hello my friends

Back at therapy. Been doing this since my twenties. Does anyone else get therapy fatigue? Back with my Psychiatrist.

I’ve lost myself. I always blame the medication. Because I just really want to cry. I have tears inside. I am drowning inside me.

With the antidepressants, I struggle to feel. So we’re trying to figure out what’s next.

Being more empathic than your typical person is exhausting. Even without the ability right now to feel my own, and at my current level of medication I should not care about anyone around me. But I do. My heart is breaking everywhere and all the time. But I have no internal emotional life. I am hard and soft at the same time.

This is not profound. But it is difficult.

But, I took a leave from work in November. Doctors are telling me that I have all the signs of severe physical exhaustion, stress, my brain is wounded and tired. I have had memory loss, frequent tension headaches, and fatigue. I thought three months should help me find myself again.

This was naïve.

What I discovered is that I am doing for others everywhere and myself nowhere.

There are needs everywhere in my life. And that is perfectly alright. As we’ve been given a lot to handle; my own depression, anxiety and sobriety, one child’s mental illnesses, my mother’s dementia and kidney failure, buying our business which we brought back to thriving, my best friend and sister Holly’s murder, my mother’s death five months later, and the stress surrounding the murder and taking care of Holly’s children.

I lost myself. Eventually the body, brain and heart called it quits. Sputters to a stop. Demands a time out. Shuts down.

I am happy to not be depressed. Not right now, thankfully. But I do not control my depression. I only know how to keep it at bay. It doesn’t always work. I have no magic tricks.

I am praying for some kind of relief. That one day life will ease up and I will find my passions again. For life, the writing and photography. More than today.

Today it is good enough to go to work, organize our family of seven’s appointments, show up on time for football practice pick up, keep my head down and avoid most people.

It is not that I don’t (double negative sorry) love people. I do.

I am simply not myself.