(nice visual, eh?)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to wonder (fear, actually) that I might need my meds adjusted upward. Anxiety has crept in. A general cantankerousness has joined my normally happy demeanor. I’m not excited about my life. And most of all, I find myself engaging in a thought script that involves a lot of doubt about myself, my life, and my choices. All of these are big red flag type indicators that something is amiss. But I’m only now spending the time delving in. Why?

For one thing, I’d be lying if I said pride wasn’t a factor. Yes, I might be on an antidepressant, but I’m on a low dose, and have never needed anything more than that. Pretty stupid, huh?

Beyond that, I have a case of fear-based “what if”s. What if I raise the dose, and that only helps for a brief time before I start tumbling again? What if I am *gasp* irreparably broken? If so, why fight? Why not just accept? Well, there is that teensy issue that life quickly becomes not worth much if I do give in.

Finally, I realized that if I’m needing a dose-boost, perhaps that means that there are non-medication fixes that I need in my life. Okay, not “perhaps” there are, but undoubtedly, there are changes that I need to make. And the biggest change I need to make is that I must — just must — get thoughts out of my head for processing more often. I rarely write any more, and when I do, it’s not of much substance, just a quote and a quip.

So, here I am, with a brain full-to-bursting of ideas, thoughts, emotions, and writing material. Why am I not writing?

Self-censorship.

This is a big deal, one that I’ve touched upon before. Wow, how much things have changed since those days, huh? What remains true is that for me to write well, I need to allow myself the freedom to write whatever strikes me, without worry about who’s reading. Does that mean I should just journal privately? Well, no — I don’t think so. Part of the fulfilling nature of writing for me is in having feedback (even the absence of feedback is feedback)!

Crap. I realize now, I’m censoring myself even in writing about censorship. Crap, crap, crap.

Moving on (since I’m a bit stuck), I moved to my current town (and it IS a town — only 20k people give or take, and an hour+ drive to Santa Fe) in February. As a result, while I have a few “friends” those friendships are more of the acquaintance variety. And, I do have a few very close friendships I maintain remotely, but how much do I want to dump on those folks with what’s in my head? At least one of my good friends, I’ve come to almost develop a complex about how much I’ve used her ear as I’ve struggled (yes, struggled) through the last two years. Yet, just the way my mind works (truly, I am very much an extrovert in how I process information), I must get thoughts out of my head in order to make sense of them. If I just think things over, it’s as if my brain is scratched CD. I’ll move on to other thoughts, just to have my current issue grab me again. If I write thoughts down, I can swim around in them a bit, picking them up and examining them one at a time, rearranging them until they make a modicum of sense to me. I can find patterns rather than being stuck with details. Telling my thoughts as a story, the story starts to take shape. I have a somewhat cohesive (if confusing) whole rather than a million discreet bits of mental debris.

But, if I write about my husband, he has this address. If I write about my beliefs regarding religion, it feels like I alienate people whom I love dearly, but who I know are believers. And in some cases, I have people I know in real life who read, but might not have the maturity of tact when sharing my thoughts with others.

Is it time for a new blog? What does it mean to be authentically myself, complete with the ugly parts and inconsistencies, and how do I balance that with kindness and compassion?

Whatever the answer, I need to find an outlet for all of this clutter that’s in my head. It’s making me crazy.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
- Aldous Huxley

Google “IUD Depression”

So Joy told me, and so I did. And damn. Just…DAMN. I screwed up, folks. When da Man told me that the Mirena is low dose ONLY delivered locally, I believed it. I didn’t do my due dilligence. Again…I fucked up.

What?

Oh, right. May 19th — I had a Mirena IUD fitted. I loved the idea of short or no periods — and since the hormones stay “local,” I wasn’t concerned about the side effects that I know MY body gives me from hormonal B/C. Within one week, I started having weird, dark thoughts and anxiety. 11 days after getting the Mirena, I had a full-blown anxiety episode. Yes, what I found were primarily anecdotes, but they sounded exactly like what I was experiencing. I read all weekend, and finally found one document from the Canadian division of Bayer that suggested that Mirena might be a bad idea for people who’ve experienced “psychiatric episodes, especially those of a depressive nature” — to a point where the Mirena may need to be removed.

