Transparency

I have always loved those pages in Encyclopedias where you open the page up and there is the skeletal system, then you turn a clear page and there are the organs, then another page layers on the muscular system and finally you turn the last page and there is skin and hair and a person.   As I've studied genealogy I've wished often for such transparency sheets to overlay maps of the states where my ancestors lived.  So often it appears they have moved but what changed was boundary lines, new counties formed, old townships died and faded away and the relative rarely left the place in which they had settled after migration from another state.

I have often said with my blog that I wanted to share myself with you all.  To be transparent.  Who I was, where I am in my mind/spirit/life span, my financial circumstances, my talents, my lacks of talents, my hopes and my loss of dreams.  I have tried to do so without revealing personal information that might be irresponsible. But I've also wanted to share a little more.  It has actually been on my heart and mind now for a number of  months that I needed to go deeper in sharing myself, my very inner self, though you might well think I've done quite enough of that already.

I want to be transparent to you as much as I can without causing harm to others who may have intentionally or unintentionally done me damage, or revealing things that are more reflective of the character of another than myself.  It's one thing to share my failures and failings and foibles.  It's mean spirited to share those of others.  At least in a more or less public setting, I've found it especially difficult to balance the pointing out of my failures without revealing what caused the situation in the first place.



Yet it was the very fact that I have tended to share here of my personal self,  that caused my husband to say to me, when I shut down the blog, "If ever there was a time to talk about things it's now.  You might be the very help another needs."   I could only look at him with tears in my eyes and promise that I WOULD write about it but I could not do so just then.  I was beyond that point of helping another.  I had to stop and get the help I needed.  And at that moment in time, what I needed was to withdraw, lie abed as often as I could do so, and do nothing.  Not dream or think or read or write or speak.

There are great and difficult things to face in this world.  People I know and love have battled cancer.  Friends have lost husbands or children unexpectedly.  Sudden near fatal illnesses occur.  Jobs loss.   Accidents happen.   And people survive despite it all.  I have not faced those things.  What I have dealt with a good portion of my life is depression, insomnia, and anxiety.

I have been depression free for years now and I've been so without medication or anything other than an occasionally blue moment or once in a while a blue day that was a little more navy than not for over 25 years.  I have both compassion and a certain intolerance for those with depression.  Like any other thing I've found that people do genuinely struggle but some rely upon it as the excuse that sucks the bones of another dry.  Just as some who have had strokes work hard to regain all that they might of their former motor skills and others would rather sit back and do nothing and be an invalid the rest of their lives.  I've seen it all throughout my life.  I admire overcomers.  I admire people who just get on with living and I am quick to see through the sham of others who use it as an excuse to manipulate.

Well, really that has only a very little to deal with what I mean to share.  I overcame depression through counseling, drugs as needed, more counseling and prayer and sheer determination.

I  did not overcome anxiety.  It decreased but it was always there. I always had the feeling that I'd not done enough, that something which was wrong might be my fault, that a shoe was about to drop somewhere.  If there was conflict, I was certain that I was going to lose the love or respect of the person with whom I was in conflict.  I felt great stress over details in tasks/jobs I was doing.  When John and I were in our first years together he soon realized that I planned things out to such a point in my head that if we deviated from the way I'd thought we were going to a store, I panicked.  It made him angry at first.  Later, he'd explain to me how he meant to go.  Still later he'd offer me a choice.  I learned to trust him and let go of the need to plan our every step...or to hide my anxiety if I was unsure. I worked hard to be 'spontaneous'.

My need to be alone for a bit of time is tied to anxiety.  I need time to have that lack of tension that is always with me when I'm around others on a constant basis.  I need time to putter without anyone else's plans replacing my own plan.  I need downtime.   It wasn't the need to be perfect that drove me It wasn't the need to control others or to always be right.  It was just THERE.  I counted hard on my coping methods: retreat into a book, write it out in my journal, lose myself in a few hours too many of some game or other, spend a few days more than usual at home away from folks immersed in a big project and then I'd venture out, often very reluctantly, but I'd make myself go anyway and I would be okay for a good bit.

And for the most part, no one was even aware of it.  Like saying to others that I am shy and having them laugh their heads off...I am shy.  I might well be talking up a storm and making others laugh, or listening intently to others and asking pertinent questions,  but inside, I'm too well aware that this is me acting like I'm  comfortable when in fact I am not at all at ease.

I've had an especially difficult time in the last 10 months.  More than the usual amount of company in my home. Many of them strangers.  More time away from home than usual and far less time alone. Lots of schedule changes.   A lot of family stuff that was some part drama, some part tragic, most all unexpected and difficult.  I found myself sleeping less and less, sometimes no more than a couple of hours a night if that.  There were a lot of demands upon my person, and frankly a lot of damned hard physical work and pressures being pushed upon me by others who had created their own dire straits.  And I had family living with me (I do still), financial constraints that are no one's fault but just the current season which will change, and the added worry of a heartache that was engineered by someone who meant to do harm and did which created even more tensions.   I often felt I was being pulled into a dozen pieces at once.

