Sad and somber

I can remember the first day it happened. It was the lingering feeling of clouds over your head but they never went away. It was the bitter loneliness and awkwardness of simply being alone. I was too young to feel this type of dramatic emotion, at least that is what I told myself. See at age 12, I use to have seizures and wake up somewhere entirely different than where I was sleeping. Everyday started being constant reminders of impending doom or this could literally be my last day seeing my children. These feelings escalated QUICKLY after someone I held dear to my heart suddenly died at age 15. Once again this proved to me that death, that sneaky son of a bitch was always looming in the shadows.

I attended his funeral and simply saw how his death made the people I loved feel. And it just awoke in me a restless, depression demon I thought I vanquished so long ago. I always hated the thought of going to sleep and just not waking up. Which intensified by these seizures making me wake up after losing the memory and time of them actually happening. Someone told me one day, “I would love to hear about your life because you’ve been through so much”. The crazy thing is, I just started to realize that myself after I start acknowledging all of this stuff really happened to me. After that somber and sad funeral that day, my mind ticked back on to sad and somber as well.

There were days I woke up, not feeling like me, just sad and somber doing my daily routines. I was literally just existing because I wasn’t living at all. My boyfriend at the time was in a full-fledged relationship with another woman, and I knew it. I just didn’t have the strength to actually care about him or her. She was at the funeral, very pregnant and looking for my attention. I just went home after the funeral, that dark cloud was lingering and it had my mind wrapped so tight. I started losing weight in an alarmingly manner of time. I went from weight 160 to 135 in under a month. What was weird is that I never noticed, other people pointed it out to me. That is probably when I started feeling as if, o my god, something is very wrong with me and I need help.

In the form of help, because I was clueless to anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. I went to regular, small-town doctors for help and kept being treated as if I was a patient with heart issues. Heart issues that I was giving to myself by way of worrying and holding how I felt buried in me. I was sent to a cardiologist in Mobile that informed me that they would be conducting some sort of dye test to check my heart. I don’t remember all the logistics to this process, but I do remember the side effect of this dye entering my body. It was warm in me, which made me feel hot and squirm on the table they had me on. I grabbed my chest in fear and the nurses rushed in. Afterwards the doctor called me into his office to tell me that they didn’t need to do anymore test, I have experienced a panic attack. He also told me that if I didn’t stop worrying like I was I would have a stroke by 30. The terror of leaving my babies straightened me out, I had a new mindset almost overnight.

New motivation, new perspective, and moving past old hang ups pushed me to change. Back then, there was no blueprint for what I was going through. There was no one around me or anyone in my family that could relate to my thoughts, so who could I tell? The medicine prescribed to me at that time, made me sleepier than I would like to be, so I stopped taking them. I resorted to the one thing that helped when I was younger, I wrote it all down. I wrote down what I did that day, what I ate, and who all I came across. Then I would go back a week later and read it. The way my mind responded to this was life changing, I felt like a new person. I felt like someone that could actually be happy one day. Because before this time happiness came to me in small burst, I could barely hang on to long enough to enjoy.

10 years later, I wish I could say I tamed the beast, the monster was relinquished and never returned. But that depression is a dirty bitch, that shows up even on your best day. This time around when that dark cloud came to linger, at its first sign I reached out to someone to talk. At the age of 42, I met someone I thought I never would need, a therapist. It is a different “thing” when you are writing your terrible life on paper and now hearing yourself speak out loud the things you have endured. How your upbringing and childhood links together how you are living your life as an adult. And how come I couldn’t see these things for myself? Why did I have to have them pinpointed out to me? All I can do is shrug at my unanswered questions and be thankful that I am here and visible to them now. I am no longer existing; I am gracefully LIVING.