Category Archives: Mental Illness

Sunshine Award

Posted on by
Reply

Photobucket

Look what Enguardia gave me.  She gave me a Sunshine Award.  She received one as well from bubbleboo. I love these blogging awards people give out.  I might need to create one of my own.


Positive. Creative. Inspiring.

Here are the criteria for accepting this award:
  • Put the logo on your blog or within your post (right click and save),
  • Pass the award on to 12 bloggers,
  • Link the nominees within your post,
  • Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blog.

Look what Enguardia gave me.  She gave me a Sunshine Award.  She received one as well from bubbleboo. I love these blogging awards people give out.  I might need to create one of my own.

My list of people I have given this award to are:

Conversations With Moms (Maria Melo)
Harriet
Margaret
Really?  (Mee2)
I Think It’s Interesting (asblackasobama)

Drama Overload

Posted on by
Reply

ConversationsWithMoms:Every day Conversations with a Mom Blog

I am frustrated, I mean really frustrated with my mother in law this week.  My husband and I are aware that she has some mental health issues.  She won’t admit to any, but we know based on her behavior and things that she says.  She also has a seizure disorder that has taken a turn for the worse.

Several weeks ago she was driving and had a seizure.  While having her seizure she ran into another car.  The police officers who came to the scene put her on a warning and instructed her to go to her doctor.  She did and her doctor told her no driving.  My mother in law is evaluated weekly at this point and since she keeps having seizures she keeps being told no driving.

My frustration is that my mother in law has taken all of this to the extreme, emotion wise.  I try so hard to be understanding.  I know she has a mental illness.  I try to be paitent.  I try so hard to not get irritated with her.

Last week her being overly dramatic started.  She started telling everyone who would listen she that needed to be right next to her husband (who happens to be dead).   She also started telling my husband that if her children took steps to have her driving license taken away permanently, she would do something to herself. 

I do not mean to sound harsh, or unsympathetic, because I am.  This is something she has done several times in the past.  In most cases I would say, call the authorities and have her put in the hospital for evaluation.  However, it is hard to know if she means it or if it is part of the usual drama she does to guilt her children into doing what she wants. 

What she does not realize she is doing, is putting a huge amount of stress on my husband.  I mean huge.  He loves his mother very much and it causes him a great deal of emotional pain when she acts out this way.  This morning he told me that he has decided to take a break from his mother for a while.  He said he was “just not in the right frame of mind to deal with her drama”

I think that is a wise decision on his part, but it is frustrating that his mother pushed him to that point with her acting out.  I also think it might be good for his sibling to spend more of their time taking care of her for a while.  I am frustrated that my mother in law refuses to see, or acknowledge that her behavior is not only unhealthy for her, but also for the people who love her.

To Swear Or Not Swear? That Is The Question.

Posted on by
Reply

Photobucket
There are sometimes when I come across a blog that just gives me food for thought.  When something gives me food for thought, I usually end up writing about it.  Basically, just putting my thoughts out there on paper, as if I were writing in a journal at home.  At first I thought I was not being true to my blog, when I would write about topics that did not always stick to my main theme.  Then I realized that this is my blog, and if I want to get off track sometimes then that is OK. 


I was looking over a new, to me, blog that I had read yesterday and the author, mesina, had written a post that I just found interesting and I wanted to participate in her discussion about the topic.  In her post. Thou Shalt Not Swear, she talks about “mom bloggers” and whether it was acceptable for them to swear in their blog posts.  Or at what point does a “mom blogger” swearing make you think less of them. 

She also asked a question at the end of her post,.” Do you swear on your blog or do you tend to steer clear of the swear police?”

 I personally think that looking poorly on a mom who uses swear words in their posts is an unfair double, standard. Why would it be OK for one person to use swear words in their posts but not OK for a mom to use swear words?t  A mom is no less human than someone who is not a mom.  Why should a mom who swears in her blog posts be treated differently? Using that logic, then we should say a mom blogger should not even read blog posts with swear words in them. 

For me the only time I would turn away from a post that had swear words in it, is if the swear words were taking away from the author’s point.  That just makes a blog boring for me to read. 

I think that our blogs are our space.  To do with as we please as long as we do not break the terms of service we agreed to.  If  a mom wants to use a swear word here and there or even have a profanity filled post, that is her choice.  It would not make me look at her differently.  At most it might cause me to read her post at a time when my daughter is not looking over my shoulder.

I personally do not swear much if at all in my blog posts.  I may have said shit once or twice, but it is not something I really say a lot.  My reasoning for not using more swear words in my blog, is that in real life I rarely use swear words.  I write like I talk. 

