Tag: Depression

4Aug

Navel Date in 2025

August decided to play a practical joke yesterday and turn into October, and our modesty-optional summer wardrobe gave way to long sleeves and socks. Socks, people. I gave into the iron-hued weather and blew off chores to read The Kite Runner, which left me feeling more Octoberish than ever. Even today, motivation only glimmers from behind clouds in fickle bursts. Oh sun, wherefore art thou?

Since I laid off the poison pills in April, I’ve slowly felt more and more normal, and I’m just now normal enough to realize I don’t know what constitutes normal anymore. (Please tell me you get what I’m talking about.) I read through old journals and shake my head at the stranger on each page. Nope, don’t recognize that one either. Was she really me? Am I really me?

Burrowing somewhere in my stomach is the awful suspicion that I like the eighteen-year-old me better. She was often confused and always dramatic, but she had energy and passion and a crazy, glowing sense of life purpose. I feel like I’ve acquired a bitter aftertaste as the years have mellowed my personality; my vim and vigor are sprouting mold. Is there any chance I’ve retained some of my positive characteristics through the constant upheaval of college, married life, and babies (not to mention seven moves in the last six years)?

I suppose this could simply be disorientation after so many months of mind-fog. Maybe I’m still too bewildered by the clearing view to recognize me for myself, to notice the residual beauty. After all, my husband claims to still like me, and I don’t think he’s entirely delusional. On the other hand, I know I’ve lost a lot of touch with the better aspects of life. Maybe this is a call to attention, a prescription from the lazy psychologist in my brain to do some navel-gazing, stat.

~~~

Heavens to Brawny, Sophie just decorated the walls of our newly-painted entryway with a bright green marker. It seems the navel gazing will have to wait for another day, one in which my toddler can be trusted to coexist peacefully with our house. Perhaps by 2025?

12May

Uncaged

When I’m 85, the smell of Bath & Body Works’s peach nectar lotion will remind me of that unsettling coaster ride of an autumn with my first boyfriend. The smell of carpet shampoo will remind me of walking into my college dorm room with an armful of books and giddy expectations. The smell of hand sanitizer will take me back to the NICU where infant Natalie recovered from surgery, and the smell of lemons will remind me of this spring.

The lemon trees and perfume and homemade limoncello and lemonade (more on that soon) have swirled deep into my perception of life this spring, and I have to tell you: I am infatuated. With lemons… AND life. Remember how crap-coated existence looked in January? And in February? And in March? Man, March was a doozy. I didn’t share most of the horror that was my brain this last winter out of embarrassment and pride and a respect for your collective wills to live, but my personal journal entries are like something out of Mordor.

But then… One afternoon toward the end of March, I was researching psychiatry in Italy in preparation for the next day when I was going to beg my skeptical doctor on my hands and knees for antidepressants. If I was going to grovel, I at least wanted to be prepared. I learned that “antidepressant” is “antidepressivo” and that “panic attack” is “attacco di panico” and that around 75% of women taking Yasmin end up on depression medication. Huh, I thought. Could this be as easy as going off the Pill?

It was. Only seven weeks later, I am a completely different person. Actually, I was a different person within seven days. I can hardly believe how easy it is to get out of bed each morning now that homicidal hormones are no longer running around chewing holes through all my happy thoughts. That endocrinologist who assured me I certainly did not have a hormonal imbalance owes me one year of lost happiness and a delivery truck of Lindt chocolates, at least as I see it.

I figured I owed you all an update now that I’m on the outside of the cage. So many of you have encouraged and supported me through a truly crap-filled (and -coated and -battered and -fried and -garnished) time. You’ve sent me e-mails and earrings and reminded me that I have some worth as a human being after all, and I am a thousand kinds of thankful. The future holds promise again. The world is habitable again. My creativity is waking out of its coma, and when I look inside my brain, I finally see myself. And when I’m 85, the smell of fresh lemons will remind me all over again how lovely it is to be.

6Apr

Genesis

Hello to all of you up there in the land of the living. Hello to you in the land of make up and home-cooked meals, to you who leave your front door on a daily basis, to you who get up the first time your alarm rings. You’re within my sightline now, and that’s good.

Civilization has been clouded from view lately, or rather, limited to a dim series of doctors’ offices. The four of us have been trading sickness like collector’s cards for weeks now, and our schedules ordered by nebulizer sessions and naps. Sophie and I are the lone holdouts at this point—she fussing inordinately and rubbing yellow goop from her eyes, I holding my cough-wracked sides together and sleeping while my husband cooks dinner. However, I left the house twice yesterday and realized I haven’t forgotten quite as much Italian as I thought. I can still say “buon giorno” to friends, and that’s good.

