Category Archives: Mental Illness

Absolute Craziness

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A very sweet young man, messaged me last night.  He first complemented me on my attempt at coding, then he let me know that my layout was not showing up properly in Google Chrome.  I checed IE and it was not there either.  So once again, I was back to coding.  I really had to do it this time though.  I had to fix things so that they would show up in more than just the firefox browser I use.  I downloaded Chrome, when I finished and it appears to be working fine there now, same with IE.  

I really will not touch my coding for a very long time.  No need to mess things up again.  

Picture of the Day

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The last few years of having a mom who was “checked out” due to severe depression has been hard on my daughter, Anna. In an effort to try and rebuild that relationship and because she really enjoys taking pictures, she was given a page in my blog to show off her pictures. All the pictures you will see in this section, will have been taken by my daughter. I personally think she does an awesome job.

Anna enjoys see any feedback anyone has about her pictures, so if you like what you see here, why not leave her a comment and let her know.

Anna loves her new shoes!!

She Would Make Me Home Made Pimento Cheese

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Before you get carried away and let your mind wander down a trail of romantic and erotic intrigue, stop. We’re not talking about that kind of fire. Not today anyway. We’re talking about intellect, entertainment and adventure. I’d like you to take a look at the what makes you happy and brings you joy. Pretend you are talking to a new friend. Answer the questions as enthusiastically as you can and share with your friend what lights your fire. Recommend your favorites, what you’re passionate about – and tell us why. If it’s too hard to choose just one, narrow it down to the best of the best. Everyone who reads your answers will not only get a better sense of who you are but we might be inspired to check it out upon your expert recommendation. I like learning something new everyday. If you open the door of my imagination, I just might step through. Tell me!

1. Which historical figure do you admire the most? Why?

I have to admit that I just have not thought about a historical figure that I admired.  I do have a real life person I admire.  My Grandmother.

She grew up in a time and place where money was always short.  

Although she was not the oldest girl in her house, she was left to take care of her sick mother.  When she was a child it was still unusual for girls to graduate from high school, most got married young.  She not only graduated, she also played on her school’s basketball team.

Every single one of her brothers and her husband, his brothers, and most of the boys in the families she was friends with, went to fight during War World II.  She was left to take care of a small baby and her mother while they were gone.  She stayed strong the whole time people she knew and loved were in the war.  

She worked outside the home when it was still not common to see women doing that.  She made all my mother’s clothes, with no store bought patterns.  She could look at an outfit and figure out in her head how to make a pattern and she would create her own pattern out of newspaper.  She taught me how to make brooms out of broom straw.  

She, even now and she is almost 90, has the best gardens.  Better than professional gardeners most of the time.  She can get the smallest vegetable plant to produce tons of vegetables.  She can stick a stick from a tree in the ground and grow her own trees.  


Her home is always open to her loved ones.  She loves her family deeply and has done so much for everyone.  She remembers how my daughter loves her home made french fries and makes them for her often.  When I was a single parent and she and I shared a house she would get up every morning and cook me breakfast before I left for work.  Or when I was working at night, she would make me home made pimento cheese so I could make myself a sandwich when I got home from work.  

I admire her for her capacity for unconditional love.

2. Name the band or artist you’d like to see live in concert before you leave the planet or tell us about a concert or album that has already rocked your world.


I am not really into music too much….however, I still remember the first ever concert I went to as a teen.  Culture Club with Boy George.  

3. What’s your favorite television show or series of all time?
Why should I care?

ER was my favorite all time television series.  I do not think I missed more than a handful of episodes the whole time it was on TV.  I have no idea why you should care…..but if you are my friend you will care because I care.

4. Movies! I am so behind on the movie scene. What should I watch this weekend? Should I watch it alone or with someone?


Fried Green Tomatoes  Still my favorite movie.  Watch it with a friend.  Movies are always better when you are watching them with a friend.  That way when you say a quote from the movie, it is like a private joke.  

