Reports from the battle in my brain.

A year ago, I was excited to come home and take a proper shower again. The idea of hot water and a vast array of soaps and shampoos available to me was seriously something that I looked forward to as I packed my bags to leave Honduras. A few days ago, I was happy simply because I finally had the motivation to take a real shower and not just jump in fast enough to make sure my hair doesn't turn into a grease ball. You see, ordinarily I love showering. I love being clean. I LOVE the smell of soap. But lately, showering seems like so much work and so pointless. It's strange the things that depression takes from you, like the motivation to simply shower.

So I guess you're probably clever enough to understand that I'm still not feeling well at all. I've been pretty quiet about this since after I got out of the hospital, but lately I have felt that perhaps writing things out would be therapeutic...so here I am. I had hope when I left the hospital. There was suddenly a light because my medicine had finally been adjusted by an expert and maybe, just maybe, that would give my brain the opportunity to level itself out. I held onto that bit of hope for the recommended 6 weeks that they tell you to give the medication to do its thing. Time passed and that hope began to fade. 6 weeks went by and there was no change. There came a night that was so dark that I literally gave up on everything, I was so upset to wake up the next morning. For weeks after that I struggled with processing this and coming to terms with the fact that I had failed even at giving up on life. I'm still trying to come to terms with it, really. But I just kept on living after that.

Then one morning I woke up and I felt great! I woke up the next day and it happened again; I was so happy to see a change. I thought things were finally turning around. After a week and a half of feeling great, things went down hill again. Now I feel like I'm back at square -5 and still falling all the time. One thing that never fails to upset me is seeing and knowing other people that get better. It certainly makes me feel like a terrible person, but I can't help but hate it when someone else tells me that medication helped them almost immediately. Here I am on huge doses and still surrounded by a cloud of depression.

I feel as though I have lost most of what makes me me. The neat freak in me has apparently gone to sleep as my house remains unclean and my dishes pile up in the sink. The independent part of me has come to rely on my mother to bring me groceries as going shopping alone causes me huge amounts of anxiety. I've quit doing anything besides going to work and sleeping. Oh, once a week I manage to drag myself to the therapist for an hour but that is only out of obligation, not because I feel like it does any good. Watching movies, doing puzzles, reading, coloring, spending time with people, etc. have all become things that feel like monumental amounts of effort that I simply cannot muster. A full day of work tires me out to the point that 12 hours of sleep never even seems like enough anymore. But there's one little glimmering ray of terrifying hope on the horizon and that is ECT.

On December 19, I will begin Electroconvulsive therapy as basically a last ditch effort to make my brain work right again. ECT is the process of sending an electric shock through your brain and inducing a short seizure. This is done several times over a span of 2 weeks. The idea is basically the same as turning a computer off and back on again. It's uncertain exactly how it works, but this therapy is said to be effective in about 80% of people versus the roughly 40% that medication helps. It is terrifying, to be certain. I am scared  out of my mind. Even though it's much safer than the old versions of shock therapy, it seems like there's so much that can go wrong when playing around directly with your brain. But as I have told my family, my brain and the thoughts that it produces are far scarier to me than even the idea of lost memory or any other unfavorable outcome. For now, I will hold into this last little bit of hope and maybe, just maybe, I will get to actually start 2017 fresh and not in this deep dark hole which I have lived in for so long now.

I kept living.

About 2 and a half weeks ago, a big thing happened in my life; I was hospitalized for a week. I know your first reaction is to be really worried and quickly ask what happened and if I’m ok. I also know that when I tell you why, your reaction will likely not be one of concern. You probably won’t know how to react. Most likely the only thing you will come up with to say is something along the lines of, “ok…are you better now” and when I tell you that I’m not better now, you won’t know what to say and it’ll just be weird for both of us. So I don’t really talk about it and only a few people know. But I want to talk about it, I want to scream and shout and ask question. I want to have deep conversations about very real things and not freak people out. I want to feel like I’m not alone in the world. I want the stigma that keeps me quiet and makes things weird to disappear. I want people to talk about things freely and not be ashamed of what they’re going through. I want to talk, so that’s what I’m going to do.

