An Unwanted Companion

I have been gone for a long time.  Every since my dad passed away the holidays have been hard but this year they were even more difficult.  The week before Thanksgiving I decided it was time to ask the doctor to put me back on antidepressants after 8 years of not needing them.  It was a really difficult decision to make but I was getting to the point where I couldn't deny it anymore, I needed help.

Depression comes slowly.  At first, I begin to feel tired.   I lose my temper quicker than normal.  I can feel the anger welling up and the feeling of sinking.  I begin to feel like I can't catch my breath.  For the last year I had begun to feel like I was drowning, systematically and undoubtedly drowning.  My old companion had come.

When I was in my late teens I first met depression.  It came quickly and stayed for a long time.  I was hospitalized 2 times before I was 20.  I couldn't break through the surface and catch my breath.  I was in a unhealthy and abusive relationship.  It just feed into my depression and I began to lose myself to depression and anxiety.  I tried to commit suicide.  I couldn't see a way out and I honestly felt my friends and family would be better off without me.      

Therapy and medications began to work and after 3 years I began to feel like I was breaking the surface.  I began to breath.  I began to live again.

Depression is a thief.  It steals from you.  It took away my dignity and filled me with shame.  It stole my joy and left anger.  It took time from me and left me with gaping holes of emptiness and confusion.

Depression became my normal.  For a long time I didn't know how to live without it.  I felt lost and unsure of myself.  I wasn't who I was before it came.  I learned that I would never be who I had been again.  Depression had changed me.

Soon I learned to live my new normal and met and married my husband.  We were happy.  I became pregnant and we had our first child together.  And my old companion returned.  I soon became pregnant again and had to go off my antidepressants.  We had our daughter and moved within a month.  And I sank deeper and deeper.  Soon I found myself alone, with two children under 2, in a town where I knew no one, and a husband who had been transferred hundreds of miles away.

I became nonfunctioning.  My mom came and got me and the babies and I stayed with family until my husband had a found a house for us to live in.  We moved and I quickly found a doctor.  But I was sinking faster than she could pull me up.  I had to be hospitalized again.

I felt like a failure.  I thought I had let my husband and children down.  There was people in my life who didn't understand what I was going through and I internalized all of it.

After months of the correct medications and therapy, I broke through the surface again and began to live my life.  But just like before I wasn't the same, I was different.  I had to learn who I was all over again.

Fast forward, I was stable and under doctor supervision, was able to get off medication.  For the last 8 years I have been med free but had continued therapy off and on.  And yet here I am again.  My old companion has come to visit me again.  I am fighting to breath again.  I am struggling to not sink to the bottom.  So I have been gone.  I am trying to keep afloat and it is exhausting.

Some days are good.  I can function and am able to pull myself together enough to be around people.  Other days not so much.  I can't get out of bed let alone deal with the world.  But I still fight.  I have so much to fight for.

I have decided to refuse to allow depression to keep me in shame and isolation.  So here I am writing this, telling you my story in the belief that God is going to use my struggle.