I'm sane but I'm overwhelmed, I'm lost but I'm hopeful, baby, what it all comes down to, is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine

Tuesday, 11/07/17, 10:10am, 12:52pm

Well, yesterday, and so far, today, have been a bit better than the last, well bunch of days. I had felt like I was stuck in this depressive rut for almost 2 weeks, but maybe (??) I'm coming out of it? I'm not gonna get my hopes up too much, cuz sometimes that causes a bigger crash downward, but I am going to hope a little. Yesterday I had several things go right: I succeeded in making butternut squash soup in the crockpot (booyah! cuz I haven't made dinner successfully in quite some time...), I biked to my friend's house and picked up food for us on my way over (hah, I spent quite a bit of time transferring the to go orders into some leak proof containers I had brought so that I could put them in my backpack. I think I lot of people at the restaurant were like "that biker weirdo", haha!), I enjoyed a really good lunch with my friend and got to have really good friend talking time and she let me let out a lot of the bad feelings from the past 2 weeks (such a good friend you guys, she just got out of the hospital end of last week after spending a week in it!), and then I biked home. The rest of the day I got a lot of "chill" time, both before and after the kids came home from school, but I think the combination of feeling really successful at several things plus getting some good exercise in plus friend time, was perfect.

This morning I was going to do a cycle/core fusion class at the Y, but didn't make it since Nasser and I still had to fill out our ballots this morning. I could have made it there late, but then we also got some snow (!!) last night so I would have been extra late with clearing off the car. Oh well.

I ended up doing a 20 minute "yoga for anxiety" video, which certainly didn't burn very many calories, but it was rejuvenating regardless. And I intend to do more of a workout later in the day if I can since I've got therapy at 11 this morning.

I want to share a couple quotes that have meant a lot to me recently...

"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, 

this time more intelligently." 

-Henry Ford

"The moment that you feel, just possibly, 
you are walking down the street naked, 
exposing too much of your heart and your mind, 
and what exists on the inside, 
showing too much of yourself... That is the moment, 
you might be starting to get it right."
-Neil Gaiman

Both these quotes showed up at the end of my mindfulness practice with that app, Calm, on different days of the "7 Days of Calm." I am liking that app, although I haven't yet started the "21 Days of Calm," after having finished the 7 Days. I think that might help me get into the habit more of mindfulness every.single.day. Cuz I probably need that.

You know, today, it turns out, is my "blogiversary." I've now had this blog for 2 full years, and published 192 blog posts. Yikes. That seems like a lot of posts to me, but whatever. I think this blog has been huge for me in a lot of ways. It's given me a place to write, and pour out feelings, and reflect about things, and learn how to become more open about my mental illness. I didn't share the blog openly right away, it took some time. But I do kinda feel like that Neil Gaiman quote, I often feel like I am exposing too much of my heart and mind, and I do often wonder if it's the right thing or right thing for me at least to be doing. I like the validation I get from that quote. Cuz there's still this inner part of me that feels very strongly that it is the right thing to be doing. But it questions the blog, often.

So the other thing that I think helped my mood, was on Sunday night, Nasser reflecting over several recent things that I did, despite my foul mood. In my last blog post, I was feeling really crappy and yet forced myself to create some "hope statements", which isn't necessarily something I could have done pre-ECT. On Sunday, we were walking with my sister and her family to a restaurant across the street from our house. On the way, Nasser made a comment to me that I took a lot of offense to and felt really triggered by. I was talking with him really angrily and talked about going back home and skipping the meal with everyone. I was actually incredibly triggered (this is more a reflection on my depression than me, or Nasser) and felt super down, but I forced myself to go and actually enjoy the lunch and enjoy the discussion with my sister and brother-in-law and ended up helping myself more in the long run than had I ran off to go home. There were a few other things that Nasser brought up on Sunday night in this conversation and hearing all that made a big difference in my overall mood, I think.

When we're discussing medication changes and the possibility of a 2-3 ECT treatment burst, it's easy to feel lost in these feelings of, "I'm as depressed as I've ever been" and it's hard to see that despite the down times right now, I'm still doing better than before. I'm doing better than just a few months ago. And that's still huge, and that's still something to feel good about.

Ok, so, this next part I'm writing later, after therapy. My therapist got me talking today about some of the things that seem to motivate me, rather than focusing on the things that I feel should motivate me but haven't been. It helped to get a list started- we were able to come to a conclusion of at least 2 things. 1. I might need to plan in at least an hour every day of "relational" time, so like get together with a friend or spend time messaging with friends or even spending time on facebook catching up on friends or talk to a friend on the phone, etc. and 2. I might need to plan on one "project" a week- whether it's something around the house like getting together a pile of baby donation stuff or maybe working on ideas for our basement finish project. It was really helpful to start thinking about, like, what do I really need as a part of each day to feel good? Exercise each day probably needs to be the third item, but I'm having some trouble figuring out what "expectation" to set on that. I've been trying to exercise every day since meeting with my doctors on Thursday, and so far I've done it except for Sunday, and today I still need to (like I'm not really counting the yoga for anxiety from this morning since it was mostly laying on the yoga mat). I need to be careful about planning the exercise thing as an expectation because I tend to have a lot of issues when I don't "meet my expectation" and it all compounds into a horrid depressive state of feeling like a failure and yet the state makes me continue to not meet the expectation and it all gets worse and worse.