You may not know much of my story, so I’ll back up a bit for you…last April things just kind of changed. My brain began telling me all sorts of terrible things. Unfortunately, those terrible things were an unbroken stream and I started believing the lies that my brain came up with. I began self harming to cope with hearing all of the terrible things all the time. It was a tough time, but I had something to look forward to; I was moving to Honduras in August to live my dream of teaching in a foreign country. There were days that I questioned the choice to move forward with Honduras. I was terrified that I would be stuck in the lies of my mind and that it would be tougher to face them when I was all alone and so far from everything that is familiar. Other days I thought it would be better for me; perhaps the change of pace and scenery would actually be what cured me. Long story short; Honduras was amazing, but it did not make me feel better. I got worse and worse until I decided that I needed professional help. As it turns out, Honduras essentially doesn’t have mental health care. When I got to the point that I couldn’t see myself living until the end of the school year, I decided to move home early. I made the move back in December and had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the beginning of January.

My first doctor’s appointment was terrifying for me. I was so nervous to talk to a complete stranger about my depression and how I thought maybe medication could help me. Luckily, my doctor is one of the kindest people I have ever met and she was extremely caring about everything I was going through. She went through a series of questions with me to find out how bad things were. A score of less than 9 is considered normal and I scored a 21. So basically, things were very bad. I was prescribed my first antidepressant which I stayed on for a month. That first medicine did absolutely nothing for me so my doctor decided to change it up. The second medicine seemed to help a little bit. During this time I was also visiting with my second counselor since I’d been home; I didn’t feel comfortable with the first one and waited months to get in with a different one at Mercy. This second counselor suggested upping my meds to see if they could help even more. I liked the idea of feeling even better, so I talked to my doctor about it. Unfortunately, I ended up having horrible panic attacks on the high dose of my second medication. I also had to cancel a few therapy appointments due to work. When I received a letter from Mercy saying that my therapist had the option to drop me for cancelling, I decided to look outside of Mercy for a therapist. Luckily, I found one who could get me in on a regular basis and was much closer to home and my day job so it was easier to make the appointments. I started seeing my new counselor and taking a new medication that didn’t give me panic attacks.

I was on my new medicine for a while and becoming very frustrated with not feeling better. During this time, I was doing some research on mental illness and came across something called borderline personality disorder. I really thought the symptoms described me, as did some of the people who know me best. I discussed this possibility with my doctor who added a medication that might help boost my antidepressants if I did, in fact, have BPD. This new medication is classed as an anti-psychotic which still kind of bothers me, but I suppose it’s really just a name and doesn’t mean all that much. After 3 weeks on this anti-psychotic, I sent a very honest check in message to my doctor before it was time to refill the prescription. An unfortunate truth that I had to share with her was that there are times that I am suicidal and I am very afraid that one day I will have trouble seeing the truth beyond the lies of my brain. I got a call from my doctor that night, she said she wanted me to try inpatient care because we had tried so hard to make me feel better and nothing was working. (I forgot to tell you that she had referred me to a psychiatrist earlier and Mercy Springfield was booking for next May, Joplin got me in sooner but still not until the end of November) My doctor felt that the way things were going; I might not make it until the end of November. She told me to go to the emergency room ASAP and let them do a psychological evaluation and hopefully admit me. I was terrified, but told her I would think about it. I asked my therapist what she thought and also got a call from her. My therapist wouldn’t get off the phone with me until I agreed to go straight to the hospital after work. The rest of my night is sort of a blur, but my mom and I sat in the emergency room all night until she eventually had to leave to take care of my nephews. Around 6 am, the psych nurse came and talked to me. Shortly after, she returned to tell me my doctor had placed a call to the on call psychiatrist to get me admitted. They decided to keep me at the Marian Center (Mercy’s psych ward).