My favorite line from the movie is “Face it girls, I am older and have more insurance”  and I also like the alter ego named “Twanda”

5. You are hopping on a plane tomorrow morning. Where did you choose to go and why?


I am going to Thailand.  Ever since I did a report on Thailand, when I was in fifth grade, I have always been fascinated with Thailand.  I have made it to other places in Asia, but never Thailand. 

6. Who is your favorite author? What about their writing inspires you or simply entertains you? Recommend at least one book that you feel I must read.




Picking one author is so hard.  Depending on my mood, I pick different authors.  If I had to pick, it would be Stephen King.  He is the author that I have stuck with the longest, I have been reading him since I was a teenager.  I would recommend the whole Tower series, and/or Duma Key.



There are so many things I enjoy about his books.  I have also really enjoyed seeing how his writing has changed over the years.  I like how he can make the not real seem real, I like the hidden messages he leaves in his books.  I love how he really seems to appreciate the people who read his book
s. 

7. Hobbies and passions. What brings you joy in your spare time? How did you get into it?

Cross stitching is something I have done since I was a teenager.  I got into because it looked hard and I like challenges.  I taught myself how to crochet a few years ago for the same reason.  When my mind is healthy, I am passionate about volunteering.  


I will be honest though, at this time in my life I get more joy, satisfaction I call it, from being able to do normal every day things.  Until a short time ago, being able to do normal every day things was an impossibility for me, because of my depression.


Oh, I do get a lot out of my blog.  I enjoy messing around with it all the time.

What Turning Forty Means To Me

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On February 19th, 1970, in Paducah, Kentucky, the second cutest baby girl in the world (my daughter holds the first place position) was born.  There is some debate about the time of birth, one of my parental units says it happened at night, the other parental unit says it was in the morning.  I have no opinion either way, as I have no memory of it.


As I was growing up, I enjoyed birthdays.  One of my favorite birthday memories is when we lived in Spain.  My mother learned how to make pinatas.  These were not the simple little pinatas you see in the stores around here.  My mother’s were art pieces.  Very detailed, and if my memory is correct, they were fairly large.  She made a pinata for my birthday, and filled it with candy and toys.  

Our apartment building was on a hill and we were on the second or third floor.  When it came time to beat on the pinata, my mother just hung it over our balcony, while the kids were gathered in the road below.  The best part of this whole birthday,was when the pinata was broken and all the toys and candy fell out.  My mother had put a bunch of those super bouncy balls inside the pinata.  Since we lived on a hill, some of those super bouncy balls started bouncing down the hill with kids running behind them.  That memory still makes me smile.  





Another birthday memory that makes me smile is the year I got to go the Ringling Brothers, and Barnum and Baily Circus on my birthday.  To this day, that circus comes to Atlanta right around my birthday, the commercials for it always bring back memories.  That was the year that Coca-Cola shirts were very popular.  I was given one of those for that birthday.  I think that may have also been around the time that I discovered cookie cakes.  They were not everywhere like they are now.  There was one place that I knew that had them and it was in Town Center mall.  So for my family to get me a cookie cake was a huge deal for me.  





By the time I was a seventeen or eighteen, I believe that I was already experiencing my first round of depression.  I was a sad and lonely teen, who really did not care about birthdays anymore.  I was already having a few suicidal thoughts at that time, and I truly thought that one way or another my life would be over by the time I was twenty.



On my twentieth birthday, I was pregnant with my son, who was to be born two days later.  I felt so old on that birthday.  It was a very difficult time.  My husband (we divorced a long time ago) was not in the same state I was in, he was not sending any money to me.  I felt abandoned and alone.  I was very sad.  I believe that if it were not for my pregnancy and my son, I probably would have attempted suicide at that time.




Every birthday after that seemed to sneak up on me.  I was not thrilled about them, nor was I upset.  I was more surprised than anything else.  Surprised that I had even made it to another birthday.  Looking back I was probably depressed on and off for most of my twenties and thirties. 