So like today. I'm a little demotivated with exercise since I didn't get it in this morning. This happens a lot when I don't accomplish it in the morning. Somehow the afternoon and evening are much less motivating times for me to exercise. I'm not really ready to exercise right now since I just ate lunch and feel too full still. But then, I don't really have much time to get the exercise in before I have to leave for an appointment at the gastroenterology place. Oi. I'm going to tell you about my appointment even if you don't want to hear about it. This afternoon I've got a hemorrhoid banding, my second of three of these. Sounds fun, right? I, unfortunately, but not, like, life threatening or anything, have hemorrhoids. We're currently treating the internal ones with this rubber band ligation procedure. Basically the doctor sticks a probe up my butt, sucks at the hemorrhoid, and puts a tiny rubber band around it. This cuts off the blood flow to the hemorrhoid and after a few days or so it falls off. But we can only do one at a time. So I have 3 separate treatment times for this, spaced out a few weeks apart. Anyway, my point was, I have one today, and I don't expect to be interested in exercising afterward... last time my butt hurt a fair bit.

Alright, I'm going to be done writing for today, since I don't feel like I have much else to say, and I could use some free time before this appointment. I do want to say, thank you to my readers, those of you who've stuck with me these 2 years, and even if this is the first post you're reading. You're all awesome.

and I say, hey hey hey hey, I said hey, what's going on?

Saturday, 11/04/17, 2:42pm, 4:40pm

It's been... hard... to get myself to blog again. I had started a blog post last Saturday, wrote some more on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and never finished it. Finally I decided to just start a brand-new post and only include what I really wanted to from what I'd already written.

Things haven't been too great. In Daylio, my mood tracking app that I use every day (I'm on a 90-something day streak right now), most of the last week has either been "meh" or "fugly", at the 3 and 4 out of 5 level, where 5 is worst. I had treatment this past Monday, which normally makes me feel a bit better, but it didn't this time. And we decided not to spread the treatments out more at this time, since I did have a worse week the second week, during this past 2 week spread between treatments. We're making some minor changes in medications- I stopped the anti-psychotic I was on due to the results we just got from genetic testing (mainly that those medications aren't really expected to work based on my genes and are more likely to have side effects) and we're also upping my anti-depressant. It'll be a few weeks before we can expect any change due to upping the anti-depressant, but I also really hope that doesn't mean that the next few weeks are just going to be suck-y. We're also experimenting with having me exercise every day, which has been hard, just in the last 3 days. And it's especially hard that so far, I'm not noticing any big difference in mood despite the 3 day streak on exercise, plus the fact that today was a much more vigorous bit of exercise and I still feel fairly crappy.

I've been frustrated for some time now that I can't seem to get myself reading again. And I haven't figured out whether that's a cognitive problem due to ECT (issues with memory still and cognitively understanding things) or if it's an issue with motivation and depression (which could be since it feels like I want to want to read, but don't necessarily want to read). But maybe it's an issue with both. Here's my book pile near my side of the bed:

Today, I attempted to read some Pride and Prejudice since I had thought that it might be better reading something that wasn't new and wasn't something that I felt I should remember, but didn't. I thought it would read easy because I do remember it. But I couldn't get through more than the first chapter so far, and even that came slowly, and it almost seemed like it was harder with the language, maybe cognitively speaking. Of course that was a bit of a downer and made me feel dumb, so that probably didn't help my mood.

But then I switched to a different book that I've been wanting to feel comfortable reading... I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough" by Brené Brown. Do you remember me going nuts over Brené Brown some time ago?? I've only actually read one of her books- Daring Greatly- but I've felt for awhile that the title of this other book speaks rather perfectly to me. Anyway, I finally started this book, after the Pride and Prejudice attempt, and succeeded in reading a lot more than I expected.

The first chapter is called "Understanding Shame" and I didn't get through the whole thing, but it also didn't really make me feel much better, since I kinda think shame is my biggest issue with my depression. Of course a big part of this book is "shame resilience" so I need to get through a lot more of it to get to the point of feeling better.

But then, reading this book is also what got me more interested in writing a blog post. I have some things from it I want to share. Brené talks about wanting to develop a definition of shame as a first goal.

