I am a slacker.  I freely admit that.  I do not wear the slacker badge proudly, but I do wear it.  

I think my slacking ways started when I was a kid and got significantly worse when the depression started.  I was a slacker in school, have been known to be a slacker at work, and am most definitely am a slacker now.

As a kid I was always one of those kids that was very smart, but “never worked to my potential”.  I am sure I was a source of extreme frustration to my teachers and parents. If it was not something I was truly interested in, following the path of least resistance (just plain not doing anything in most cases) was what I would choose to do.

I read books at recess instead of playing with the other kids.  Keeping my clothes picked up was too much of a bother, it was so much easier to just throw them in the bottom of my closet, or under my bed.  Once I reached a point in school where home work was assigned, it just seemed easier to me to not bother with it.  My parents gave me very few chores when I was growing up, and very often I resisted greatly when it came time to do them.  I was well on my way to being a professional slacker early on in my life.

In high school I would read what I wanted to in class, rarely participated in class discussions, and very often slept my way through the class.  In literature class, we would usually be given our text books on the first day of school.  When I would get home from school that day, I would read every story in the literature book, and then for the rest of the year pay absolutely no attention to the class.  I liked the stories, it was too much work to dissect them.  


Choosing the path of least resistance always seemed like a good idea at the time, but most of the time it did not work out to my benefit.  Often I would just agree with what someone wanted to do, because it seemed easier to do that than actually speak up with an opinion I might have to defend.  Or I would be silent and let the choices be made for me.  


My slacker way of taking the path of least resistance, led to two failed marriages, an inability to hold on to a job for a long period of time, and in me not really having my own voice.  Not having my own voice meant that I was very often frustrated with the people in my life.  For the most part the fault was with me not them, after all, I was the one who was choosing not to speak up for myself.  


When I developed severe depression I lost much of my motivation to do anything.  As a life long slacker already, to lose what motivation that I did have turned me into a fixture on the couch or in my bed.  There was very little I managed to accomplish on a daily basis, and my family had to pick up the slack.  The path of least resistance often became me going to bed and putting the covers over my head.  I totally did not have to deal with anything that way.  That was ultimate slacking.  


Now that I have been in treatment for my depression for a few months now, I am getting some of my motivation back.  I also realized that it was not healthy for me to go through life without my own voice and letting people make decisions for me.  


The problem is, I have found it really hard to put aside the life long habit of slacking.  In many ways taking the path of least resistance still appeals to me, even though it is very unhealthy (mentally and physically) for me.  I have found that at this time in my life that I want my own voice, and I need my own voice.  It really has become time for me to own up to being a slacker and then become very serious about unslacking myself.  


I am not really sure how to go about this.  I think what I should do is sort of adopt the approach I have been using to have a more positive mental attitude.  Every day I will pick one thing to do around the house that I normally would avoid because it was too much trouble to do.  Right now one thing is best, I tend to get overwhelmed and do nothing when I put too many things in front of me to accomplish.  I will continue doing this every day, until the habit of being productive replaces the habit of being a slacker.  I figure by then, I will be in such of habit of getting off my butt and doing something that I won’t even consider it a chore anymore.  


The other thing I need to do to unslack myself is to find my own voice.  I need to get in the habit of being able to voice my opinion with other people so I am not just carried along, like a seed in the wind, doing what everyone else wants to do.  I need to learn how to speak up for myself and set boundaries with the people in my life.  I think practicing this will be a benefit.  Taking each situation and person as they come along and dealing with them in a one on one basis, clearly but not rudely establishing new ground rules for how I would like to people to interact with me. 

So, yeah I am a slacker. I do not wear the slacker badge proudly, but I do wear it.  I really want to be able to put the slacker badge aside, and be able to wear the self motivated badge with pride.  

One of my biggest sources of anxiety has been rooted in a feeling of never being satisfied with what I have or what I can do or what I have done.  I did not feel any personal worth, because I always felt as if I was lacking something.  Something about my personality, or character, or even sometimes a material thing.

I think this lack of satisfaction also led to a very negative internal dialogue.  I was always pointing out to myself what I was lacking.  Or telling myself the reason something did not work out the way I had planned was because I could not manage to do it properly.  I hate to admit this, but I also was jealous of what other people had that I did not.  My head was just so full of all this negative stuff that stemmed from not being satisfied.


This lack of satisfaction led to me develop a victim mentality.  Why did I get asthma at thirty-seven?  Why did I have to develop diabetes.  Why are they doing better than us financially, we work just as hard as they do?  I was constantly asking “Why me?”.  I became convinced that some cosmic force was out to get me.  I often said things were “not fair”.  I complained that life was too hard, and focused on my illnesses instead of positive things.  


