It feels like I've been fucking up for the last several months. Most especially, since the tragedy of Adam's death. Since then, everything has felt off, everything I've done has felt like a failure, and I've personally let down several people in my life, maybe.
I feel like I'm shirking responsibility for my own life by putting this all in perspective of Adam's death. But I have been rather affected by it. I've talked about this at length in the past, but the grief isn't magically gone now that more than 3 months have gone by. I feel like some of it has been delayed and pushed away at times.
This summer, despite some great travels, has been hard. We've needed more our little family time and less social obligations. We've needed more downtime, more allowances for messy house/screen time/fewer activities. But now we're trying to get ourselves back to normal, since the school year kinda requires us to. And it's hard.
RG was sick this week and he actually missed the first two days of school. It was a real bummer and definitely threw me off a little since I had much different expectations for those days. But being a good "take care of my kid when he's sick" mom helped improve some of my self-confidence.
I'm starting to wonder about changing my meds right now. There's also several other changes happening in my life too: kids are starting up school again, TK in kindergarten, we'll be in a new routine, I'm going to have some more free time to get in exercise and therapy appointments, and I'm also trying to get back into practicing mindfulness. It's hard to ever have a more controlled experimentation of medications, but it's so hard to reduce all the variables. It's not like I want to avoid getting back into an exercise routine right now in order to remove that as a variable. It's possible that I will be getting much better in the next few weeks due to all theses other changes, and not necessarily the medication.
It just makes treating mental illness that much more difficult, accounting for all the variables.
Did you know that Adam's death certificate lists (not sure if it still does since there was some family effort to change it) the cause of death as "suicide"? It's probably easiest to label it that and I'm sure they saw "schizophrenia" and figured there really is no other thing to list since it was probably, at least in part, caused by his mental illness. I've gone back and forth on what I think happened, and I think we all probably do. I think I have to not call it suicide, for my own sanity and because of my own fears for my self in my lowest of lows. But sometimes those thoughts creep back in of maybe it was suicide and we didn't see the signs because he was good at hiding that part. It's possible. With mental illness, it seems like there's so much of hiding from other people.
I understand why we hide our struggles, and there are so many reasons to do so. For one, we don't want to worry those that love us. But I think there's this big part of it that is perpetuated by the stigma of mental illness. We don't want others to look at us as "crazy" or "weak" or "mentally unstable". We don't want to be seen as a failure because we aren't able to just overcome the illness.
I think it's critical to be more open about our struggles in order to receive the best treatment. We have to be honest with our care providers, our doctors, and our therapists, but we also have to be honest with those who can support us, those who care about us. I think the support network thing is a huge component of the treatment, and yet the pressure to keep these things silent prevents getting all the support we need.
We had a surprise birthday party for my sister and her husband in celebration of their 40th birthdays (a month apart from eachother). It was a success, although I still feel awful over the people we forgot to invite, or didn't have email addresses for, etc. I did another specialty cake, this time to honor their love of skiing.
The backstory here is even though they are both normally skiers, my sister is snowboarding because now that she's 40, she feels ready to try new things. :) Finding skier figurines in August did not prove to be an easy task.
Although I mostly just got pictures of the cake, I got a few of us getting ready to surprise them.
I haven't been social much lately, mostly due to recent sickness, my depression, the grief, social anxiety, and some Nasser stomach troubles. But last night was nice, it was the right setting for me, the right people, to feel supported through it all. Unfortunately Nasser and TK were sick yesterday (probably from whatever RG had), so that made for a more stressful day, but the success of the party was enough to make me feel more normal last night.
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