Well, well, well. Document from Bayer in hand, I went to my 2-week check-up, and requested (okay, insisted) that the thing be removed. My NP had never experienced this side effect before, and was glad I’d brought documentation. She said she’d bring this up at the next staff meeting — so that even if my side effects were rare (I was the first she’d seen), at least they’d know they’re in the universe of possibility.

Within a few days I started to feel better. At about a week, I darned near felt normal again, I thought. At 10 days, I wanted to shoot myself.

I’d been warned. Along with all the anecdotal hoo-hah about Mirena side effects were horror stories of the “Mirena Crash” — this low, low point that could occur 1-1/2 to 2 weeks post removal, in the time between the loss of the synthetic progesterone’s loss and the body’s notice to start producing on its own. Yet, still, I had (have) no idea how long this crash might last. And what if this isn’t a crash, but the hormonal changes started an avalanche of symptoms that now can’t be stopped? What if I spent a year hating mornings and wanting to strange my 3-year-old? Or ready to punch a wall when the baby just. wouldn’t. sleep?

I broached it to Mike. In reality, I wept and sobbed to Mike, making a sad, sad case that “I know I’ll be fine. I know what it is, so I can push through it.” Somehow, hearing that along with the idea that I thought my kids deserved more (and that was the brightest, sunniest of my dark thoughts), didn’t convince him. “Please,” he said. “Please go see the doctor tomorrow. Go before I leave for D.C.”

And I did. And I wonder why I waited so long. You have no idea how bad you feel until you just don’t feel bad anymore. Heck, I might even say, I FEEL GOOD.

Effexor is a real bitch to discontinue. But she’s MY bitch again. And I’m glad. At least this time, when the time comes, I know what to expect: that it will take months of slowly ramping down and a switch to other drugs before Ms. E lets me be.

But you know what? It’s still worth it. Already, I’m more myself. Cliches and all.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

One of today’s quote’s from iGoogle:

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

Treasures from unhappiness. It makes an odd sort of sense to me, especially considering how my last several weeks have gone. On the 26th of May, I began to show symptoms of anxiety and/or postpartum depression (PPD). On the 27th, I had such a difficult time concentrating, that I decided to push off the grad program from my planned June 2 start date. I mean, if I couldn’t concentrate enough to write my entrance essay, how the &^%$ did I think I’d do grad work? On the 30th, I had a full-blown panic/anxiety attack, complete with fears I’d end up rocking in a corner somewhere in an institution.

Thankfully, I have a good friend who stepped in to my cry of “HELP!” and talked me back into reality, made me promise to go see a doctor about meds for PPD, and generally helped me step away from the cliff’s edge. After we got off the phone, I was simply exhausted — but at least back into my own skin.

Within half an hour, she called back with a command. “Google ‘IUD Depression’.”

to be continued…

From the comments on Hemant’s blog:

Reflecting over these events as an adult, I have come to the conclusion that deeply religious people are similar to individuals with personality disorders in that they simply cannot attach. They have learned to mimic the motions of normal human behavior but the hamster has left the wheel.

A little timeline:

• One week ago today, I got a positive result on an early (super early, like 10 days post-ovulation) pregnancy test.
• The weekend was a bit nasty in terms of the husband and I working out unexpected emotions re: said test — even though we were TRYING.
• By Monday, I warned the husband that with my temperature shift, I was fairly sure I was going to miscarry.
• Tuesday, I miscarried.

If I hadn’t been paying attention to symptoms, I’d have never even known I’d been pregnant in the first place. Annnnyway…

I had a meeting planned with my local counselor for Monday, and the timing couldn’t have been better — after a quick (eh, okay, long) rant from me about the weekend, I told her that I didn’t want to fuss about my husband, because hell…I can’t control him. I can, on the other hand, control me. What she pointed out that she sees in me is a bit of difficulty attaching. She also mentioned that she can see some of the same in my husband, but demonstrated in different ways (qualified that, of course, she only “knows” him through my stories).

So, me being me, I read. And read. And yeah, I saw some of myself — but not as much as I would have seen, say, 10 years ago.

Back to the quote from Hemant’s place, this comment really jumped off the page at me — as you might imagine, given my background and past week. I’m not looking for one more emotional issue to blame on religion (I have enough of those!), but it does shed a little light on myself as a younger person. I honestly think it took me until my early 30s (and my first work with a counselor — see the earliest posts of this blog) for me to learn to become a genuine, authentic person. Until then, I just kept role-playing, trying desperately to read what I was “supposed to be” and to try to “be that” (often unsuccessfully).