I was absolutely terrified and shell shocked as 2 nurses and a security guard escorted me from the ER to the Marian Center. I started to feel slightly more at ease as I became acclimated with my surroundings. One of the staff members, who I would come to trust wholly, told me that they would keep me safe while I was there. I immediately felt somewhat better because when self harm is your coping mechanism, you always feel as though you’re in danger from yourself. I must admit that it was nice to know that I was constantly being watched and checked in on. What I found at the Marian Center was community that I can’t have anywhere else. I was surrounded by people that, like me, suffered with mental illness. Everyone was so real. There was no pretense. When things felt terrible, we talked about it. People were real about everything were dealing with. No one was trying to hide. Smiles and laughter were always genuine. Not a single person told me to smile or think more positively or accused me of doing things for attention. That week was something that I absolutely needed, in fact; I think I left too soon. My meds had been tripled by the time I went home and were to be upped even more in a week. I’m now on medicine that is quadruple the dose I used to take and a couple other medications to assist. Right now, I don’t feel any better, but maybe one day soon I will. Unfortunately, antidepressants take about a month to take hold and the waiting period is absolute hell. For now, I have a small sliver of hope because there is still time for this medicine to do what it is supposed to do. Mostly, I still feel the same. It’s a lot of being very tired and feeling all alone in the world. It’s a lot for hopelessness and hurt, but despite all of that; I will keep living.

On coming home.

10 days. That's all the time that now stands between me and everything that is familiar. 10 days until I'm greeted by my family at the airport. 10 days until I get to sleep in my nice, big, fluffy bed again. 10 days until I can eat all of the foods that I've been missing. 10 days until I get to watch movies with my best friend again. 10 days until I'm home.

But that means only 10 days until I walk away from my dream. Only 10 days until I give in to this terrible thing I've been fighting. And while it's true that it has already been ruling my life for so long, I feel like this is me finally admitting that I'm no longer in control; the mess in my brain is.

In case you were wondering, that's not a fun thing to admit.

I am not coming home simply to celebrate the holidays with my loved ones, that would have me much more excited about what waits for me on the other end of my journey. The timing just happens to coincide with Christmas. I think this makes things a bit tricky. There's family to see, things to do, places to go. I want to want to do all of that. I want to be excited for that. I wish I was coming home to celebrate the beauty that is this season.

The reality is that I am coming home broken and weary. All I want when I get back is to crawl into my bed, curl up under my cozy blankets, and stay there forever. That's not meant as a hyperbole, either. I just want to sleep and never have to face the world. In fact, some days all I can do is sleep. I get out of bed each morning only because I would feel even worse if I left everyone to cover my classes for the day.

I've finally been able to shake the guilt of leaving but only because the school already has a replacement lined up. But I'm still greatly conflicted about all of this. I feel like it ultimately it wasn't my choice at all. I never would have chosen to walk away from all of this. But I also would never have chosen to try and keep fighting for my life here when I felt I was bound to eventually lose. So I'm doing  what I have to do to at least give myself a fighting chance here.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at here is the fact that I need time. Part of me cannot wait to see your lovely faces, to be wrapped in the warm embraces of my loved ones, and to share stories of the past 4 months with you. A bigger part of me is terrified. I am overwhelmed by the mere thought of suddenly being surrounded by so many people, of suddenly having to appear ok for all of those people. It's hard work to put on that smile and pretend that it's all alright. Not that I necessarily think I have to do that all of the time, but I'm sure you are uninterested in seeing me when I'm in my bed that I haven't left for 2 days and my face is tear streaked and I don't even have the energy to feed myself. But that's my reality more often than not. So please don't think it's anything personal if I don't see you right away when I get back or if I'm not up to doing something with you.

Thank you all again for your love and support, it means the world to me.