Even when I was not having suicidal thoughts, I was still taken by surprise when each birthday rolled around.  It always seemed, to me at least, that I had already passed that age at which I thought I would die, so I always felt like I was living on borrowed time.  As my depression grew worse and I was having suicidal thoughts all the time, I would often tell myself that I would not be alive on my fortieth birthday.  


Here I am though, three weeks until my fortieth birthday, thinking about how that makes me feel.  I did everything to prevent this birthday from taking place.  I truly wished to die.  Yet, here I am.  I am alive.  What an odd feeling, with everything I did to prevent it.


 My fortieth birthday is actually the first birthday I have looked forward to since I was a young teenager.  I am not looking forward to it for presents, or for a party.  I am looking forward to it because to me it represents  a “New Life” celebration. I can start from there forward with liking and loving myself in a way I never thought possible.



My fortieth birthday and the word hope seem to go hand in hand. I have a feeling of genuine hope and satisfaction, for the first time in my life.  I will be starting off a new “birth year” with hope.  I will be starting off a new “birth year” with an excitement that I cannot ever remember having.  I am looking forward to this new life of mine.  

Can you spell O B S E S S E D ?

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If anyone noticed that I had not blogged in a few days, I was not slacking.  You can see from looking at my blog that my layout has changed.  
I saw a layout on someone else’s site that I really liked.   I checked the source code for their layout and figured out where they got it.  So I went and got it for my blog.  The main thing I wanted was the four boxes for the front page of my blog. 
I decided I would go through and change the coding in the layout a bit, to make it more my own, and so it would not look exactly like the other one.  The truth is I became obsessed with “making it my own”  I had very little rational thinking when it came to completing it.I was up to about four in the morning, several nights in a row because of my obsession with having “victory” over this project.
I am not very good at coding.  What I do know is all self taught.  However, I figured what I wanted to do would be very easy.  I was so wrong.  I started the process Friday afternoon.  I was finished by early Sunday morning.  It took so long because there were several unexpected “challenges”.
The original layout was written in Portuguese.  I do not know that language.  I do know Spanish, and some of the words were similar so I was able to figure a few sections out.   It did not occur to me to use an online translator for the parts I could not understand, until I was on the last word I did not understand.  Yes, I said the last word.  
In my arrogance of thinking that this would be an easy project to complete, I laughed at the wisdom of backing anything up. It is fairly easy to predict what happened next.  I would get a large section of changes done, then I would make a huge error in coding, and could not figure out exactly where the error was. Which meant, because I had no back up of what I had done, I would have to trash the whole layout and start from scratch.  Now you would think after the first time this happened, I would have learned to back things up.  I guess I am a slow learner, this scenario played out three more times before I learned the “back things up” lesson.
On Saturday night, it appeared to me that I had managed to get the majority of what I wanted on the new layout on to my blog.  I decided that the time was right for me to transfer the layout from my test blog, to this blog.  I “knew” nothing would go wrong, after all I had done the original work on a test blog (the only wise decision I made through this whole process).  

After getting all the code work moved over, I was so excited.  I was declaring victory before “my chickens hatched”.  I looked at the main page and saw only ONE of the little boxes I had admired so much.  Unfortunately, this occurred before I had learned the back up your work lesson. 

Thinking that the reason only one little box was showing up was because of an error I made in the coding, and not knowing enough about coding to be able to look at it and discover the error, I decided to trash the coding and start from scratch again.  This time though, I decided to do all the work from this blog, in case the error came from moving the layout over.
By this point, I was tired and frustrated with this whole darn project.  I wanted it to be over.  However, I could not let go of my obsession about  “beating” this project.  I slowly continued on with my coding, with my family giving me strange looks at times.  It seems people think it is odd when you are trash talking a bunch of codes on the internet. 

