I have suffered from depression for decades, and only in the last few years have I taken my recovery seriously. I guess a six week stay in a private hospital will do.
Staying changed me. In fact, coming home changed me. Before going to the hospital, I had this idea that I would be cured — they would get me off the anxiety medication I was addicted to; I will have electroconvulsive therapy and it will make me brand new.
oops
Although a little changed by the time I got home, I certainly wasn’t cured. I was off the anxiety meds, sure. I have endured some intense therapy, yes. But I’m still going home—same old brain, same old body. Only this time I was acutely vulnerable, and I didn’t have a team of doctors monitoring my every move and teachers honing my coping skills.
My first task was to return to the role of my mother. I had two kids under 4, and they didn’t know where I was, nor did they care. No, they wanted cheese sticks and popsicles, Mickey Mouse on TV, and about a million other things in between.
It was difficult to meet their demands after being away for so long. I struggled to meet them and myself for a while. One day, when they were both screaming and I couldn’t remember how to hold on and breathe, I started crying. I thought I was such a failure and that I had learned nothing from the hospital and that my recovery plan, which was supposed to bring me back to the real world, was a joke.
We all cried for a while, then I burst into tears. I thought, hey, this is just temporary — something I didn’t feel at home before the hospital.
When I cried before, it was all dark. He’ll get a divorce, I’ll kill myself, I’m going to get in trouble for something, I’ll lose my job, etc. I never cried, then went ahead and said, “Okay, what’s next?”
Even now if I accidentally mix up my pills or don’t get enough sleep—events that I’m bound to fret about—I can tell myself, “Okay, this is temporary. You don’t really mean these things. Try to relax a little, and You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
Maybe that’s what “normal” people do all the time, but for me it was a breakthrough! My thoughts were no longer black and white; Gray was popping up everywhere. It liberated me.
This flexibility and my new way of thinking grew and grew, paralleling my personal growth until one day I realized, “Wow, I’m resilient.”
It’s hard for me to say because I’ve always been labeled as vulnerable because of my mental health diagnosis. My brain told me to kill myself more than once. My depression tried to keep me from having a life, kept me from being a mother, and kept me from the world. I may have gone into shock, and I needed to go to the hospital, but I never gave up.
I spent six weeks away from my family, staring my demons in the face, enduring electroconvulsive therapy, but I did it.
I came home and worked. Why? Because I am tolerant. tears? transitory Bad timing? temporary
But if the bad times are temporary, so are the good times, right? No, don’t let them.
Be grateful to them. Soak them in, as if they were the sun. As if they were water. As they are what you need to survive.
Because they are. And you will survive.
For more than 20 years, Heather Loeb has experienced major depression, anxiety and a personality disorder while battling the stigma of mental health. She is the creator of Unruly Neurons (www.unrulyneurons.com), a blog dedicated to normalizing depression, and a member of State Representative Todd Hunter’s Suicide Prevention Task Force.
Mind Matters
Now more than ever we need to take care of our mental health. Guest columnist Heather Loeb discusses why and other important mental health topics in this special series.