A Beautiful Mess

Still here; still struggling. I have a lot swirling around in my head but it's too fragmented to write down. I feel like my life is too big for me at the moment and I don't know how to make it smaller.

If you want to know where I am right now, take a look at this amazing post by "music is art".

The Perfect Storm

Sometimes the universe seems to conspire against me and many different elements come together at the same time to form what seems like an unsurmountable obstacle. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I've just crawled out of a pit of despair.

It started when a chronic medical issue raised it's very ugly head and stepped into the spotlight. Even though this is something I've been dealing with for a long time, it can still zap my energy, obliterate my fragile self-esteem and make me feel hopeless and bitter. You couple that with two solid weeks of bad weather, a couple of power outages, 10 to 12 hour days working with ungrateful clients, not being able to ride my horse and becoming isolated from my social circles (because of the bad weather and the heavy work schedule) and you end up with a very unhappy woman. I shudder to think where I would have been without my blue happy pills, probably in a fetal position in a cellar.

My sister is bi-polar, and I have witnessed a few of her manic phases. Although I suffer from both anxiety and depression, I don't have the euphoric highs of the manic depressive, instead my anxiety manifests itself in the form of panic. The meds do a good job of dampening those tendencies, but when I get into a depressive cycle it doesn't do nearly as good a job in keeping me from sliding downward.

Normally I feel the urge to write it all down when I feel depressed, but this was different...I felt so shitty about myself I didn't think anyone would care enough to read about it and even if they did, they would be so put off by the nasty bile I was spewing they wouldn't care to come back to read any more. All I could do was work my way out of it, every day giving less weight to the negative thoughts and trying to pay attention to what my body needed (sleep, food, etc.).

So, if you're reading this, thanks for checking in on me. I'm getting there.