I’m so grateful to @kiaraantonoviche for coming up with #mentalhealthmonday and also for speaking her own truth. I am inspired to also further this conversation and bring mental health issues more into the light and invite more conversation. Hopefully this serves a dual purpose of educating those who don’t have to deal with mental illness personally and also as an encouragement to others who are dealing with it to feel comfortable to speak up when they are ready.
I deal with depression. For me it is sort of hard to say how long it has been going on to at least some degree. However, it took a pretty intense turn when I got pregnant with my fourth child. My relationship was not particularly stable. I had a 14 yo, an 11 yo, and a 10 month old, and I was 39. I had my own business which was in that crucial state of needing to grow to survive. So, there were a lot of external circumstances contributing for sure. That said, I’ve been through harder times. Those of you who have dealt with depression know that circumstances aren’t really the crucial piece. It hit hard, and because I had never spiraled that far, I didn’t really realize what was happening until it was very deep.
Circumstances changed. I had a beautiful baby. I got engaged. I moved to Belize, where I have wanted to live for a very long time. Still, I wasn’t really happy. I couldn’t feel it. Even worse, I was fighting off anxiety. I felt that any moment the axe was going to fall. Well, thoughts become things, don’t they? My relationship began to struggle. We lost a fuckton of money in a land deal that went horribly south. We had no way to make money without the land. The relationship got worse. Then I realized that I wanted to die. I didn’t want to kill myself. I just wanted some kind of accident or whatever to come along and rescue me from the endless sufferring. I had been feeling like that for a while, a few months at least. I think it’s important to explain to those of you who have never had depression that, in my mind, I believed my children would be better off without me because I was so miserable. There is this horrible idea that when people commit suicide, they are abandoning others. It simply isn’t true. In almost all cases, a depressed person truly believes the world is a better place without them in it. I started to speak out to friends and family. They were the ones that clued me in about how long I had been sitting in the darkness. I felt like I lost about three years of my life, maybe more. The more I talked about it, the better I felt. I started to feel my power return to me. I started to draw boundaries to protect myself. I stopped listening to messages from others and my own head that I somehow wasn’t enough. I turned on a voice in my head that countered those messages with ones that were more helpful.
I want to say something here about being a woman. I don’t know what depression is like for a man because I’m not one. Having raised two boys, I do have some clue about the pressures men face. Right now, though, I want to speak to women and also to anyone who has a woman in their life who is facing depression. Many of us tend to feel like we need to handle everything, take on all the tasks of the family. Men, if you don’t know what emotional labor and invisible labor are, I invite you to look those terms up and become more familiar and do your best to even the scales. It would be a whole other post, so maybe I will go into that at another time, but I’m not diving in right now. Suffice it to say that a lot of women, especially mothers, are taking on more than they can handle in any kind of healthy way. In my case and the cases of many, many women I know, men are standing by and watching it happen. Watching women sink in the quicksand, often complaining about her sadness or bitchiness along the way.
Now. I’d like for men to begin to notice. I’d like to see more men step up and actually do something about it. Btw, here’s a hint. Don’t ask, “How can I help?” FFS, you know what needs to get done. Go do it. Anyway, amazing women of the world, we have to speak our truth! We have to say when it feels overwhelming or too much. We have to stop feeling like we are supposed to carry it all. We have to stop feeling like we are a burden. As I mentioned above, when I started to speak about my depression and my overwhelm - both the circumstances and the actual illness - I felt really empowered. And a lot of wonderful people around me rallied to support me. They encouraged me and also validated me. Now, my circumstances haven’t changed a whole lot, but feeling my power that came through speaking my truth did more than anything else to eradicate the depression.
So that’s my story and my encouragement to women dealing with depression. As it stands now, it’s a little over a year since I came out of that deep darkness. I’ve been mostly fine. I notice recently, though, that I feel a bit numb. I was inspired again by @kiaraantonoviche and her five year plan. I started to think about what I really want moving forward as we begin to emerge from the dark depths of debt. It's been one thing after another, but it does seem things are shifting. Of course I have a plan. We have things we have said we wanted to do, but I have noticed I’m having a little bit of a time really feeling excited about those. I really don't even feel connected to them, and that unnerves me a bit. This mild level of depression usually comes and goes, so I am hoping sharing will help shake this one off.
I was in the midst of both depression and anxiety when I took this. Remember smiles don't mean depression is gone.
I hope this will inspire others to share. Feel free to share in the comments below if you feel called. I’m also in discord as @solarsupermama if you’d like to talk privately. I don’t always have time or energy, but I will let you know. I also hope those of you who don’t deal with depression have a better understanding now.
A few technical difficulties ended in this being posted on Tuesday, but hey. I think it's still Monday somewhere.
As always, all pics are mine or pixabay.
I’m a passenger on the @ecotrain, as well as a member of @teamgirlpowa and @steemmamas. All three are worth taking a look at, and all three are on discord.