Help, I'm Drowning..

"I make no apologies for how I choose to repair what you broke"

I love the beach. It's extremely calming to just stand there and look out into the never ending ocean.  Only right now, it felt like I was smack in the middle of that ocean.

Depression.

I walked around with the pain for a while, but thankfully only had one major bout of near depression. I say thankfully because a lot of people never get out of it.
The thing people don't realize about depression is that people don't fall into depression, they slip into it. Slowly, gently, and if you don't pay close enough attention, you wont even see it happen. You will wake up one day and you will be in this deep, dark place and have no idea how you got there.

And I almost got there. Actually, I did get there. I just got pulled out in time.

The thing is, many times when you are in this place, what you feel you need is space. You want to be alone. But that's actually the last thing you need. In fact, if you are reading this and know someone who could potentially be in that place - don't give them space. They'll slip right out of your grip.

I stopped talking to people. Completely. I wasn't talking to people at work, and I'd get home and go straight to my room and lock myself in there waiting for tomorrow to arrive. And wine. I drunk lots of wine. Boy, did I drink wine. And i think this is the first time I have openly addressed this. Only two people knew I was drinking, and even then I'm not sure they knew how much. (Sidenote- prior to this I was a teetotaler). Unfortunately, I never was able to get high. But that's what I wanted. I just wanted to feel happy. I wanted this unbearable ache in my heart to go away. But my body just refused to cooperate. Turns out I am extremely alcohol tolerant (meaning it would take a lot to get me high on alcohol), so I gave up on that. I did it because I hear that's what people do. And everyone on my Instagram always looks so happy when they are out drinking :-D

I cried a lot during this period. I think it actually got to a place where I couldn't cry anymore, the tears just wouldn't come out. My eyes were almost permanently red and swollen, and so was my face generally. I'd blown my nose so much, I couldn't anymore.

For a while, those around me let me do this. day in day out. Up until they couldn't anymore. How was it broken? My father :)

One Sunday, he got home from church, came straight to my room and forced me to open the door. He looked me straight in the eye and said "You know you cannot give this boy this much power over your life. His decisions should not change who you are. You cannot allow your life to came to a standstill while his is going on". Then he left.

I was so mad. The thing is, I knew everything he was saying. He wasn't giving me any new information. I knew all this - I spent my four years in college studying psychology. But we all know- doctors make the worst patients. It hurt me a lot whenever people said such things to me because in the back of my mind, no one got it. They couldn't possibly understand. But my dad had only spoken to me twice about this- the first was when they were given the news and he asked me to explain what happened, and the second was this.

In many ways I felt it was because he felt helpless. It can't be easy to watch your child in that much pain and not be able to do anything about it.

So I picked my self up, took a shower and went to bed. I woke up the following day a completely different person.

This is not to say I was OK, far from it. I just moved from being openly sad, to being inwardly sad. I got tired of feeling as if I had become a burden to people. I needed to deal with what I was going through, but at the same time I felt that I wasn't able to properly do that when I had to constantly keep worrying about other people worrying about me. So I begun to bottle everything up. And it took an angel to be able to point out what I was doing and helped me handle it. Again, a story for another post.

The main point is this - despite whatever pain you find yourself in, for whatever reasons, you can not allow yourself to drown in there. Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. It's a lot easier for me to say this now that I'm on the other side of it, but it is the hard truth. When something catastrophic happens, you often feel stuck and feel like everyone's life is moving on except yours. But at some point, yours has to move on too. You have to take that first step. You have to allow yourself to understand that choosing to move on doesn't invalidate your experience. That was a big issue I had to deal with. I felt that refusing to live in my pain meant that I was validating his actions. That picking up and moving on meant that I was silently saying that what he did was OK.

That is absolutely not the case. Your experience is your truth. Yours alone. Only you will ever understand it. It will always be with you, but you need to refuse to build a shrine for it. Your life cannot be built around that. Letting go of the pain doesn't mean that you are cancelling out what you went through, it simply means that you refuse to live in it. Fight through it. Fight like your life depends on it.

And trust me, you have more control over this than you could ever imagine. So much more.

"Pain. You just have to ride it out. Hope it goes away on its own. Hope the wound that caused it heals. There are no solutions. No easy answers. You just breathe deep and wait for it to subside.

Most of the time, pain can be managed. But sometimes, the pain gets you when you least expect it. Hits way below the belt and doesn’t let up.

Pain. You just have to fight through. Because the truth is, you can’t outrun it. And life always makes more."