No conclusions from this. Just thinking out loud…

Back to my hole now. At some point, I should give an update on my life, huh? Or perhaps, answer the questions Sage asked me eons ago?

Be prepared. About two weeks after the wedding, it will finally sink in, and you will wonder, Oh My God. What Have I Done? This is normal. Just be warned that it will happen.

That’s a paraphrase of some advice my mother-in-law gave me on Thanksgiving (day before the wedding). She had married my father-in-law at the end of October. It still hit her, too — even thought they have been together for seventeen years.

There’s a sense of mourning, of lost freedom, and the clunking sound of expectations falling into line with reality rather than floating up in the air with hopes. It is hard. In some respects, the shell-shock that being newly-married provides is not unlike the first weeks of parenthood. You can be warned. You can intellectually think you know what you’re in for. But nothing, nothing, nothing prepares you for the first month. Did I mention that it’s hard?

When I gave birth to my daughter, I knew that I didn’t know her. I’ve been able to watch her without preconceived notions of the person she’s becoming. In marriage, you’re hitching your future to a person who largely already is who s/he will become. The catch is that no matter how much you know, you never fully know another adult. (My father says that after 41-1/2 years of marriage, my mother still surprises him on a regular basis.) For me, the “getting to know my husband more” phase has largely involved letting go of hopes for who I thought he was — adjusting my expectations with reality. For him, it seems that he’s working it the other direction. Immediately after I moved to Santa Fe, he started to have a series of fears (some justified, mostly not) of who I might become — fears triggered by past relationships, memories of his childhood, etc. So, he’s not as good as I’d hoped he’d be. And I’m not as bad as he feared I would be (at least I hope not).

It’s growth. Growing pains suck.

~~~~~

We’re heading out of town tomorrow for the honeymoon. I’m both anticipating and dreading nine days and eight nights of getting to know my husband more.

In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. I’m hopeful that my new blog home will be up by the first of the year. Right now, I’m painting the walls and hanging pictures. I’ll move all the boxes (ie, these posts!) after we return.

A new book by one of my favorite bloggers is now available on Amazon.

Motherhood is Not for Wimps: No Answers, Just Stories

After a couple of years’ reading Liz’s stories about Mary, the baralicious pregnancy, then the wonder that is Renny-Roo, I feel like I know these folks. They help me feel sane AND make me laugh. What more could a girl want?

No time to navel-gaze today, but do take a look at Andrew Solomon’s column from today’s New York Times:

Our Great Depression

Following this model, the National Institute of Mental Health should coordinate and subsidize a national network of depression centers, ideally based at research universities with good hospitals and departments devoted to the subject.

The University of Michigan, host to the country’s first national depression center, which opened its doors last month, has been a pioneer in this regard. More than 135 experts on depression and bipolar disorder will collaborate there, about half of them psychiatrists. The center has a large clinical treatment program and a genetic database that will house samples from tens of thousands of depressed and bipolar patients. It is sponsoring social and biological research and pressing for policy initiatives related to mental illness.

I’d love to find a way to be involved.

If you’ve stopped by much at all lately, you know my blogging has dwindled down to pretty much nil — especially since I moved to Santa Fe.

While I *could* blame this on the upcoming wedding, that’s not it. I’ve realized something — I have no time to myself.

What? Wait a second, don’t you normally grouse about having no adult company ever because of working from home? Sure, that’s true. I’m alone all day. But that time is filled with other obligations: work (first and foremost), daily house-stuff, duties that require business hours, etc. If I spend time during the day contemplating my navel, a severe case of guilt ensues. So, I work, but not nearly as well/efficiently as I should. Then the afternoon arrives, and I feel a sense of relief (no more guilt at half-assed work; the day’s over!) as I go to pick up Maya. From there, I’m distracted by a 2-year-old (great distraction tool) from my own thoughts. With that particular cute distraction hanging from my legs, I strain to get some dinnerish food together while keeping her from feeling ignored — after all, she’s been away from me all day.

By the time Mike comes in, I’m fairly desperate for something. It could be some time with Maya when I don’t need to be doing something else (dinner, for instance). It could be that I need some time to myself to simply think and work out what’s going on in my head. The problem is, we (as a couple) also need time together — but I find that I’m there, but with issues. Because I haven’t taken the time to figure out what’s going on in my own head, they (the issues and thoughts I’ve ignored day after day) bubble to the surface and color every interaction we have.

——-

Added: This should have been fairly obvious to me, but hey…remember, I’m not giving myself time to introspect much these days. By the time Mike comes home, my immediate need (extrovert that I am) is for time around another adult. That trumps my need for time with myself. Since he’s an introvert (and has been around people, if not interacting with them) all day, he doesn’t necessarily need the same. On top of that, as much as his 45 minutes each way commute is a pain, it does give him some time for thinking. And I wonder why it seems like every night turns into a Conversation?

——–

This, invariably leads to a “capital-C” Conversation. You know, these are the ones where we’re supposed to be actively listening to each other and improving our relationshiop. The problem is, because I don’t get (or take) the time to get inside my own head, I’m pretty inept about explaining my needs, since I don’t even know them myself.

Maybe I only felt so emotionally healthy before moving simply because I had at least an hour or so every night/day in which I could yank thoughts out of my head and turn them into concepts. These days, I’m feeling somewhat like a feather in the wind, and it’s frustrating, because I know how I *normally* am, and how I should be.

I’ve got to find a way to make my life sustainable. This ain’t it.

(cross-posted at Maya’s Meanderings

Yes, I know — I haven’t posted in ages. I’ll start catching up before long, but this was just too good to not link.

