there we'll go again wishing something bolder, trying to push and pull inside this moment, trying to mold this life within our hands

Saturday, 09/30/17, 2:59pm

Hey there, dear blog. Here we are, it's a Saturday- the weekend, and although I had a wonderful morning with a friend (with some exercise), I am feeling a bit of the usual tension/anxiety/only slight depression this time (so far at least). I'm not sure what it is; I am actually getting a decent amount of productivity in. Got the dishwasher unloaded, reloaded, and restarted, got a load of towels washed and now currently in the dryer, with the washer restarted with some clothes. I have a couple sorta minor issues going on... some, uh, physical issues this morning that required a call to the on-call doctor at my gastroenterology place (don't really want to get into those issues with all of you though, heh), but luckily the recommendation is simply to schedule a follow-up come Monday, I accidentally rolled my ankle during the walk this morning with my friend, so that kinda sucked and cut our walk shorter, and unfortunately the ankle is still a little bothersome. I had some anxiety last night and this morning, enough so that I ended up with some nightmares last night. And I have some things to work on before the end of tomorrow regarding all my plans for next week.

See, I have to tell you all something. I had a big appointment on Thursday, with my ECT doctor, Nasser came of course, and the big news is: I am allowed to go off the 24/7 supervision requirement (!!!!!!). To me, this is a HUGE deal. I have been on 24/7 since mid-June, so about 3.5 MONTHS. That is... well... kinda a lot. I still have to be on 24/7 for treatment days, of course, and really, we are going to ease out of this rather slowly. Because as excited as I am, we want to be sure we do this carefully. I am allowed to drive again, but they recommend the first 3-4 drives be with Nasser, and I'd say, potentially even more than that. I'm definitely of the opinion that I'm going to be taking it super slow when it comes to driving with the kids, so I figure I'll be getting a lot of solo drives in before I start driving them around. But I'm allowed to bike by myself again, I'm allowed to take the bus by myself. I've been pretty stoked about this for the last few days, haha. Yesterday, I took it fairly easy. I still went to hang out with my brother-in-law for a good portion of the day while he was working from home. I ended up doing a walk/run/walk from their house, entirely by myself, which I was pretty excited about. Here's me from that run, with some fall colors in the background, plus some pumpkins growing out of someone's yard that I saw on my cool-down walk back.

My brother-in-law brought me home a good hour and a half before the kids' bus, so I definitely had a big chunk of time at home by myself. That was so incredible, I was even excited that I could get a load of laundry in. I spent a decent portion of time on the couch, relaxing, and I gave BuddyCat some much needed attention.

So I ended up sharing my last blog post on facebook, along with a little explanation of how much better I'm doing. And then yesterday, I shared about going off 24/7. I don't feel like I've shared so much about my treatment and how I'm doing on facebook, at least in awhile, but it ended up making me feel pretty good. I have my issues with facebook, for sure, but it is a nice way to be able to share big news with a lot of people. And I think this week I really got a better sense, for myself, of how much better I am doing, so it was nice to share about that, and get a rather nice bit of response from people I know. I feel stupid sometimes about it, but it does make me feel a little better, to be honest. And I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, so probably not something to feel stupid about, but rather normal.

Yesterday, while I was at my brother-in-law's house (well, really sister and brother-in-law's house of course, but lately since I've been hanging out with just him there during the days using him as my 24/7 person, I've been referring to it as just his house) I ended up drafting up a bit of a schedule for next week. I don't know if I've mentioned in any other posts, but since Nasser had to go back to work, like a month and a half ago - ish (?), he's been writing up a very detailed schedule for the week to email out to all the involved 24/7 people. He would always email it out Sunday to make sure that everything worked for everyone. So now, I'm trying to come up with the schedule mostly on my own, taking on some of that independence I've been looking forward to. I'm still going to get plenty of help from Nasser to finalize everything, but I really need to do this since I still need to get plenty of people time during the week, I still need plenty of rides until I'm actually driving myself and until I feel comfortable driving the kids, and I still need 24/7 support on treatment days, like I said before. The other thing is, I think I need to have a reasonable schedule for the routine aspect of things. Like I probably need more of for the weekend, like I've said in the past. Unfortunately creating this schedule for next week, while being a good thing, did, possibly, cause some of the anxiety I've been feeling. Sigh.

Let's be done here for today, and I'll finish with some of the amazing pictures from the time I spent this morning with my friend. There was this crazy fog over Boulder that we had a great view of, and we both couldn't get enough pictures of it. :)

I think this next one is my favorite: with the lake + fog + foothills + some snow on the further peaks.

It's fall!!!!

...with some variety in colors!

We had brunch at this awesome restaurant that provides blankets for their outdoor seating!!

I used to think there is no future left at all

Sunday, 09/10/17, 11:57am, 4:44pm

Did you know that today is World Suicide Prevention Day? There's a decent chance you didn't. It's not as recognized as many other days throughout the year, thanks to mental illness being brushed to the side so often. And thanks to the overwhelming stigma when it comes to mental illness. But that page I linked to is very worth reading, especially if you've ever thought that you have no idea what to do to help someone who might be suicidal. Their theme this year, "Take a minute, change a life" is spot on in my opinion, as someone who has dealt with these feelings at multiple points in her life.

This weekend was... tough for me again. Even though I just had treatment last Wednesday. Although we did some looking through Daylio, the daily app I use to track my mood. It seems, that at least this summer, since I started using the app more regularly, I don't do as well on the weekends, for some reason. We're thinking it's probably most to do with the fact that we have less routine on the weekends, and I probably do better with more routine. So I could probably figure out a way to add more routine into the weekends; I was talking today with my sisters about adding more exercise into my life as well, but that could be an easy routine thing to add to the weekends. Maybe a yoga dvd or the exercise bike, if I'm still under 24/7 supervision requirement and can't leave the house. Although... Nasser found out on Friday from some of the ECT people that we could potentially start relaxing some of the 24/7 stuff. It's not much, but little things, like I could stay in the house by myself while Nasser takes the boys to the park, assuming he thinks I'm doing well enough in that current situation. I still can't drive of course, but this is still a big stuff forward. But the exercise stuff is definitely something I need to think about incorporating into my life more. I've been walking more, mostly with my mom, some with my brother-in-law, but I'm thinking I need to get more in, get closer to the level of activity I was at some time ago. I certainly haven't ran in a long time, there was no possibility of a triathlon this summer, and I'd definitely like to get back to that at some point again. Bike-riding, at some point, would be good, so maybe getting on the exercise bike more regularly right now would be good so that I'm more ready for the real thing when I do go off the 24/7 thing. I know that exercise helps me, a lot, so I just need to work on getting it more into my life again.

So what I haven't mentioned is what the next treatment gap is going to be. The last one was 9 days, and I had wondered about that and thought that we'd have to do less this time around. The doctor noted my bad days, but noted that I had an upswing again, still before treatment, and was pleased to see that. So we decided to schedule 2 possibilities again, but this time 9 days and 12 days, so we've got one scheduled for this coming Friday and one the following Monday. So I may end up skipping a week. But we'll see, of course. I had these not so great 2 days, but this week may be better again.

I hope.

I dunno that I really have anything else to talk about. Short post for today. I'll finish with a picture of Nasser and me on the merry-go-round on Friday night at the amusement park we were at- it was for a private work party for the company my sister, brother, and brother-in-law work at.

on a stormy sea of moving emotion, tossed about, I'm like a ship on the ocean, I set a course for winds of fortune

Sunday, 08/21/16, 3:44pm

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.