Because I could not get satisfaction out of anything, I became very angry and resentful.  I would sit and dwell on all my perceived short comings, material and personal.  The more I did this, the more foul my mood would become.  I could go from being very quiet to a raving, yelling, not nice person in a second.  I am embarrassed to recall all those poor innocent people (doctors, service people on the phone, my husband….) I yelled at when I was in such a bad frame of mind.


At some point in the last few months my internal dialogue began to change.  I cannot say exactly when that happened, or even why it happened.  I do suspect some of it has to do with the counseling I have been getting since May, and also my depression and anxiety medications.  Maybe it has to do with the “home work” my counselor gave me, to find something positive in every situation.  I guess the why is not as important as the fact that it is changing. 

What has happened is that, probably for the first time in my life, I am satisfied.  With that satisfaction I have let go of much of my anger, and am not jealous of what other people have.  In the grand scheme of things, the things that satisfy me are, for the most part, not really all that important but at the same time they are. 

I have found satisfaction in being able to get dressed before noon, or if I can make a nice meal for my family.  Having a conversation with my daughter, or getting my blog done for the day.  I am satisfied when I have a good mental health day, or if I can keep from freaking out during a stressful situation.  

Bad days are not really all that bad anymore, because I can find something about that day to be satisfied with. I do not look at things as being fair or unfair anymore.  I do not sit around and ask “Why me?”  I do not look at what other people have and wonder why they have it better than I do.  


This does not mean I am this happy and perky person everyday.  It means I am satisfied.  My internal dialogue is one that does not put me down, or tell me that I am not adequate.  Instead it tells me that I did a good job, or that I did accomplish something.  It leaves me with a pleasant feeling at the end of the day. 



I enjoy the measure of peace that being satisfied has given me.  I feel less stressed.  I feel better about myself.  I enjoy being around other people more than I used to.  It is like my soul is quieter, and calmer and not as bone weary as it was when I tried to kill myself.


Being satisfied does not mean that life will not be hard at times, nor does it mean that I will always be in a good mood.  It really just means a peacefulness that goes all the way through me, fills me up, and flows into my soul.  It gives me an inner strength and confidence, that I have lacked for most of my life.  It just plain feels good to be satisfied.

A few months ago, I announced my son’s upcoming wedding.  The date of his wedding changed several times, and finally he and his fiance decided on a date in March.  

Due to my anxiety disorder, the only way I could fly out to where the wedding was going to be was to be doped up on stronger anti-anxiety medications than I currently take.  Although I was looking forward to going to the wedding, I really did not want to have to be doped up for it.  I thought that would make it so I would not be able to enjoy the festivities as much as I wanted to.  I shared this with my mother, and we had decided to drive across country to the wedding so that I could go without being medicated and so that my Grandmother could also attend.  It was a trip that I was looking forward to for many reasons.

While he and I have had some difficulties over the last couple of years, I really love him and it was important to me to be able to share my son’s special day with him.  I thought he wanted me there as well. 

While I was in the hospital this last time, I got a text message from my son.  He was visiting his future in-laws for the Holidays.  It seems he and his fiance had decided to go ahead and get married on Christmas Eve.  The reasoning I got was so that members of her family, who could not afford to attend the wedding in March, would be able to see her get married.  I was very upset.  Once again, I felt that my son was cutting me out of a portion of his life, a portion that I thought he had wanted to share with me.  

I also wondered why it was so important to include her family in the wedding, but to leave his own family out of things.  I thought there could have been a way to include at least some of the family members from each of them.  

My son and his fiance also posted something on their face book pages about getting married on Christmas Eve.  I thought that meant they had no problem with people knowing what they were going to be doing.  I was wrong.

After my son told me about his plans to get married on Christmas Eve, I called my mother.  I gave her an update on how I was feeling and told her about what my son had said to me about getting married on Christmas Eve.  I also told her that I was hurt by that, because I had really been looking forward to seeing him get married.  

It seems after I talked to my mother, she texted my son and gave him her opinion about rushing into the marriage and how his family wanted to be there as well.  The next thing I know, I get a text message from my son that was full of obscenities and telling me that I should not have “run my mouth” to my mother.  I never would have thought that my son would talk to me the way he did in that text message.  He did apologize later, because my mother told him that he should not have spoken to me that way.

From there, things went further down hill.  He told his fiance that his family did not want him to be happy, and we did not want him part of the family.  I have no idea where he would have gotten that impression.  He has spent the last year and a half, cutting his family out of his life, and we have spent the last year and a half trying to be a part of his life.  As for not wanting him to be happy, we love him, of course we want him to be happy.  