"When I asked the research participants to define shame for me, they either gave me their personal definition or they shared an experience as an example. Here are some of their definitions:

• Shame is that feeling in the pit of your stomach that is dark and hurts like hell. You can't talk about it and can't articulate how bad it feels because then everyone would know your 'dirty little secret.'
• Shame is being rejected.
• You work hard to show the world what it wants to see. Shame happens when your mask is pulled off and the unlikable parts of you are seen. It feels unbearable to be seen.
• Shame is feeling like an outsider - not belonging.
• Shame is hating yourself and understanding why other people hate you too.
• I think it's about self-loathing.
• Shame is like a prison. But a prison that you deserve to be in because something's wrong with you.
• Shame is being exposed - the flawed parts of yourself that you want to hide from everyone are revealed. You want to hide or die."

Then she talks about compiling the definitions and coming up with a conceptual definition:

  

"Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging."

For me, ever since I discovered that Nasser and I were pregnant with RG, out of wedlock, I felt immense shame. Telling every single person that I had to tell, I felt overwhelming shame. Even now, when someone who doesn't know our history finds out that we were already pregnant when we got married, I still feel shame. Even though I don't wish to, don't truly feel that I deserve to, don't think worse of other people who have sex before marriage, don't think worse of other people who get pregnant before marriage. And yet it's still fucking there.

I feel shame about my depression and yet I still write about it and share openly with others, in general, because I think that there shouldn't be shame when it comes to mental illness. I was getting bloodwork yesterday, as prescribed from the ECT doctor, and the technician asked if I'm an employee for Boulder Community (because the paperwork said Boulder Community Hospital due to the association the ECT facility has with the hospital) and I said no, and then I honestly explained how actually I'm going through electro-convulsive therapy right now and they are located in the hospital. My honesty, unfortunately, simply led to some awkwardness with the tech.

Ugh, it's hard to not feel shame about depression when there still feels like a big sense of not belonging in many groups. Like I try to be open and honest about it, but it often feels like a fair number of people are less interested in talking with me because of that. Or at least a lot of people still feel uncomfortable talking about mental illness, and maybe I force people into those conversations more than they'd like because it's currently the overwhelming thing in my life. Really though, it feels like I can't win.

So, back to what we started off talking about, the medication changes and the exercise experiment... if these things don't really make a big difference for me, then we're probably going to be trying a 2-3 ECT treatment burst, kinda to jumpstart the getting better thing again. And this whole idea scares me. The idea of going through another mini-acute phase feels like a big setback, and it kinda feels like failure on my part (because I tend to put everything on my shoulders). And it also just feels like we're never going to be done with ECT. And as much as I feel like I have gotten significantly better with ECT, I do really want to be done.

Man, I kinda just want to scream out, I'M SO FUCKING FRUSTRATED WITH DEPRESSION! IT SUCKS SO FUCKING MUCH AND I AM SO FUCKING DONE! Because it's true.

I read an article, well most of an article, yesterday about a woman, a mother, and how much it sucks to have a mother who suffers from a severe mental illness and won't treat it. Her mother has schizoaffective disorder, which basically means she has symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It was difficult to get through this article, because it made me wonder if this is how my kids will think of me someday. Like what if eventually I do give up on treatment because after however many years it just doesn't work for me? Because I truly am treatment-resistant? It just made me feel incredibly sad and helpless and hopeless.

I suppose I'm not doing very much in this blog post to give hope to others, and I apologize for that. It's my own lack of hope speaking up really loudly. And I know I need to move past that lack of hope in myself and just create it again, right? So maybe we'll write some things.

Hope statements:

• Despite all the treatment attempts and failures, my doctors continue to work at solving and fixing this depression I have. They have not given up yet.
• As frustrating as each depressive episode/rut/dip is, I'm still here and still fighting. I've gotten through so much already, I can keep fighting.
• As much as the depression can make me feel a lot of hatred towards myself, my husband and children continue to love me, as do so many wonderful, supportive people in my life.
• Nasser, especially, has seen the worst of me, many, many times, and yet, continues to love me so, so much. Despite how difficult and stressful my depression and treatment make life for him, he continues to do everything he can to help me when I'm down.
• My willingness to talk about my mental health and share openly my experiences is a sign of my strength. It's a sign that I do have more shame resilience than I realize about my depression, and it's something that I can continue to share about and hopefully give others some strength and willingness to share.

Not a lot of hope statements, but some at least.

My nurse at treatment on Monday wrote a beautiful note for me that I'm going to share now.

I'm going to keep working on it, and although I haven't felt a significant "I'm better" feeling from the exercise I've managed to do the last 3 days, I need to give myself some credit for having done exercise the last 3 days, despite feeling like crap. I went ahead and did it anyway. 

One more book I wanted to share with you. I finished reading this one this morning, although I had read most of it during the spreading treatments out phase between acute and maintenance, so I don't, unfortunately, remember much of the rest of it. I will have to reread it for sure. It's a book sent to me at the beginning of ECT by my sister-in-law, called The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman.

It's a book that's less story, and more reflections and art, which may be better for me right now with my current brain state. Here are a couple sample pages, from near the beginning:

May be a sooner reread than not. Maybe mixed with Brené Brown and Jane Austen, and exercise, maybe this will all help me in the long run. 

All I can do is try, over, and over, and over again, as needed.