I decide to step away from the computer for a bit on Saturday night.  While I am away from the computer, I am still thinking about the codes, and trying to figure out why only one of the boxes is showing up on my front page, and for a few pages after that.  Suddenly I have an epiphany! I remembered that on this blog I had it set to show only one post per day, but on my test blog I did not do anything to the settings.  This thought made a lot of sense to me, but I am the person who decided to mess with their blog layout without backing up more than once, showing how illogical I can be.  

I go look at the setting for this blog, and click the button so it will show four posts on the main page at a time.  Yay!  It works!  I now have four little boxes on my front page.  I am very impressed with myself.  I won!  Then the reality of the situation occurs to me.  I did “win”, but I still have half of the coding to do because of trashing it all when I thought I was the reason the boxes were not where they were supposed to be.  It was late, and I was very sleepy.  

At this point most people would have decided to finish this project up in the morning.  The problem for me is I do not think like most people and once again I was obsessed with getting the whole thing completed.  The benefit for having coded the same layout multiple times, is that I knew what I needed to do and could get it done faster than I had done previous times.  I even added this cool thing where my navigation buttons rotated.  Once again, I impressed myself.  

Shortly after I completed my beautiful rotating navigation button tool, my daughter lets me know she has gone to my blog to see what I have been doing to it.  She
promptly lets me know that she finds the rotating navigation tool, confusing and she does not like it.  She certainly let all the air out of my balloon.  

I did finally get my new layout completed.  Once again I did a victory dance.  I took stock of my insane habit of obsessing about things that do not really matter and also the crazy feeling of being in competition with whatever it was I felt I was competing against.  Obviously, there is something not quite with my thinking.  I think I need to set some ground rules for the next time I feel the urge to obsess about a project.  

Oh…..since it seems I am obsessed with constantly changing the layout on my blog, I have forbidden myself to change the layout for at least two months.

The site that set me onto this nightmarish journey of obsession and competition is  Enguardia’s Journal

Enguardia is quickly becoming an internet friend.  I enjoy reading her blog.  She also has depression, diabetes and an anxiety disorder.  She blogs about her own personal struggles with and victories over those illnesses, in a very funny, dry humored way.   

Checking Out Is Not Allowed

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I saw my counselor today.  I let her know about how I was doing this week.  I told her about not getting dressed for two days, and trying to isolate myself.  I did let her know that I did not have any suicidal thoughts, or any negative dialogue running around my brain, but I knew that I had been feeling down.  
She told me that in her opinion, she felt like the two days I chose to not dress and hide away in my room, was me attempting to “check out” again.  She did say that it was an improvement that I did not have the suicidal thoughts, or any negative dialogue in my head. 
She confirmed that it would definitely be considered depressive behavior.  That kind of disappointed me.  The reason it did, is supposedly there is something called depression remission.  If you can go a solid year with no depression symptoms you are considered in remission.  Of course, me of the unrealistic expectations, was convinced that I had this depression thing licked and I would be considered in remission by next summer.  Not going to happen now.
Then it was time to figure out why I was feeling this way.  We came up with a few reasons.  Basically, what it boils down to, is I have this habit of taking on other people’s emotions as my own.  Even people I see on TV.  That is why I have not watched anything about Haiti.  Someone being angry with me also affects how I feel.  It usually makes me very sad, and leads me to a very negative dialogue about myself. 
Someone I dearly love has been feeling a bit stressed lately, and down.  Plus with my wheezing, I was not feeling good.  So those two things got combined in my head, and all of the sudden I was taken on someone else’s emotions and feelings, and I was allowing it to bring me down.  Those two days of not dressing, were my way of trying to hide from how I was feeling. 
My counselor said she believed that unlearning this particular behavior is going to be one of my biggest struggles, since I do it without even thinking about it and have done it most of my life.  
I now have another home work assignment.  She is so darn good at giving out home work.  What I am to do is when I encounter a person/situation that I know is going to drastically affect my frame of mind, I am to tell myself that this is not my issue to take on.  I feel empathy for them, but this is not mine to take on.  Just like the home work of finding something positive in every situation, the idea is once I practice this enough, it will replace the not healthy behavior.  She reminded me that this was going to be much more difficult than the positive thinking home work, and I absolutely needed to be extremely patient with myself.  No unrealistic expectations and checking out as a way to not deal with something is not allowed.

