Sinkhole

I am feeling low, and because of that lowness I feel like I need to write.  Truthfully I try to avoid writing about when I’m feeling depressed, because I don’t really want the world to know.  So I’m writing this and I’m not sharing it.  It’ll just sit on this blog as a little blip and if someone stumbles on it then I suppose they can read it.  

I hate writing when I’m like this because I think there is too much out there.  Too many people holding up their mental illnesses as if it is some sort of badge of honor.  I hate that.  I think that it exacerbates the problem more than it solves the problem.  I know there are people out there that write of their depression/anxiety or whatever in order to facilitate personal healing.  Those are not the people I’m talking about.  The people that bug me are the ones that write about their mental illness and then post countless memes or videos about ‘how to treat someone with X issue’.  I hate it because what they are saying is “I am proud of being broken and I expect you to change everything about yourself in order to facilitate me”  I have a HUGE problem with that.  Because if you have a mental illness you need to HEAL not to stew in it, not to tell everyone around you that they are triggering you.  You need to deal with it, you need to shoulder your unfortunate burden and move forward.

Letting people know you have an illness isn’t the issue for me, expecting everyone to put you on a pedestal because of your illness is my issue.  

I know people will read that and go, “wow, judgmental much?” or “the only way for me to heal is to make everyone be careful around me” That isn’t healing, and yes I am judgmental.  I’m judgmental of other mental illnesses because I’ve carried the mental illnesses of anxiety and depression since I was like 10.  And you know what? Never once did I feel it was other people’s responsibility to help me deal with it.  I was eventually diagnosed with a long winded titles of Bipolar Anxiety Manic Depressive disorder.  Which frankly has so many words in the title that it sounds absolutely made up.  I was on medication for about a year, I could say a lot about that but not this post.

So why am I writing today when I clearly do not like it when people do this?  Mostly because I need to get some thoughts out on ‘paper’.  

It started with a conversation.  I had the impulse to tell a friend something about where my husband and I were considering moving in a year that I thought was funny.  I thought she’d laugh about it.  The impulse was that we are now discussing the idea of buying a larger piece of land and building a house on it.  The reason that this amused me was that I am in a funny place in life.  I never was going to get married, I was never going to have kids and I sure was never ever going to live outside the city.  As it is I’m married, have 3 kids and am hoping to have at least 3 more and I’m seriously considering getting a piece of land in the country and running a small farm of sorts.  This amuses me because 16 year old me would drop her jaw and not believe that I was her future.

So my friend reacted slowly, she actually didn’t say much the night I told her.  I mentioned in my message that we were hoping to buy a property this fall and start building right away.  I didn’t mention to her that my husband and I had also discussed that the most likely scenario was that we would have to live in a cheap apartment that we barely fit in while he finished up school so that we could realistically save up for a few years to do this crazy plan.  I just mentioned my most ideal situation, because the details were irrelevant.

I mentioned this a lot on my last iteration of this blog, but we are currently living in my mom’s home.  We were planning on being here for only 9 months, then my mom extended that stay to 3 years, in order to help my husband and I through school.  Fall of 2015 things went really badly for my husband, and we realized it would be at least 2 more years of school for him to get through.  On top of that I met with a councilor only to discover that most of the classes I’d been told by a previous councilor would count for my major… didn’t count.  So I upon realizing this, we decided it was stupid to stay here any longer, because we felt we’d overstayed our welcome by a lot.  I also had to take Spring of 2016 off so that I could get things back on track.  Since we’d already said we’d only stay until the summer of 2016, we decided we’d still move out then because we felt awful for being here so long.  So that is what we told my mom, and promised to move out that summer.  My parents response was to buy us a range and tell us that we could stay as long as we needed.  We decided that regardless of where we were in school we would be out of my parent’s home by the summer of 2018.  My second girl had turned 1 about 5 months before we initially moved in here, she just turned 5.  

Last year I found out I was pregnant which through everything off.  And my husband has been struggling with a class that he needs to pass in order to finish his major.  2016 I basically spent in bed being pregnant and then with a newborn.  During that time my husband has dealt with losing a job and a few new frustrations in school.

So now it is summer of 2017.  We’re not done with our degrees, we feel too old to be in school, we have 3 kids and we live in my mom’s basement.  

Putting it mildly it is hard NOT to feel like total losers.

The plan now is my husband will finish the class he’s been dealing with this Summer and then we both go back Spring of 2018.  I cannot go back any sooner than that because of the baby, and my husband’s next class is ONLY offered in the Spring.

Oh on top of that the job he has now, that he hasn’t even worked at a full year… well there is a chance that he might have to get a new job in the next couple of months.  We knew going in that it was a start up type situation, so we’re not surprised about this, but it is still something we have to consider.

So when my friend reacted with ‘well, don’t get your hopes up and don’t forget you are probably going to have to live in some middle place while chasing your dreams, by the way did you hear that (blah city) is really cheap?’

I fell apart.

I honestly should’ve just responded with, “yea, that is our plan, we’re just being hopeful” and left it at that.  But when I go that text it was as if a boulder of depression slipped off a cliff and just smashed me to bits.

(blah city) isn’t cheap, we’d looked there.  I’m 33 and have always lived in small apartments with generally awful landlords, and yes I’m aware that I’m a total loser.  (I’m paraphrasing the conversation of course)

The response was don’t you feel like you leeched off your parents enough?

Yes I really do feel that way, we’re moving next summer no matter what.  Even if if ends up being to a tiny 2 bedroom apartment with 5 people…

I just wanted her to laugh, I didn’t want to be judged.

So I was crushed and I spent the day moping around, my husband eventually kicked me out of our bedroom (since his office is in there) and told me to get *something* done, just because he knows if I get moving I can generally battle back the depression.

I’m still feeling pretty low, which is made manifest by the fact that I didn’t get up until 10am.

What is my point in all of this?

None really, but I needed to write it out for myself for my own sake to work out the emotions mentally and put them somewhere.

I’m not mad at my friend, I’m hurt and I feel like she was judging me on not enough information.  She probably could’ve been nicer, but we’re still friends and she has apologized for hurting my feelings.  

Sucks that the damage had already been done.

But here is the thing, I couldn’t control her reaction to what I told her.  I can control mine.  So yes, I was a human slug yesterday and I still feel pretty awful today.  But that doesn’t mean I need to curl up and let the waves of depression wash over me.  I need to be a person and I need to push through and find the things that will pull me out of depression.  This is my responsibility, not hers.  

One of the ways of dealing with this is to write that out.

The next is to get my exercise done and do the maintenance cleaning of my home.

Then I can do something fun, maybe walk to the park with the kidlets.  

But mostly I need to live, despite the depression.