Paradox

Depression doesn’t have a rhyme or reason. Depression knocks at the door whenever it chooses. It might be the middle of the night, it might be in the middle of dinner or possibly in the middle of vacation.

Anxiety approaches a bit more casually, slowly intertwining itself in the doings of your everyday life until it feels like it has you gasping to breathe. In the middle of the night you wake up heart pounding, sweat on your brow in the midst of monsters surrounding you in the dark.

You consider the plan, how much more can you take? How many more sleepless nights can you endure? You stand staring in the dark at what, in your mind, could be the last night you wake with anxiety.

You wander through the room, searching for the one thing that can get you through the panic. Then suddenly you stop mid step to realize there are no walls, you have been wandering for hours in the dark. You search for the light switch only to find more panic from the darkness. It seems darker than when you woke. You stumble and slowly fall. You never hit the ground, you continue to fall and as you spin you realize that the darkness has mixed with colors. The colors that make you feel. Colors that give you emotion, empathy and happiness. At that moment the anxiety has been suppressed along with the depression and you feel at ease, calm and your body is cool.

You awake to find the sunshine beaming in through the dirty window of the hospital room. The depression returns quickly, while the anxiety takes its time to re enter your life and panic ensues.

Lemons

Life doesn’t ever give you lemons. Life gives you what you deserve. Life gives you what you created. It gives you either chaos or happiness. It gives you sadness and uncontrolled behavior. If you don’t have control of yourself within your life, your life will never be happy, it will never be good, it will always be out of control.

You’ll find yourself always upset. You’ll find yourself looking at others with anger. You’ll find yourself demonizing others when in fact it’s your life that has been out of control for so long.

Instead of demonizing others and looking down on others and blaming others for what is going on in your life and how you feel, you need to look in the mirror. You need to make a list and determine what it is that you’ve done in your life to create this chaotic uncontrolled life that you’re living.

What can you do right now to make a change in your life? To make today better. What is one thing that will change what is going on in your life?

Do you need new friends? Do you need to stop doing drugs? Do you need to clean up what’s going on in your life by getting rid of some people, some things, a job? Sometimes we fill our lives with people who we think are our friends. In reality those people are just markers in your life. They just mark a time, a place, a season. They mark when everything was not as cohesive in your life as you would have liked it to be. 

When you have friends in your life who pretend to be friends. Who don’t really want to be there for you, but say they’ll be there for you, that can cause a lot of strife. It can cause a lot of depression. It can cause a lot of anxiety, because when you need someone to be there and you don’t have anybody who will be there it can cause thoughts that you really shouldn’t be thinking.

So think about what it is that’s in your life that’s causing you to have chaos. Write down what’s causing the chaos. Whether it be people, relationships, stuff that you have in your house, a job that makes you feel belittled or it could be a number of other things. Then decide what you can get rid of. Decide what it is that causes the worst chaos, the worst feelings, the feelings that make you feel like you need to make lemonade out of lemons.

Remember when you say, if life gives you lemons make lemonade, you grew those lemons yourself. And by making lemonade you’re going to dissolve some of the things that are in your life.

Life can be happy. Life can be fun, it can be filled with great people who love you, it can be filled with wonderful things that create a sense of calm. So take a moment and figure out what makes you happy. Figure out what makes you sad and get rid of those things.

I’ve had my moments

I’ve had my moments in life. It’s been a crazed road paved out of tiny pebbles that slowly wash away with the rain leaving a muddy mess to only be repaved again and again.

Just when you think your dad is your dad, turns out he’s not your biological dad at all. After 14 years of people saying, “Wow, you look like your dad.” I found out that he wasn’t my biological dad. My early life started out with 14 years of lies from my entire family.

The way I found out that he wasn’t my dad was just a fluke. My best friend and I were snooping in my moms closet only to find my hospital birth certificate. From what I recall after seeing the paper, I thought, “Who is James Lindsey McGowan?” I was very confused. I didn’t ask my mom about it for some time. I don’t know exactly how it came out to my mom, but it did and she wasn’t happy. She was mad at me for snooping. It wasn’t until two years later, when my mom and dad divorced and my maternal grandfather passed away that my mom offered to help me find my biological dad and then I was informed of the story of the beginning of my life.

Let’s just say in those days, if you got pregnant, you got married. Even if the other parent was “from the wrong side of the tracks”. After about a year of being married and a short time after I was born, my dad was basically banished from my life. My maternal grandparents decided that he wasn’t good enough and they wouldn’t let him see me anymore.

When I was two my mom had remarried and this is the man I called dad. He adopted me when I was two. He was pretty good to me, he treated me like his own.

Not long after my mom started looking for my biological dad she found him and a meeting was planned. We met at the Peppermill Restaurant in Sacramento, California. It was nerve wracking, this is when I started to feel that crazed anxiety, the inability to focus on what was really happening. As we sat there, he told me about his wife and my half sister. He also pulled a picture out of his wallet. The picture was tattered and frayed and had been in his wallet many years. This was a picture of me in a light pink dress when I was about 8 months old. He told me that he carried this picture with him all these years and never stopped thinking about me. It was a heartfelt moment, one that I will never forget.

In those moments I felt so many emotions, but the one emotion that stayed with me was that anxiety, which turned to panic. It was as if it had been triggered by this moment. It makes me wonder if that moment had never happened would I today have anxiety and panic disorder. Or was it the next moment in my life that caused the anxiety and panic disorder to stay with me?

I’ve had my moments and this moment was one that sticks with me the most. This moment is the one that has kept me from committing suicide. The moment after my parents divorced and I met my biological dad, the moment I came home to find my dad, the one who raised me, on the ground, in the garage, unresponsive with a noose around his neck. The rafter had broken from his weight. He wasn’t dead, he was breathing, but I was scared to death. In that moment I couldn’t think, I was panicked, I was 16 going on 17 and my life had been turned upside down. In that year my parents divorced, my grandfather died, I met my biological dad and my real dad tried to commit suicide. Life changed from this moment. Nothing was the same ever again.

As depressed and suicidal as I have been at times, this is the moment that keeps me from suicide. I can’t put my kids through this. It is scary, it is sad and no matter how depressed I get and how stressed I feel from life or how many times I’ve sat on the bathroom floor crying with every prescription I have ready to take them all, I just can’t put them though that. Life can be very sad, life can be scary, life can be tumultuous, but life changes daily and if I end it now, my kids life would never be the same.

I have many more days to live, to laugh, to cry and to be a mom and wife. And laugh is what I hope to be doing the most.

This is the first in a series of three blogs about anxiety, depression, and coping mechanisms. Please if you feel suicidal call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255. Feel free to email me if you need to talk. Call a friend. But please get some help, there are people who love you and need you.