She also discussed about me making some friends that I could count on.  She did not care if they were over the internet or in real life. She feels that having more friends would be a good way to have other people besides myself to concentrate on.  Also, having friends with people who are fully aware of my mental difficulties, would be more understanding than some people, who I thought were friends, have been in the past.  This sounds like another home work assignment to me, even if she did not use those words. 
I never was one for a ton of friends.  On and off for all of my life I have dealt with depression, this last time was much worse with the suicide attempt that almost worked.  So my need for friends has been minimal.  The few friends I had before I developed this round of severe/major depression sort of dropped away, because I never returned phone calls or emails.  I think they were also at a loss of how to be around me and what to say to me after the suicide attempt.  
I know that to have friends, I need to be a friend.  Honestly though, when I am depressed, it is just too much work.  

A friend of mine that I have not seen in several years wrote me a note the other day, she mentioned something about me and her getting together for lunch sometime.  That is something I really want to do.  I would like to cultivate that friendship so I have at least one real life friend in my life.  She is a good person and I think it would be good for me to step outside of myself and do what friends do for each other.  

Lately, there have been a few people I have met around the blogs that I want to get to know better.  One in particular I think would be someone who I think would turn out to be a good support for me and I could be a good support for her.
I already know that this is going to provide me with some extra anxiety.  I will do what I need to do, to deal with the extra anxiety.   

Easy Button

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Have you ever wished that you had an Easy Button for your life and all of its challenges.  I have.  There have been so many times during the last few months, while I have been in treatment for my depression, that I have wished there was an Easy Button.  It would be so much easier for my mind to get better if I could just push an Easy Button and get an instant cure.

Delving into why I am the way I am has been a very painful process.  Thinking about how I behaved when my depression and emotions were out of control is not the most pleasant.  Seeing the consequences of my suicide attempt and hospitalization on my family, truly makes me sad.  An Easy Button would be a great way to not have to deal with all that emotional pain. 

 I could see myself using an Easy Button for most, if not all, of my mental difficulties.  I would be happier, wouldn’t I?  

If I had an easy button, I would not have the feeling of satisfaction I get now when I can make it through the day.  Nor would I have a feeling of satisfaction for having worked hard at finding something positive about a bad situation.  Oh wait, I just realized I would not even have any “real” emotions because I would not have to deal with anything.  

As much as I say I want an Easy Button, I think the reality is I do not.  I would miss out on to many life experiences.  Sure, those experiences can be painful and make me sad, but how would I grow as a person if I just pushed a button all the time to skip over the difficult parts? How would anyone grow if they could just use an Easy Button to not have to deal with the hard stuff in life?

Confession Is Good For The Soul

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Confession is good for the soul is what I have been told.  I hope it is, because today is my day to confess.  

Since Friday my mental health has not been as good has it has been.  It is not as bad as it can get, but that is not saying a lot.  I have been down, wanting to isolate myself, quiet, and I have not felt like communicating with anyone.  I have a counselor’s appointment Thursday so I will be sure to bring it up to her then.  I have been faking feeling OK on my blog and with my daughter.  However, even over the phone my husband can tell that I am not in a good frame of mind.   I even lacked the motivation to take a shower and get dressed for a couple of days.  

Some positives are I am not having any suicidal thoughts, and I am not having a negative dialogue running through my head.  I mostly feel disengaged from things.  

It could be a normal “down” time that everyone goes through, but it is still a struggle for me to identify “normal” emotions as compared to my out of control emotions.  That is why running this past the counselor is a good thing, she helps me identify which category my emotions are in.  