My list of failures is extravagant at this point. I have consistently been two days behind on house cleaning, and I’ve only managed to make one grocery trip in the last month. I’ve abandoned my friends and my inbox and my fingernails. The balcony planters are still sprouting last year’s twigs. Editing work is piled up around my ears, and the many blank pages in my writing folder feel like the worst failure of all. There is one and only one thing I’ve done well in the last week: loving my little family. I’m hopelessly smitten with them, my daughters with their sunny imaginations and deep blue eyes, my husband with his warm smile and oh-so-scrumptious hugs. Tender moments are alive and well in our family, and that’s good.

And spring is here.

Our wardrobes are switched out, the windows are open, pink and yellow flutter in our periphery. The world is a hundred shades brighter, and… well, that’s good.

23Mar

Malady Du Jour

Today’s malady du jour: vertigo. I woke up this morning to a head skipping like a scratched disc, waves of dizziness repeating ad nauseum. The doctor, diagnosing by phone as I was in no condition to leave the house (or, um, the bed), suggested it might be an inner-ear infection, which I want to make sense. I could use some extra sense right now, and perhaps a mysterious bug caught in the mazes of my head can explain the host of physical-mental symptoms I’ve been muddling through. Like headaches, great and small. Backaches. Stomachaches. Leg-aches. Heartaches. Draft folders crammed with half-written e-mails and blog posts I can’t seem to finish. Telephones ringing off the hook while I put another pillow over my head. Panic attacks. My body closing in on me until I have to force each breath. Loss of appetite. Loss of motivation. Loss of that little  somethin’ somethin’ that used to add sparkle to my days.

“It’s probably a milk allergy,” assured one friend. Another one told us of an endocrinologist where I could get my thyroid checked. Another friend suggested I ask for antidepressants, while yet another one told me about some great counseling services… 6,000 impossible miles away. Suddenly it’s not just the vertigo making me dizzy as I spin through the options and consider the frightening subjectiveness of medical diagnoses. I start to feel claustrophobic at the thought that I live in a non-English-speaking country, but I should be honest: I wouldn’t know where to start looking in the States either.

I go to the doctor in a few days, and I desperately want to solve myself before then. I am reluctant, embarrassed, to explain the multitude of ways in which I am sucking right now, and I would love to tell him, “Look Doc, I seem to be suffering from a food allergy. Please to medicate.” Doctors appreciate it when patients diagnose themselves, right?

The one good thing about this prolonged mystery illness is that, as it slowly drains the color from life, my priorities come into sharp black-and-white focus. I may not be able to accomplish much right now, but I can snuggle my girls for a long afternoon nap… and realize how much more important that is than cleaning or shopping or worrying about everything I’m not getting done. The world won’t stop if I’m unproductive this month, and perhaps marinating in the love of my sweet family may be my best treatment plan.

16Mar

Damp Paper

We’re in between seasons here. Cold winds sneaking through sunny yellow days, snowboards and planters vying for space on the balcony. At the grocery store, seasonal fruit is limited to spongey apples and some mandarins that look everything brilliant and orange but taste like damp paper. My days lately have had a lot in common with those mandarins…

…and there I stop. My thoughts have developed a sudden habit of darting away when I get too close, when I try to form their likeness into words, and I can’t manage heartfelt honesty right now. It’s heartbreaking, as is the way I snap under the pressure of mothering some mornings. The way seedlings and ringing phones make me crumble. The way I lie in bed wondering if today will be a make up day. This is not a year I want to remember, but I wish I could put it into words all the same.

11Mar

Association-Free

Today was a better day.

Perhaps that’s all the explanation I need to give for the last few weeks. That, and the fact that I’m finally putting letters together on a page without abusing the backspace key most disgracefully.

We’re on Day 4 of a settimana bianca in the Alps, and the wild incongruity of cautious, southern-bred me whizzing down slopes on a snowboard is doing me good. I love feeling like the wind, or at least the wind’s unfashionable second cousin who occasionally goes sprawling in a ploof of powder. It’s like breathing caffeine. Not even my ridiculously painful snowboard boots matter when I’m taking off down the mountain into a more alive version of myself.

Growing up in Texas gave me no context for cable cars and snow-tufted lodge gables, and I’m okay with that. This week can just be, free from associations. It can just be the glitter of fresh-faced sunrises on the snow. Pots of hot chocolate for breakfast. The soft crunch of boots and whirring of ski lifts. Funny bruises. Adorable preschoolers shuffling in misspelled lines during ski school. Pure air in our faces. At least one Better Day to remember this vacation by.

10Feb

A Week

It’s been A Week.*

A holding my miserable, asthma-stricken baby nine hours a day kind of week.

A bad words on the brain kind of week.

An OMG, when did I get this flabby? kind of week.

A glance at the laundry pile and curl up in bed kind of week.

A fog inside and out, and you know I mean metaphorically kind of week.

A thank the powers that be for caffeinated gum kind of week.

A kitchen floors perpetually sticky from my leaking brain residue kind of week.

A life smells like vomit kind of week.

A wordless kind of week.

But I’m finally back.


*Technically, two weeks. But whatever.

P.S. – Thank you all a thousand times over for your encouragement. It’s exactly what I needed some days to remember that pesky business of inhaling and exhaling.

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