Keep Climbing

Lately, I have made a point of going out for a walk each day after school. I don’t mean a casual stroll, either. You see, Copán is built on hills. Not gently rolling hills, either. These hills are huge and steep. But I set out every day and make a path around town that has me climbing all of the biggest hills around. I usually get about half way up the hill before I start cussing myself for doing such a thing. My legs start to burn. My lungs start to protest. I want to stop. But every time I want to stop, I remember the days when I used to run.

I remember the lessons I learned from my cross country coaching friend, Rachel, about running hills.

“NEVER stop on a hill, it’s harder to get going again.”

“Make it to the top, your rest will come on the way back down.”

“Don’t look at the top of the hill. Head down, focus on the step right in front of you. The top will be there before you know it.”

“Slow down if you must, but DO NOT STOP.”

What I’ve realized is that I love how these lessons relate to life as a whole. We’re all going to have to climb hills in our lives. Some are bigger than others. Some hills seem like they will never end. Sometimes we just want to stop climbing because it is so hard. I’m there right now.

I’ve been there for quite some time. The hill I’m climbing seems like Mt. Everest most days because I’m looking at the top of the hill. Not a day goes by that I don’t want to quit. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish for just a quick break. But that’s not how life works, it keeps rolling. Take a break and it may pass you by. So I know I can’t stop. But I can slow down when I need to, as long as I never stop moving. I’ll reach the top eventually and there will be rest.

If you are where I am, let me encourage you to keep climbing. Don’t look at the top of the hill. Put your head down and make the step that is right in front of you. Never quit making those steps. Slow down if you must, but keep moving forward. You will find rest one day.

Keep climbing.

What if you fly?

The prospect of uprooting your whole life and moving to a new country is a scary one, I would know. 

The prospect of uprooting your whole life and moving to a new country when you're in the midst of a terrible bout of depression is absolutely terrifying. 

Unfortunately, I also know that all too well.

Yesterday marked 4 months exactly since the day that the switch was thrown in my brain. 

4 months of darkness.

4 months of never feeling quite "right." 4 months of fighting the monster that is my own brain at times. 

4 months of trying (and usually failing) to stop self-harming. 

4 months of almost always having someone around or even not staying at my own house so I wasn't alone (my best friend is a saint, btw) and was safe from myself. 

4 months of finding out that recovery doesn't mean your fight is all over, it just means that you're still deciding to fight no matter how hard that is.

But here I am, still fighting. 

Here I am, marching forward into the future.

Here I am, doing what I have always dreamed of doing.

It is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my entire life.

There are days that I want to pack up and go home to what's familiar and easy.

There are days that I don't want to leave my bed.

There are days that I wish xacto knives existed in this country.

There are nights that my brain plays dirty rotten tricks on me and I wake up on the verge of tears.

But then there are days like today.

There are the smiles from my students.

There is time spent with my fellow teachers.

There are afternoons of laying in our new hammock.

Sometimes the cuts on my legs are healing nicely.

There is joy.

There is hope.

I'm not sure how many times before I left I asked, "But what if I can't do it? What if I can't handle it? I can't even handle normal life..." But I know that time and time again I was not only assured that I could, in fact, do this but also that if it came to it, I could leave. 

While I don't think I would leave no matter how bad things got, there is peace in knowing that I'm still here. I'm doing this. I'm still fighting. There is peace in knowing that I can do this, even on the hardest of days. Even if there are days that I don't want to carry on, I can keep living my dream. Because while those days have the tendency to be many, they will always eventually pass.

I have come to accept that fact that I may not get "better"while I'm here. I know this isn't the ideal place for healing with my support system so far away. But I know that I will make it through this year. I know that should I decide to seek professional help when I get home (I'm strongly considering it) I will have an amazing network of people who love me standing right beside me, holding my hands through everything.

I know that no matter how bad things get, life is not about asking, "What if I fall?" Life is about asking, "What if I fly" even when you feel like flying is the last thing you are capable of.