He went ahead and got married.  I have to admit that it did make me sad when I found out that he had gone ahead with the marriage without any of his own family there.  It was his choice though, he is an adult now.  If he can live with his decision to exclude his family from his life, I have no choice but to live with it as well. 

The way he has spent so much of his energy cutting me out of his life over the last year and a half has changed our relationship and not for the better.  I love that boy.  For most of his life I put him ahead of everything and everyone.  My world revolved around his world.  I thought we had a close relationship.  Now I realize that I was probably wrong about him and I having close relationship, and that I really messed up by putting him ahead of everything else the way I did.  So now, instead of being devastated, like I have been in the past, about not having him in my life, I feel at peace.

I will never stop loving him, he is my son, but if he chooses to continue to exclude me from his life, like it appears he wants to do, then I am OK with it.  I am not going to let it get to me like I have before.  I am no longer willing to put up with his disrespect just to be able to talk to him.  

I will get over being sad about being excluded from his wedding.  I will grieve and move on.  I wish things could have been different, but there is nothing I can do about it.  My hope is that he and his new wife will be happy together. 

After the whole lack of the “big moment” trauma, me and my life kept on going, and going.  There was still huge amounts of stress for me to deal with, but for the most part I kept continuing to deal with it in an appropriate manner. 


After many months of hard work and worry, it became very evident to me and my husband that we could no longer keep our house.  About two weeks before Christmas, we got the notice that our house was going into foreclosure.  Wow!  How Horrible!  Except the reality was that it was not all that horrible. 


In the not so distant past, if I even thought about losing my house I would have just cried and cried.  I would have spiraled down in a deep dark pit of misery.  I would not have been able to function because I would have been overwhelmed by it all. 


So when we got the news, I surprised myself with my response.  Which was me saying “OK” and “How long do we have to move out?”  I was not upset.  I did not cry.  There were no deep dark pits of misery, and I was able to function. 


How could this be?  Where was my normal freak out?  This whole feeling of actually being able to cope with something was a new and weird feeling.  It was like I was another person.  Even my husband thought it was too good to be true.  He did not verbalize this, but I could see him watching me, checking to see if he could see any signs of a freak out.  Everything was so calm. 

We were all waiting.  Waiting for the freak out that never came.  Instead of freaking out about losing my house, I just kept going and going.  I was able to put the whole situation into perspective. We had a place to go. We would own where we were going to move to, and we would not even have a house payment there.   We would need to do some work on the new house, but it would be totally ours. 


So two weeks before Christmas, we moved into our new house and said goodbye to the old one. It was as simple as that.  Well, mostly simple.  Ok, I admit it, while I did not freak out, the whole move probably pushed most of my anxiety buttons all at once.  


I was physically unable to do the work that needed to be done, and there was no way my husband and daughter could do it all themselves.  So my mother-in-law volunteered to help us out.  What a nice and generous thing for her to do.  What a sure fired way to trigger my anxiety.  


One of my many anxieties is over people touching my stuff.  I am an adult, why should I get so anxious about something as silly as someone touching my stuff?  The only thing I can think of, is when I was a teenager even though I did not use drugs or drink alcohol, my mother used to search my room.  The thing was though, she did not search it when I was away from home, but she always did it in the middle of the night.  I would wake up and I would see her with a flashlight going through my closet, or my desk or dresser drawers.  It really was a weird and almost frightening experience to wake up and see that going on.  


I did OK the first day.  The second day did not go as smoothly for me.  However, I have reached a point in my depression recovery, where I know it is in my best interest to let people know when I am having difficulties.  I told my family and my mother-in-law that I was feeling overwhelmed by the whole moving process, by having people in my home, and having people touch my things.  I told them that I believed the whole process would go much quicker and more smoothly if I stayed at the new place organizing things and not witnessing people handling my things in the old house.  


They were all very understanding and supportive, especially my mother-in-law.  Even when they would bring a load of stuff to the new place and they would catch me napping. 


That is the pattern we developed during the move.  I would work in the new house organizing what I could, napping when the sleepiness caused by my medications got too much, and trying to be as much help as I could.  


By the end of the whole process, I had a new found respect for my mother-in-law.  I also realized that there was at least one person, outside of my immediate family, that I could trust with my most intimate things.  In a way, that realization was a huge relief.  It was as if I had found someone else to share some of my burden with and they did so gladly with no expectations of anything in return.  


Now we are settled into the new place, still organizing our things.  With a lot less stress because we are not constantly worrying over whether or not we can make the house payment this month.  I have a closer relationship with my mother-in-law.  I have discovered that I can deal with one of my worst fears and not freak out.  I have been looking, but I really cannot find anything horrible about losing my house.  So I just keep on going and going.