I do however read blog that uses a great deal of swear words in it. Bud, who writes WTIT: The Blog, uses the big swear word all the time in his blog.  Does that make me a bad mother for reading it?

Anyway, to sum things up, I do not look down or differently at mom bloggers who use swear words in their posts.  I do not think they are bad mothers, nor do I think they are of bad moral character.  For many of us our blogs are our place to blow off steam, be creative, and be ourselves.  Using swear words in a blog seems perfectly natural to me, if that is what you choose to do. 

If someone is offended by the fact that a mother would use swear words in her posts, then I dare say that is probably someone that would be offended by a great many things and we would be hard pressed to find something that pleased them.

Mom’s need a place to call their own too, so I say be honest, be creative, be yourself, and have fun with your blog, swear words and all.

The Great Grilled Cheese Debate

Posted on by
Reply

Photobucket

Last night my husband my husband came home from work at a decent time and decided to cook supper for us.  He chose grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.  That is one of my ultimate comfort foods.  I have not eaten that in a while, so to me it was a real treat.

When he finished cooking he even brought me my food.  Such a sweetie.  We were all in the living room, slurping our soup and munching on our sandwiches.  I am a dunker.  I always have to dunk my grilled cheese in my tomato soup.  I am dunking away, and my sandwich is almost gone.  My husband asked me if I would like another sandwich.  He also said that “it would be easy to stick another one in the oven” for me.

The oven?!  He messed with my comfort food!  I am sure his way was healthier, but that is not why he chose to “cook” the sandwiches in the oven.  He confessed that it was simply easier for him to cook them that way, than the method I use, frying pan and butter.

It was then that he committed the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich sacrilege.  He said “cooking  the sandwiches in the oven was just as acceptable as cooking them in a pan”  I was appalled and stated that what “he made was a baked cheese sandwich and not a grilled cheese sandwich”

It was at this point that “The Great Grilled Cheese Debate” began.  Each of us certain that our position is the correct one.

So my questions for you are this…Is there more than one accepted method for preparing a grilled cheese sandwich?  Is baking the cheese sandwich just as acceptable as grilling it in a pan?

Please hurry and answer these questions, I must show my husband that I am correct, as usual. 

If you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see the official poll.

Photobucket

The Isolated Woman

Posted on by
Reply

Photobucket

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated. Not too long ago those words could sum up how I felt. I felt so alone in my depression. It felt to me as if I was the only one who had those feelings. Because I felt isolated by my major depression, believing no one could understand me, I felt too ashamed to tell anyone about it. I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated. The more my major depression developed, the more I became consumed by my feeling of being isolated.  I would look at other people, and they seemed so happy.  I would wonder how they could be so happy and I was so sad.. I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated.  I felt so isolated from everyone, even myself.  I could not stand to look at myself in the mirror.  My reflection was more human contact than I could handle.  When I caught the occasional glimpse of myself in the mirror, I could not recognize the person looking back at me. That person looked beaten down, and very lonely.  I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated.  I felt boxed in by my depression.  Way back in the early days of my major depression, I would struggle against the isolation I felt.  However, after a short time I lost my will to fight what the depression was doing to me.  It surrounded me on all sides, boxing me in.  I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated.  I lived in a box.  Not in a bubble.  Or even in a room by myself.  It was a box.  Boxes are dark on the inside.  I was surrounded by the darkness that I felt was inside of me.  The box limited my movements.  It kept me from interacting with others. I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated.  I became an isolated woman, who was incapable of functioning except for the simplest of tasks and even those were difficult to accomplish.  Even when I was surrounded by people, even family members, I still felt isolated.  I was an isolated woman. 

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears. Isolated.  The day I tried to kill myself, I felt as if my box of darkness was closing in on me.  My sadness had reached a peak where something had to be done.  I chose the pills, and the insulin to try and achieve the ultimate darkness of death.  I failed.  I became even more isolated.  How do you tell the people that love you that you really did try and end your life?  I was an isolated woman.

Dark. Alone. Sadness. Tears.  I was an isolated woman….

Photobucket

My Lack of Self Esteem

Posted on by
Reply
Photobucket
I enjoy it when I find a blog post that is discussing something I have been thinking about.  That happened this morning.  Chere Michelle wrote an awesome article on self esteem called Self Esteem Why Does It Seem So Hard To Keep Hold Of.?

In it she wonders why people, women in particular have such a difficult time with maintaining a healthy amount of self esteem for themselves, as well as getting respect from others.  She indicates that the amount of respect we get from others is directly tied to the respect we give ourselves, how much self esteem we have. 
For most of my life I have lacked self esteem/self respect.  For me it is partially caused to some extent from learned behavior.  (Mom if you are reading this please know that nothing in here is meant to intentionally hurt you, it is just the truth, and I am over being angry and hurt by it)  From the time I was very little, my mother said very negative, insulting things to me.  As I child I took the things she said for truth.  I internalized what she said, and it became a running dialogue in my head.  I felt I was unworthy of love or respect. If my mother could say those things to me, then they must be true.