~~~~~

Mary P. wrote a post that I wish I’d written — about parents’ attitudes toward their children and sex.

When I was a young married with a baby girl, our daughter’s father would joke that she wouldn’t be allowed to date until she was 35. Well, 30 if the prospective boyfriend was a member of the royal family. I’d laugh at his little joke, but it always annoyed me just a bit, though I wasn’t sure why. (The fact that it was feeble and repeated waaaaay too often didn’t help, but it was the actual content of the joke which bugged me.)

Not too long ago, some commenters on a blog I was visiting were speaking of the future dates of their infant girls. A couple of the daddy-types came out with the typical Big Protective Daddy comments. “The first guy to stick anything in her,” said one, “and I’ll stick something bigger into him.” (Charming, no?)

Here’s a thought that most parents of very small children don’t really understand:

One day, you will be the parent of an adult.

Go read the rest. Really, just go read it.

Still not wanting to? Okay, then I’ll tell you what sums it up for me:

Okay, now we’re coming to the crux of this post. Why did that stupid joke, why do those ‘protective daddy’ comments exasperate me so? Because they are based upon the assumption that females are passive recipients of sex. Females have no drives of their own, they have no sexual volition. They make no choices. If they are having sex, it’s because someone required it of them.

“My daughter couldn’t actually want to indulge with her boyfriend!” these parents wail. “It must be his idea, the filthy creep.” Well, I hope for your daughter’s sake that this isn’t true. I hope that the sex she has, happens when she’s ready, that it is joyful, respectful, mutually desired and mutually satisfying.

Just like you want for yourself.

***applause***

First: News

Nope, not mine this time — I literally mean “the news.” Jim Wallis (Sojourners) and Tony Perkins (Family Research Council) will be on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric this evening to discus the “Moral Direction of our Country.” I’m recording it, and if there’s anything worth talking (or ranting) about, you’ll see it here tomorrow. Or late tonight, since Mike’s coming in late, and I’ll want to keep myself up. Then again, I might just watch Grey’s Anatomy.

Second: Being told who you are

After knocking off one more of the seemingly endless list of wedding to-dos (finding shoes), I emailed Mike with an FYI that the ones I’d picked would be sent to the dress shop for me to try on, and buy them if I like them. He replied, You are so organized. Meanwhile, I keep looking at my to-do list for the next 3 hours and wondering how it will all get done.

Me? Organized? Oh, right. I actually *am* organized. So, how is it, that I’ve spent years playing the familial role of the flighty one who can’t be pinned down? And how is it, then, that even though I KNOW I’m capable of pulling multiple long-eared rodents out of numerous items of headwear, that I still sometimes in my head don’t see myself that way, after years of being told who I’m supposed to be (but am not)? Confused yet?

No answers here…just musing and indulging myself in some serious run-on sentences.

Now, off to cross some more things off my list that might actually pay the bills. I hate that part. That post (work/worth) is still brewing in my head. Someday, I might even get myself *organized* enough (snort) to write it.