So that is my confession.  I felt compelled to do it because from the beginning of my recovery process I promised I would always tell the truth about what was going on.  Sometimes the person I need to tell the truth to the most is myself. 

The Sky Is Falling

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I had yet another children’s book on my mind today.  The story of Chicken Little.  After re-reading it this morning, I realized that Chicken Little was having a major panic attack.  I also realized that there were several things in the story that I could apply to myself. 

Not only was Chicken Little experiencing a panic attack, but he was having a panic attack over something imaginary.  

“Chicken Little was in the woods.
A seed fell on his tail.
Chicken Little said,
“The sky is falling.
I will run.”

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I have had more than one panic attack over something I imagined.  Whatever I had created in my mind, became real to me, the feelings were absolutely real.  The things I created in my mind that caused me to have a panic attack, were huge.  Sometimes it would be imagining my whole family being killed in an awful car accident. Once after I tried to commit suicide in May, and the right medicine mix had not been found for me, I started imagining that my husband was done with me, because he could not handle being married to someone who was mentally ill.  

Very much like Chicken Little taking off and running, I can spend several hours pacing the house. not able to concentrate, and crying buckets of tears when I have a panic attack due to something I imagined.  Days like that lead me to have many bad thoughts. 



Another thing I noticed about Chicken Little and his panic attack is that the longer the panic attack went on, the more details his imagination added to his “story”. 

“How do you know, Chicken Little?”

“I saw it with my eyes.
I heard it with my ears.
Some of it fell on my tail.”

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I have done the same thing when something I have imagined has caused me to have a panic attack.  All it succeeds in doing is making the panic attack worse.   


Chicken Little’s reasons for having the panic attack were so real to him that he managed to convince a few of his friends that the sky was really falling.  They started having panic attacks, and they started running.  I would think that by this point all of those animal/people having panic attacks were feeding each others fears.  I know that if I am around people who are anxious or panicking about something, it feeds my own fears and makes things worse.  That is one of the reasons I choose to only be around people who are positive and not prone to drama.


The final outcome for Chicken Little and his panicking friends was not very good.  They got so caught up in their panic attacks that they lost their common sense.  They actually thought a predator by the name of Foxy Loxy was going to help them.

“Foxy Loxy said,
“We will run.
We will run into my den,
And I will tell the king.”

They ran into Foxy Loxy’s den,
But they did not come out again.”

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I cannot even count the times that I have had a panic attack and lost all the common sense I had.  No common sense means I make very poor decisions.  An example of this is when I tried to kill myself.  I had been thinking constantly about suicide for months and months but had not acted on those thoughts.  When my husband lost his job and and we lost our insurance, we could no longer afford my medications.  I had gone to the free clinic in our county, and they were able to provide me with all my medicines except for one. I became very discouraged and panicky over not being able to get that one particular medication.  I have restless leg syndrome.  It is fairly bad.  When I do not have my medicine for it, I do not sleep and my legs get in such bad shape that I am miserable.  I began to panic at the thought of how miserable I was going to be for who knows how long. I decided that I could not live without having that medicine.  It was at this point I chose to act on the suicidal thoughts I had been having for so long.  It was a very poor decision that I made while having a panic attack, it almost cost me my life.  


Chicken Little and his friends were eaten.  Obviously their situation got worse due to their panic attacks.  Often when I have a panic attack, I become paralyzed with fear.  I can take no productive action about what is making me panic.  That inaction due to panic, makes the situation worse than if I had just been calm and dealt with it.


The original version of Chicken Little was a fable.  It has been passed down from generation to generation, in an oral tradition.  Fables tend to have a moral lesson in them.  I find the things that I picked out that I could apply to myself interesting.  I know the “professionals” who dissect stories find different moral lessons than I did.  I suppose there is no way to tell fo
r sure what moral lesson the original story teller wanted people to learn from from Chicken Little. Maybe he wanted people to do exactly what I did and find themselves and their flaws in it and learn from it.