I went through my childhood, especially my teen years with a very negative outlook on myself.  Because of my own feelings of not being worthy, I looked for love, or what I thought was love, in the wrong places.  This got me in trouble more than once, mostly with the type of men I usually “settled” for.  
In my first marriage I settled for a man who could not/would not take care of his family.  My second marriage I settled for a man that I knew there was something “off” about him.  I would say for sure something was off about him, he broke my nose and stalked me for a while.  Plus there were the various men in between.  
My lack of self esteem has led to me not having a voice and speaking up with my opinion about something.  It has led to me being resentful because I did not like how the situation turned out, but I also had failed to speak up.  I have let friends, family and strangers walk all over me because that is what I thought I deserved.  
I am sure that on some level these people picked up on the fact that I did not love myself, that I had no self esteem.  They in turn treated me as less of a person than they were.  I do not think everyone did it intentionally, some did but not everyone.  Of course the more I was treated disrespectfully, the lower my self esteem became, the more negative my internal dialogue became.  The more negative my internal dialogue became the lower my self esteem was, and  I was treated with even more dis-respect.
I believe that this issue of no self esteem, not having a voice and negative dialogue contributed greatly to the depression I have had over the years.  Especially this last time when it became so severe. 
In my depression recovery process, I have been finding my  voice, and gaining self esteem.  It does make me sad at times that it took me until I was almost forty to even start learning that I am worthy of having self esteem, and respect from others.  I think about all the years I have wasted with that negative internal dialogue telling me what a loser I am.
However, at least I am learning those things now, and finally for the first time in my life I have a voice.  I have the next forty years to tell myself I am a good person, I am not a loser, to speak up for myself and to have a healthy amount of self esteem.  

Do you have a healthy amount of self respect? If so, have you always.  If not, what do you think is holding you back from having it?  If you have a healthy amount of self respect, what do you do to maintain it?  If you do not, what can you do to try and improve it?

Photobucket

Why Blog?

Posted on by
Reply
Photobucket
I started blogging as a way to creatively let my emotions out.  Instead of letting them build up and lead to a depressed state of mind or act inappropriately, I decided putting them out there for everyone to see would be a good idea.  So far it has worked out that way.  
As I started blogging other purposes came about. To educate people about mental illness from my perspective and for my blog to stand as a place of support, encouragement, and even friendship to others who live with mental illnesses.  Not only has that been happening, but I have been given loads of support and encouragement, even from people without a mental illness.
Something that has happened that I did not anticipate, is that the blog has become my hobby.  For so long I had put down any hobbies I had, and was not interested in taking up any new ones.  Depression does that, it takes away your desire to do those kinds of things.  I love messing with my blog, changing its style, trying to make it look better and better, writing in it, and just being as creative as I can with it.  
Those thoughts led me to a couple of questions.  Why do you blog?  Are your reasons for blogging the same as when you first started?

Internet Friendships

Posted on by
Reply

  I was catching up on my blog reading this morning and I ran across a blog post, in which the author was pondering The Nature Of Friendship .  Author Bubbleboo, wonders if internet friendships “are as valid as ‘real life’ ones?” “Can you really know someone if you have only ever met via a computer monitor?”  “Are virtual friendships real?

Her answer to all of those questions is “yes”.  I happen to agree with her.  

With the internet being such a huge part of most everyone’s lives now, I think it is natural that we create friendships with people we have never met in person.  Just like when we meet someone new in real life that we have a connection with and we begin the steps to friendship, the same thing can happen with people we meet on the internet.  

Over the last few years, I lost many friends due to my depression.  I did not maintain good contact with them, I am sure I disappointed them when I could not go places with them, and they most likely got fed up with my anger and negativity.  At this time most of my friends are internet friends.

The people on the internet that I consider friends are people I have known for a long time, and have proven themselves trustworthy and honest.  They have stuck by me when I was acting nutty, and consoled me when my heart was broken.  



My internet friends have the guts to tell me when my behavior is inappropriate.  They tell me to keep my chin up when I get  discouraged.  Due to my anxiety and depression and other illnesses, I am home a lot.  My internet friends keep me from getting lonely and keep me in touch with the world. We have laughed together and have cried together.  In short they have been better friends, than most of my real life friends have been.

I do agree with what Bubbleboo said in her Post about exercising caution when you strike up a friendship online.  I think that it takes time to truly get to know someone when your only interaction with them takes place via the computer.  However, I also believe that it takes an equal amount of time and caution when becoming friends with people in real life.  

