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Eight Years

August 28, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

One year ago I was closing doors behind me. I had returned to work after being on leave, had ditched some of the hard-core medication and figured life was returning to normal.

Except there’s no such thing as normal, which I now know and, I think, am better able to accept.

When life spins you around, the path ahead looks different. Even if you end up pointed in the same direction, things are not as they once were.

I thought I would just carry on as before, except that under all those layers of trying to find normal I knew it wasn’t going to work like that. And it didn’t. Instead of carrying on with my job, I quit. We sold our house and moved to another city, another province. I think maybe there was a part of me that thought it would be like sweeping the debris off the path of my past and starting anew.

But that’s not how it works.

After loving the change at first I went through a phase where I felt lost. It seemed as though I had lost not only the stuff in my past but the whole of me. And in that situation, it doesn’t matter which way on the path you’re facing. The road ahead simply looks unnavigable.

Now, though, the road is clear. Or maybe it’s my ability to see it that has improved.

So here I sit, three weeks away from being done with work again as I prepare to go on mat leave for a year. Seven weeks away from my due date with a second child I at one point thought wasn’t meant to be. And eight years from one of the most important days in my life.

Except that important day is in my past.

Eight years ago today I stood up in front of family and friends and cried as I married the man I loved.

At the time I had a very “first comes love” view of what it meant to be getting married and planning a family. We’d carry on, I imagined, simply doing the things we liked to do, eventually adding a kid or two into the mix.

But that’s not how it works.

And in a way I’m glad it’s not. Because if life really was just “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage” I think that would be awfully boring.

Today we’ve been married for eight years. And one thing is for sure – none of it has been boring.

Linked up with Pour Your Heart Out.

Filed Under: Happy things · Tagged With: family, gratitude, living life, meds

Sliding Towards Happy

March 8, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

I suppose it’s natural that after selling one’s house and quitting one’s job and moving to another city away from one’s parents (one’s main source of support) that one would eventually come to a point where things feel somewhat less than hunky dory.

Or that’s my experience, anyway.

A few weeks ago a good friend asked how the transition was going and whether it had been at all hard. “Not at all,” I told him. “I don’t feel like I’ve even looked back.”

I’m one of those people who likes change. I love new places and new things and anything that gets me away from the stagnant ordinary. I get bored way too easily.

I’m also one of those people who doesn’t like to lose what’s overly familiar and who ticks along best with a routine.

These two ways of being are not mutually exclusive. They’re also not the perfect recipe for existential equilibrium.

Throw in stubborn and a dose of high standards and I’m pretty much screwed.

Things were going really well and I hadn’t at all questioned our decision to do this. However…I mentioned that I lowered my anti-depressant dose about three weeks ago. I did that for all sorts of reasons, and in large part because I don’t want to be dependent on this medication anymore. But I am.

I blame the ramping-up period of getting on to this medication for my breakdown earlier this year. Turns out coming off is no picnic either.

I knew within a week or so that coming off wasn’t a good idea. But once you’re in the crap, you kind of don’t want to lose the withdrawal days you’ve already invested, you know? So I kept going with the lower dose, praying that it would even out and I’d find myself again.

I didn’t.

I’m now at the end of week two of being sick with this horrible cold that’s going around. I missed a bunch of work last week and found myself very glad for the excuse of illness that allowed me to stay in bed a bit more than usual. Wanting to stay in bed is never a good sign for me. But it’s one that’s so easy to ignore. What is not easy to ignore, however, is having a record-breaking fight with your husband. In a restaurant. In front of your son.

Oy.

For a minute it felt like we were right back to the horrible state we were in a couple of years ago, except this time we were in it after having made a major decision that left us in a totally new world. Totally stuck, in other words.

It was awful. This past weekend was awful.

But my husband, bless him, was able to ask me if having lowered my medication dose was perhaps not such a good idea, and I was able to rail and say No, it’s not and but I don’t want to be on it and I’m scared.

And then I upped the dose again.

It has been immediately, noticeably better. Which, frankly, pisses me off. I will resent this medication for the rest of my life, whether I ever come off it or not. (I know, not a constructive way to feel, but there you go.)

But I suppose better is good and good is better than wanting to run away into the mountains and hope nobody notices you’re gone.

So that’s where things stand. The whole lot of suck from earlier this week is gone—or temporarily beaten back, anyway—and I feel like I can cope again. And maybe when I get over being sick I’ll be able to look a little farther afield and find my happy again.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, call for back-up, depression, hope, meds, meltdown

Rainy Days and Mondays

March 4, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Well not so much rain as snow, or that’s what in the forecast anyway. Quite a lot of it apparently. We’ll see if that actually comes to pass. Given the weirdly mild winter we’ve had I don’t know whether to expect it or not.

We’ve certainly got our share of Mondays though. Things around here are full of a whole lot of suck right now, so all I ask is this:

Please stand by. I’ll be back.

Credit: Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: admissions, call for back-up, depression, meds, meltdown

Writing Dangerously

February 29, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

“Write something dangerous,” he challenged us.

It was the “fall back in love with writing” part of the session description that drew me in. I need that. Badly. So I went to the session at Blissdom.

I actually quite liked that one. Jeff Goins is a young guy—younger than I am, I’d wager—and when he first got up in front of a room full of women to talk about the love of writing I was a little nervous for him. Because he looked a little nervous. But then he got going and it was clear this was a topic he had a handle on.

He talked about how we get to the point where we lose our love of writing because we’re not writing for ourselves anymore. I totally get that. I just don’t think that’s my problem.

I’ve always written for myself. Sure, now and then I do something sponsored because, hey, we all need money, but also because writing things like that actually challenges me. I want to maintain my own voice and not turn into a commercial, because that is so not who I am, and that’s not an easy thing to do when writing about somebody else’s product or service. It’s just not.

But here’s the thing. Writing for myself is tough when there are things I can’t write about. Two or three of them, at the moment, which adds up to rather a lot when you consider how much brain space they take up.

One of them is related to work, and while I’d love to muse about taking on a new job in a new city amid all kinds of other things going on, it seems ill-advised. So that’s a no go.

A second is just a personal thing and it’s sort of related to the work thing. Every day I write post after post about this in my head, but they’re not going to appear on these pages. At least not yet.

Write something dangerous? What would that be? Both of those things would fall into that category, I think, but my filter is standing firm on those two.

Something about a personal experience, maybe? That’s almost entirely what this blog has been so far. Yelling at my baby? Been there, wrote that. Being told by my husband he felt I was abusive? Covered it. Seeing a way out in a bottle of pills? It’s already out there.

Dangerous is not my problem.

So what should I write about? How about this:

A couple of weeks ago, I lowered the dose of my anti-depressants. With the advice of my new doctor, I cut it by a quarter. I want to do more. I want to slash the dosage and perhaps literally throw that bottle of pills into a field of snow. But that’s not how it works.

So I cut it down a little bit. Staying safe. Being smart. And you know what? It’s kind of kicking my ass.

This medication is tied to me by a blanket of dependence and resentment. This was the only thing that worked but the piece of me that’s thankful for that is pushed down into a corner, buried by frustration over how little control I have over whether I keep taking it.

I’m going to have to come off it eventually. I mean, yes, I could stay on it forever, and part of me is prepared for that, but there’s a part of me that’s yelling louder. A part that’s adamant that I should find out if I can function without it. And whenever that is, I know I’m going to have to go through the horrible transition that seems to be a part of this particular medication. The transition that builds a brick wall around reality so that all I can see is the scrawled graffiti, boldly proclaiming in angry red letters that “LIFE SUCKS.”

Yes, I guess that’s dangerous. So I wrote about it.