You Don't Know You're Beautiful

A few weeks ago I heard a commercial that seriously disturbed me. There I was, getting opening things done at work, rocking out to pandora as I usually do before work, when I hear a commercial for a tanning salon that I couldn't even believe. I wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention, because let's be real here, I obviously don't give a rip about tanning salons. Anyway, I caught part of the commercial and the part I caught said something along the lines of, "When you're tan, you'll feel better about how you look and the outside. And when you like what you see on the outside, you'll like what's on the inside better." So what I took from that was that in order to feel good about myself as a human being, I need to focus on my outward appearance first. Because how could you have any problem with you if you look pretty? After all, that's what's important, right? What we look like on the outside. Why take the time to learn to love yourself no matter what and focus on what your inner voice is saying to you about you when you can simply lay in the tanning bed and make yourself prettier?

It amazes me a little bit that we as a society seem to understand what's so very wrong here, but it continues to happen. We continue to tell generation after generation that they aren't pretty enough so they must not be good enough. We continue to create an unrealistic ideal that turns into nothing more than a general dissatisfaction with how we look. And sometimes general dissatisfaction turns into something so much worse. People's lives are ripped apart because they learn to hate themselves because they will never be as pretty or as skinny or as perfect as society tells them to be. It simply isn't acceptable that this is a reality.

In thinking about all of this, I found something I wrote a few years back and it fits rather well:

 Today in my writing 1 class we watched the Dove Evolution video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U) and were asked to analyze it. When asked what claim Dove was trying to make this old man in my class had the audacity to raise his hand and say that because the girl wasn't really pretty to begin with, Dove was saying that using their products will make you beautiful. This seriously pissed me off...first of all the freaking video says that it's pointing out why our standard of beauty is so unrealistic. He was seriously trying to argue that this girl was ugly and Dove was trying to pimp their products. Guys like him are the reason girls hate themselves and develop eating disorders! I grew up watching my mom ruin her own body by being anorexic because she has an unrealistic view of what it takes for her to be beautiful. Trust me, it's not pretty. I think guys like the one in my class and also the beauty industry as a whole should be ashamed for pushing such unrealistic standards on women. Little girls see advertisements or even hear adults talking and think they have to look like models for people to think they are pretty...I applaud Dove for trying to change this. Yeah, they're a business and are trying to make money, but they are also trying to make the world a little better for women everywhere and give little girls a positive start and the self-esteem they so desperately need.

And to all of the girls reading this...You are all beautiful ♥

I still stand by everything I said that day. But what will make this better? That Dove video was new 4 years ago and today I don't see anything changing. I think we as women perpetuate the problem at times. We buy into it. We turn to the right clothes and the right way to do our makeup and best way to get a bikini body to make us feel better. But is there a real solution in any of that? Isn't all of that just fleeting? What about when you wash that makeup off and change into your sweats? Do you still love you? Or do you only love the you that you allow people to see out in the world? If that's the case, how terribly tragic.

In my mind, change will happen only when we all learn to look within. When we train our inner voice to speak with kindness. When we learn to be more gentle with our selves. As much as this is a societal ill, I think there is a problem that lies within each of us as well, one that won't go away until we can truly learn to accept ourselves and love ourselves each and every day no matter what. On bad days, guess what, you're still living! And just living can be hard enough sometimes. Why make it any harder on yourself?

One of my yoga instructors said something in class somewhat recently that has stuck with me ever since...she said, "Practicing non-violence with others is usually second nature to us, but we often forget to practice non-violence with ourselves."

Moral of the story today? Um, I'm kind of all over the place I suppose. But as a society, we have got to stop telling people that their worth is only skin deep. And as humans, we have got to stop believing that our worth is only skin deep. Then and only then will positive change happen.

My two cents on the matter...

I've been trying to decide if writing this was worth the waves it would inevitably make. Trying to decide if I wanted to potentially put myself at odds with the church and, most unfortunately, members of my own family. I don't like to speak up, I prefer to fade into the background and let people do their thing while I do mine. But this time, I decided that I would be doing some people who I love very much a disservice if I just stayed quiet. So I shan't. Be warned, many of you probably won't like what I'm about to say, you might want to leave now. Though if you know me at all, you likely already know where I stand.

