of me wishes I hadn't done it, but there is a small voice that keeps telling me I did the right thing.  I am listening to it, even though it is really hard.

The hurt inside me right now is threatening to make me withdraw again, to stop feeling again, to retreat back to my old coping mechanisms.  I know I can't but it is taking everything I have to keep making myself feel what is going on with me instead of ignoring it.  Staying strong really matters I know.  I will find a way to use the tools I have now to get through this, but right now it is extremely daunting.

Stretched myself too thin

I have learned another lesson about living with depression.  That is that taking care of myself has to be constant.  Last night and today I am feeling pretty down.  I feel stretched too thin for sure.  The last couple of weeks have been fun, but I have also neglected some of the things I need to feel ok.  Not enough sleep, not enough exercise, eating too much rich or sugary or salty food, and not enough down time.  It has taken its toll for sure.  Not only physically but emotionally.  Someone once said that living productively with mental illness means that complacency no longer has a place in your life.  This is true.  The things that keep me well have to happen, no matter what.  Today I rest and tomorrow I will start over again.