Losing my mind

To put some context around my last post.  I have been struggling more and more with depression lately.  I really shouldn’t post anything online when I am feeling this overwhelmed but in the spirit of Dooce, here goes nothing.

A couple of years ago my home life was a wreck.  Things were simply spiraling out of control.  As Jordon and I were on a vacation in Victoria, B.C. I told him I wanted a divorce for no other reason that I thought he just deserved a better fate than living with me.  Luckily he disagreed with my assessment of the situation. We came home and I got into counseling. The counselor helped me figure out a lot about my past and my present and things improved for a couple of years.  Then two years ago things went out of control again at home.  I was lying to Jordon, confusing Mark, and hating who I was, and confused on what was going on.  This time I went to my doctor and she put me on some mild anti-depressants.  They seemed to help for a while and then when I had Oliver, the combination of my normal depression and then postpartum depression made it a lot worse.  On top of that, I stopped taking my medication regularly which is the worst thing I could have done.  It wasn’t intentional, I just didn’t remember.  Jordon suggested I get my medication bubble packed (like many mental health patients do).  That just got me enraged until I went over and noticed I had more medication in my bottle then I should have.  I just cried when I saw that.   I went over and called the pharmacist and had my medication bubble packed (and apologized to Jordon) which has helped me keep my medication on track.

That has helped a lot but I still have days/weeks/months which are still chaotic.  One of the things I do is try everything I can do to hide the chaos from Jordon and handle it but of course I have a zero for a lifetime of getting out of the binds I get myself in and then I dump it on Jordon’s lap and he has to deal with it.  This was one of those weeks.  These weeks tend to come at the worst possible moments.  Right before Jordon’s birthday, Christmas, Father’s Day, vacations and other important dates.  It’s complicated but around here we call it the Hardinge Version of Reality.  It’s a quite derogatory comment that reflects that in our experiences dealing with my family.  It boils down to what they want to happens changes what really did or needs to happen.  In other words what I want to happen becomes so overwhelming to my priorities that it often messes everything else up.  For some reason I see this happening and instead of stepping back, asking for help, or just stopping everything, I tend to become more focused and do what was causing the problem even more.  Eventually Jordon catches on and has to stop everything and fix things.  The end result is that on a lot of Christmases, birthdays, and special days things get canceled, Mark is disappointed, and Jordon is probably wondering why kind of crazed idiot he married.

That is often the last thing I want to do and so it means more conflict for Jordon who often is the one who has to break a promise to Mark because of it.  Of course this makes me feel like I need to fix things but when I am in this state, the last thing the family needs is more involvement from me.

Jordon handles chaos really well.  Working at the shelter he sees a lot of things.  The Salvation Army is in a tough neighborhood and there are knife fights, drug fights, domestic violence, people drinking solvents, drug overdoses, and gang activities all happening on that block at times.  He also deals with a lot of people who are struggling more than I am.  Where it stops being fun for him is that he puts in 10 hours at the shelter and then comes home to more problems and chaos.  Of course I know that and so I tend to want to keep things from him which perpetuates the cycle.   I tend to be conscious about what a pain that I can be and try to keep things off of Jordon’s plate and I kind of don’t tell him certain things about Mark, Oliver, our finances, the noise the van made, or the strange twitch Maggi does once in a while.  That is kind of where we are at again.

This is made a little bit worse by the fact that Jordon isn’t controlling by nature.  He hates to check up on me.  He hates to not take my word for things and it hurts him a lot to have to say, “This doesn’t make any sense.  I need to see some of this for myself.”  I still remember sitting with him in counseling and him going to the counselor, “So what you are saying is that I have to trust Wendy a lot less?!”  Since then he has gotten a lot better at asking questions and he can tell by my voice when I am struggling.  He also has done a good job in helping me figure out a work flow solution for my life.  Keeping a daytimer and Moleskine with me at all time has made a big difference.  At the start he wouldn’t talk to me if I didn’t have my books until I got in the habit of keeping them with me.  Now it is second nature to grab a pen and my journal to keep track of things.  I write more and more down now than I ever have in my life.

On a positive note, we are still married.  I know of friends who have left or were left because of depression and we have made it this far.  We are celebrating 12 year of marriage this fall with a family trip to Victoria.  In his former life as a pastor and now as manager at a shelter, Jordon deals with a lot of people who are losing it.  I also have some wonderful friends who are going through the same stuff or have gone through it in the past.  They see what Jordon sees as well and like Jordon, they see it earlier now as well.  It isn’t as bad as millions of others of people either.   The other positive side is that work doesn’t seem to be affected by it.  I am told that is normal and many people who have horrible depression at home operate comfortably at work.

On the bad side, my side of the family isn’t any help at all.  If there was a list of things my counselor has told me to avoid to make things worse, those things are brought our in every conversation I have with them.  The solution is simple, I haven’t had a real conversation with any of them in years but it does make life feel lonely at times.  It’s a bizarre paradox of being lonely and yet better off being disconnected than connected.

I have learned a lot during the last five years battling this thing and that is that it too will pass and that the guys will all be there for me if I let them.  I just need to do a better job of remembering that when I am going through this.