With the world becoming “smaller” due to the internet, the need and desire for online friendships will continue to grow.  When that need and desire are tempered with the proper caution, I believe our lives will be enriched by the people we befriend electronically.  What do you think?

Photobucket


What Is Type Two Diabetes?

Posted on by
Reply
Photobucket
 Type II diabetes is the most common form of diabetes.  Millions in America are diagnosed with it every year, while many others have and are not aware of it.  

In Type II diabetes either the body does not produce enough insulin or the cells ignore the insulin.  Either way, the results are that the person does not have enough insulin to control the amount of sugar in a person’s body.

Insulin is necessary for the body to be able to use glucose for energy. When you eat, the body breaks down all the sugars and starches in your food turning it into glucose.  Glucose is the fuel for the cells in your body.  Insulin takes the sugar from the blood and puts it into the cells.  If too much glucose builds up in your blood, it will cause you to have high blood sugar and can lead to diabetic complications. 

Depresion and Marriage

Posted on by
Reply
Photobucket

  Is it possible to maintain a marriage when one spouse has major depression, especially major depression that lasts for years? The statistics are certainly not encouraging.  Marriages with a depressed loved one are nine times more likely to end in divorce.  Add this number to the 60% divorce rate we already have, and it seems to me that most marriages where there is a depressed spouse do not survive. 


One of the key elements of a marriage is the give and take that is supposed to exist between the married couple.  There are times when it is not an equal give and take between the spouses, one having to give more than the other, but ultimately there is always a give and take.  This is not the case in a marriage where one of the marriage partners is dealing with a case of long term, major depression.  




The spouse without the depression will often find themselves picking up more and more of the slack.  Taking care of things that would normally be done by the other spouse.  In the short term, this works out OK, however, as the depression drags on and on, and the one spouse is continuing to be stretched thin taking care of things, a certain amount of resentment and frustration starts to build.

The more the depression the goes on the more resentment and frustration build up.  I know that my husband expressed to me more than once that he felt like a single parent, when I was at my worst.  In addition to feeling like a single parent, there was the added pressure of worrying about me and making sure I was OK. 




Accepting that the problem is depression is half the battle for both spouses.  It is easy to blame outside sources for why your spouse is in such pain.  Before I started getting treatment for my depression my husband felt the sole reason I was acting the way I was, was because of how my son left our home. He did not understand that the depression had been there before that incident, and the incident just made it worse.  




Depression affects not only the person with the diagnosis, but it affects the marriage as a whole.  Especially if the depression goes untreated.  Before my depression was diagnosed and I started the recovery process, my husband thought that I did not love him anymore.  From his perspective, I was withdrawn, distant, and did not want to have anything to do with him.  He felt hurt and taken advantage of, because I was incapable of helping him around the house.  Our marriage was already under strain by the time I started therapy.  




Then the things I was learning and doing as a result of the therapy added more stress to our marriage.  As far as my husband was concerned the outcome of my therapy was far from what he expected.  It has taken him some time to come to grips with the fact that I will not be the person he married. 

Both people, not just the one with depression need a support system.  It is imperative that even the person without depression has good support to help them through the rough patches.  It is also important that both spouses work together on plans and other things that will give both parties guidelines to follow during the recovery process.  A support system also can help the married couple identify when thing are not gong a well. 


I personally think that it is possible to maintain a marriage when one of the spouses is living with severe depression.  However, it is a unique challenge that requires both parties to make the effort to keep the marriage together.  


One of the things I used to do was to write contracts with my husband about things I would or would not do.  An example is, shortly after I tried to commit suicide, my husband was asked to work out of town.  He was hesitant about going because he was afraid that I would try to kill myself again, I was still having suicidal thoughts.  We came up with two solutions that made it so he felt like he could work out of town.  First, I actually wrote a contract between me and him that stated that I would not try and kill myself during the time he was out of town.  Also, knowing how I would isolate myself to attempt suicide, we decided I would stay at my grandmother’s house while he was out of town.

As far as my mine and my husband’s marriage is concerned, things are still a long way from perfect.  However, each of us is trying as hard as we can to keep it together.  We are also taking more time to understand how my depression has affected us from each other’s point of view.  


I try really hard on my bad days to show him affection and tell him I love him, so he does not feel that I do not appreciate all the things he does for me.  I can tell he is trying very hard to not become frustrated when I have a bad day and can not be the marriage partner he needs. 

I also make a concerted effort to not think about those statistics.  I feel like if I pay attention to them too much, then I am allowing them to pigeonhole my marriage into one of the failures.  I want to keep my mind on my marriage surviving and thriving.