While I am not really surprised in the least, I am ashamed of my community today. Honestly, I don't understand why in 2015 we need laws to tell us to treat other human beings like human beings...and I REALLY don't understand why anyone would fight to take such a law away. Oh, that's right, it's totally ok for you to be an ass to other people in the name of your religious freedom, but it's not ok for people to be gay. And heaven forbid those gay people expect you to treat them with the same decency that you treat straight people, that's asking too much of you! After all, you don't agree with their life style so you shouldn't be forced to treat them like other people.

Let me just start in on this whole "religious freedom" argument that I've heard. I'm really not sure what to say besides that it's utter nonsense. First of all, you do realize that by law no one can be discriminated against based on their religion, right? You can't be fired or denied housing just because you're a Christian. So why would you want to deny anyone else those same protections? Oh, right, because they're gay. How dare they! It's not your religious freedom you're afraid of losing, it's the right to be an ass and claim that it's because of your religious convictions that you're afraid of. Because if it isn't a religion issue, that would just mean that you're a crummy person who wants to treat people as less than because they're different than you. Furthermore, if this truly was a religious freedom issue (it's NOT), why should your "rights" as a Christian trump some else's as a human being? Please, do tell.

And here's another question for you: why is this what we're fighting against so hard? Why have we picked homosexuality as the sin that we want to attack? See, I've heard this scenario about how it isn't fair to expect a Christian owned bakery to bake wedding cakes for a gay wedding...but what if an unwed mother wanted to get a cake for her kid's birthday? Would people be clinging to their religious conviction then? She made a choice to have sex before marriage so shouldn't you deny her business just as you would the business of that gay couple? What about that employee that just cheated on his wife? You should probably fire him because he's making choices that you don't agree with. Read that Bible that's clutched so tightly in your hand, you'll find out that ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That doesn't make someone else's sin worse than yours or mine.

And can we PLEASE stop saying that we "love the sinner but hate the sin" because trying to deny someone a job or a home is not loving them. Telling them that you should get to decide to treat them like you treat everyone or turn them away is not loving them. Seeing them as anything other than human beings is not loving them, because once you've lumped someone into a group that you hold preconceived notions about, that's all you see.

What this comes down to for me is the fact that human beings are human beings, point blank. That's all there is to it. To be fair, I realize that I'm hating on people for hating on other people. BUT let me assure you that I don't think you should have any rights taken from you just because you don't agree with me.

This is a subject that hits home with me so it's hard not to rage about it. Because it affects people that I love, it says that in Springfield, Missouri my cousin, great aunt, and many friends don't have the same rights as me. You see, my cousin Ashley is one of my favorite people in the whole world and I have looked up to her my whole life...she is super smart and she moved out to Boston from small town Iowa after high school to pursue her dream of becoming an architect. These days, she is indeed an architect and is also taking flying lessons and has plans to buy and renovate properties around the Boston area so she can get into the rental business. Then one day she wants to spend some time living in Europe, and I have no doubt that she'll actually do it. And in October I finally got the opportunity to meet Ashley's wife, Jamie. And you know what? She's awesome! They are amazing human beings who opened their home to me and my best friend and were more than hospitable to us.
But I saw the pain on my cousin's face when the conversation came back to our family, most of which has decided to pretend she no longer exists. It was awful. No one should have to say that their grandmother has gotten better because she actually calls on their birthday now rather than just ignoring it. And let me just tell you, if anyone ever tried to deny Ashley and Jamie jobs or housing just because they love each other, I would lose my shit.

Human beings...not a general label of "gays or homosexuals or whatever else you may come up with"...but someone's brother, sister, daughter, grandkid, son, best friend, cousin, aunt, uncle, mother, father, etc, etc.

Human beings are human beings, end of story. Let love win, guys, that's what it's all about.