And I had no way to cope.  No escape.  No down time.  Not enough rest.  No quiet space. I couldn't write.  I couldn't pick up a book.  I couldn't lose myself in a game.

At a family party after a particularly difficult and physically tiring week I looked at Katie and said with a shaking voice, "I'm coming out of my mind...my skin hurts..." and she took one look at me, led me to her room, handed me a prescription pill for anxiety and said "Take this NOW."  Katie had been dealing with a bi-polar anxiety disorder for than two years now.  She has done, as I did with diabetes, copious study online and discovered what medications work best and for how long, and various methods for coping.  She's been faithful to take medications her doctor provides and to return if something is not working.  I don't think she'd mind me sharing this.  In the midst of some pretty hard stuff she went through her own private hell and managed her disorder because as she told me "I've got to take care of me...How can I come through this if I don't?" The pill she gave me that day was very low dose.  Very low.

I don't take medications offered me by others not even my own family members but I took that little pill that day and I felt some minor relief within minutes.  Later that evening she came out to the house and said "You need help.  It's not normal to sleep as little as you do.  Please call your doctor."  I refused.  I was sure it was a fluke. I gave her all the excuses of how I just needed to take a little time out that when this season was done I'd be all right, if I could just get a good night's sleep I'd be fine... It wasn't.

It took a near breakdown about two weeks later to drive home the fact that I wasn't well.  I wasn't managing.  The incident was simple enough, but it caused a conflict between John and I who disagreed over the way a situation should be handled.  Katie happened to be here at that time and unusually, John brought her into the argument, something we've never done.  He told her he needed an impartial party...Well, what she had to say brought us both up short.  She wasn't 100% for my point of view nor his but she did point out that she understood what I was saying and explained to him how it tied into my personal anxiety...and she said again that I wasn't going to resolve my issues on my own and I needed to see my doctor pronto. John  tends to be a bit "You just need to get your mind off things..." sort.   And I...

I broke down and cried and said "But I feel so stupid!  I have controlled this all my life!  I ought to be able to continue to control it!"  I think that convinced John as much as Katie's words.   It wasn't the stigma of mental illness.  It was truly an ego issue.  I controlled my anxiety.  I, me.  Only I wasn't controlling it any longer.  And what was worse, was that feeling that I was sliding fast and hard down a rather muddy slope into the roiling waters of real depression, a place that I have no more desire to enter into than I do hell.  I've been there.  I've wished every single day that it would be my last. I've willed myself to go five minutes, ten, fifteen, a half hour, an hour longer.  I did not want to go back to that place.

So I called my doctor. I agreed to take a very small dose anti-anxiety medication until he could see me.  It was very small.  A dose not fit for a five year old child, he told me later.  In between the call to the doctor and the appointment time,  John and Katie watched me like a hawk and the moment I started to feel panic rise within me, that I was going to explode, one of them would send me to my room and demand I be left alone or John would whisk me out of the house and we'd walk around a store doing unnecessary looking or take long rides.

I felt better just before the doctor appointment and was sure I should cancel but my two advocates insisted I go.  We ran errands that morning, John and I, then stopped for lunch.  As we sat in the restaurant which was quiet enough, a person at a nearby table's phone began to ring.  I promise you that her phone rang repeatedly for 30 minutes.  She'd never answer but whoever called, re-called repeatedly.  I nearly came undone...Just when you think it's all a fluke, some little something like a ringing phone will send you over the edge of reason.

My doctor didn't laugh.  He didn't pooh pooh me.  He took me seriously and he listened to what I had to say.  He put me on a 'real' dose of anti-anxiety medication.  He recommended two natural remedies which are both expensive and extremely vile tasting.  He put me on progesterone to promote sleep at night.  He told me I could wean myself off the anxiety medication as time went on if I needed to take it for a length of time but to by all means take it as long as I felt necessary.  Three weeks in, I have decreased the dosage slightly.  I have slept most nights though just lately I'm finding it a bit difficult. I've taken naps daily.  When I feel myself slipping past a certain point, I go to my room.  I still can't read but I've been able to journal a little.

And today I felt I could finally write this much of a post. Not to say here I am but to say that if you suffer from anxiety and it's gotten to be too much, get help.  To ask you all to be aware of your own emotional health and mental well being.  To say that there is NO SHAME in needing time out to heal and repair and restore.  To say thank you for being patient with me.  I will be back.  Not yet.  But I will be back.