Weekend over and back to work today– it’s going to be a busy one. Lots on the agenda at work and at home.  I leave for a work retreat over night Thursday night so that will be fun.   It was a good weekend,  spent some time outside pulled out the patio furniture – maybe a little early but seeing it makes me feel better.  Saturday was sunny and I spent most of the day cleaning out gardens picking up sticks.  Sunday cleaning up inside and putzing around, and had a nap, on the couch like a cat in the sun.  Time with friends, time with family, time with husband, went to church,  all the way it should be.

I was a little low this weekend. I haven’t been sleeping so I know that means watch out for the sadness incase it rolls in like a sudden fog off the water.    It did.   I turned my attention to praising God and ignoring the negative and repeating the positive.  Did the sadness just disappear, no,  I felt it, I just tried to work through it. Cleaned up stuff, did laundry, tried to take my mind off of it. In the long run I did ok. It’s just hanging on. Its Monday and I had another night of interrupted sleep.  I am back to a stepped up workout routine so we shall see if that helps.  I did 5 workouts last week and it didn’t help much, surely it will this week.

I prayed tonight with my Pastor his wife and my husband. It was a wonderful prayer time. God was with us and it was an evening of honesty and prayers of thanks.   It is a real blessing to sit with your best friends hold hands and pray.

An author; whose books we 4 have read, son, committed suicide. I didn’t know the boy but it strikes hard at your heart, only 27, good christian family – no drug abuse,  just died by his own hand.  It strikes hard at someone who suffers from depression.  A depression sufferer understands that the pain and anguish of depression that never leaves you.   Some days its better, some days its anguish.   It is a companion that never leaves your side. It is at the ready, as tight as your shadow.
In discussing things last night I don’t think some of them understood how when you are good you are never what you were, and when you are down you can never effectively communicate how dark and lost you are.   I was good last night but there were 5 of us praying I was #4 my depression #5.   Its like watching students in the hallway at school- they always have a knapsack on their back – mine is the weight of depression.

In the course of the evening, after I got home, I came clean about some of the things I had encountered over the past two years with my husband.  I hadn’t really told him that there were times that I thought about suicide, or the extent that I punished myself with not eating and belittled myself when I was down and couldn’t “pull up my boot straps” and get on with it.  I had told him that I had seen the line of suicide – and I did, I never thought how.   In truth; I did not think how to do it, but the consideration that death is a way to end the anguish  and how the line more encircled me instead of  just standing in front of me was true.  It is frightening today to think how far gone I was and how my husband, unbeknownst to him, saved my life one evening when I was alone in the dark.  Today it seems like a fantastical dream, but when I read my journal from those days, they reveal a death of spirit, and cornering of darkness, and a lost frightened girl.

The depression is the same today as yesterday, so how can it be different. It’s not drugs, it all goes back to one afternoon not long ago, laying on a couch looking at the clouds going by a window thinking I could have this for the rest of my life. I have harped on this before, but I have a strange peace from it and it has held on ever since then. The desperation of the illness seems to lessen. It has made it a part of my life. As I go through each wave the next down isn’t a surprise. I am not thinking on every up swing – “ok feeling good this is it”, only to be disappointed when the next down turn arrives. The second thing that seems to have changed for me is the words I read in the bible, Jesus always says when he arrives anywhere or an angel says when they are delivering a message in the bible, “don’t be afraid” Those words are said 380 times. You would think that we would be able to rely on those words. The dips I have had this week I have been telling myself “do not be afraid, and my trust in God”  seems to have increased so as the devil slithers around me and wants to strike fear in me I have not been afraid cause God is in control, Lord knows I am not. I maybe have come to terms with the fact that I have loss control of my mushy mind and set my expectations lower. Acceptance seems to have made a difference – for now.
Next once I get the specialist report, and decide my next drug plan, it is my plan to get off some of the more harmful drugs and keep on ones that are a little more – body friendly. Messing with them is never a good idea but I want to feel more like me and be able to cry at a good movie, love my husband a little more fully, and not feel the good feelings be pushed down with the bad feelings. First the doctor has to come through for me!! If I ever see that report.

till next time………………..