Self

Finding Happiness in the Muddle

By / March 12, 2014 / 2 Comments

In my head there are four versions of today. There is the day when I got out of bed early and focused on book design and layout work with only brief breaks for meals. There is the gardening day where I spent all my hours outside rescuing my flower beds from the dead masses of last year’s weeds. There is the day where I cleaned all of the things, setting our entire house into order. There is the day where I relish the fact that my kids are out of school and we go do something fun. There is a hidden fifth version where I run off to visit Antelope Island or hide and write all day long.

The day that I had was an unfortunate mish mash of parts of all four days. (Sadly that fifth day remained illusory.) Because it was a mish mashed day I arrive at the end of it feeling like I did not use my hours well, which is not my preferred feeling at the end of a Monday. The truth is that I always have four days worth of stuff that would be useful to do in each day. I can only thin out the tasks by eliminating things which truly matter to me, so mostly I just bounce from one thing to another trying to make sure that each thing gets some attention during the week. It sort of works. Except when it doesn’t.

Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to acknowledge the importance of the things I am getting done rather than only seeing what they cost me. For example, there is a writing retreat that I would love to attend later this year. At the moment it looks like I will not be going. This makes me sad. I could focus on that sadness and make a huge list of all the events I have to miss for lack of child care. But the reason I miss them is because ensuring proper supervision for my kids is more important to me than any event. I am not willing to settle for less, so I have made a choice. When I feel trapped by my life, it is often because there is something more important that I’m not willing to give up.

I apply this knowledge to my task list. I try to see the value in the things I get done rather than the long list of things that I did not. It still wears at me. I don’t always succeed. Particularly when I see an urgent task and note that the due date was a month ago. I never get around to priority number five because I’m constantly handling the things that rotate through priorities one through four. I’ve stopped believing that I’m going to catch up, because this constant stream of things is my life right now. And it is a good life. I choose it in the moments long ago when I chose to have four children and then to support Howard in being a cartoonist. I chose it when I decided to start a blog and to self publish picture books. I chose it when we kickstarted projects. Granted, at the moments of choosing I didn’t really understand how these things would converge all at once to give us some really busy years. There are also other things that add to the stress of my life that I did not choose, but had to deal with nonetheless. I would really love to have a few winters without major illness. That would be nice. We have ongoing mental health issues with several family members. I don’t get to choose all the things.

But of the things I did choose, I could un-choose some of them. The un-choosing would have far-reaching consequences, most of which would make my life more difficult and far more miserable. So I muddle along and try to find happiness in the muddle, because when my life is less busy (and I will have less busy times eventually) I do not think that happiness will just be sitting in the midst of the empty hours waiting for me to collect it. I will only find happiness in empty hours if I brought it with me. This means I must learn to live in happiness now, while my life is busy.

It is not easy, particularly at the end of a mish mash day, but I shall continue to try.

Married to Depression: Additional thoughts and resources

By / March 12, 2014 / 3 Comments

Yesterday I published a post that resonated with a lot of people. Many of those people offered further thoughts and asked me excellent questions. As a result I have a few more things to say.

First, I want to post some links to resources. I’ve actually added these resource links to the bottom of the prior post, because in hindsight I can see that they needed to be there all along. These provide a starting place for people who are exhausted from struggling alone and would love to have help and support.

NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They have a page dedicated to helping people connect with support groups and discussion groups both online and in person.

Google also led me to DBSA the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. They also have a page devoted to helping people connect with the resources that they need.

There is the ASCA, Adult Survivors of Child Abuse. If a history abuse of any kind factors into your loved one’s depression, it is probably best to talk to someone who knows how to thrive after that.

If you want a faith centered approach to healing, you might consider looking at the LDS addiction recovery program. Reading through their 12 steps, most of it applies if you just substitute “depression (or anxiety, or mental illness) for the word addiction. You do not have to be a member of the LDS (mormon) faith to use these services.

I know there are more resources than these, both locally and nationally (or internationally.) No one has to struggle alone because the world is full of people who’ve been there and would like to help.

My further thoughts:

Several people brought up how sometimes depression can manifest as irritability and anger. This was one of the things that surprised Howard and I when he first took medication. Over and over again I would brace myself for an event that I expected to be stressful and then it just wasn’t. It was little things over and over which failed to make Howard cranky: loud children, dishes undone, lost items. We didn’t see until after it was gone the hundred little ways that depression crankiness was adding stress to our lives.

When Howard and I first started naming and discussing the depressive cycles as a problem to be solved, we spent a lot of time wondering “was it always this bad? Or are we just noticing more because we’re paying attention?” I still don’t have an answer to that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a common stage in the process.

Thirty days makes a habit. This means if your loved one has been depressed for an extended length of time, you’ve forgotten what it is like to live with them not depressed. You can work to revive that memory, but your family habits have adapted to the depression. I saw this when my sixteen year old son was sick for six weeks. When he finally recovered I spent a lot of time re-realizing how capable he is. I don’t have a solution for this, just an acknowledgement that this is really, really hard. Perhaps some commenters will have suggestions for how to keep the memory of happy things alive.

Depression has many causes and therefore many treatments. Depression that is driven by the PSTD of an abuse survivor is a different animal than a rapidly oscillating manic depression caused by brain chemicals. Sadly, having one type does not exclude another. Treatment is often very complex and takes place over an extended period of time. Don’t expect to treat all of it at once, just start in a corner and focus there. People at the resources listed above can help you figure out where to start.

I found myself musing on some of the bad coping strategies that I used to deploy. Most of them were only semi-conscious. If they’d been fully conscious I would have known they were bad. One was to try to counter act a depressive cycle with a crisis. Sometimes the adrenaline from a crisis would pull Howard right out of a depression. Other times it would just sink both of us into a morass of emotion. So Howard would swing downward and suddenly I would be ready to melt into a puddle of incapacity. Some of that was real, but some of it was my subconscious trying to jump start normality again. Bad strategy. Life is not happy when pinging between depression and crisis. Fortunately I left that strategy behind somewhere in my twenties. I mention it here though, because it is a real thing and may be playing into the life of your loved one.

This afternoon I checked in with Howard to see if he felt weird that my post about his depression had gone a little bit viral. He shrugged and said not really. This is why I can say these things now, when I would have been afraid to say them a year ago. I would have been terrified that my words would send him crashing down into depression and then it would be All. My. Fault. Instead I said some things that I felt were important and needed to be said, even though I knew there was a possibility that it would effect him emotionally. But it didn’t. He’s fine. He even said it was interesting to see the depression from my perspective. So all is well. And we go onward.

Married to Depression

By / March 12, 2014 / 32 Comments

I started writing this post six months ago. I started again four months ago. This week I opened it up again. It has been very difficult to get the words right, but then I realized that getting them right is impossible. There is no way that I can convey everyone, regardless of their experiences, what it is like to be married to someone who struggles with depression. The audience is too diverse and the experience is as well. My thoughts and feelings on this matter maybe similar to that of another spouse, or they might be quite different. It is impossible for me to get it right, because there is no “right” when discussing a subjective experience. I can only write about my experiences and hope that something in the story is useful to other people. When I look at it that way, the only way to get it wrong is to not write the post. So I wrote it. All 3000+ words of it. The first part is personal history for context. The rest is things I think will help other people in a similar situation. I put those things in bold for those who want to skim. At the very bottom are links to resources for those who need them.

Howard and I have been married for twenty years. It was not all bliss. Parts of it were gut-wrenchingly hard. In hindsight, many of those horribly difficult parts were directly related to Howard’s struggles with anxiety and depression. Other difficult parts were directly related to my personal stash of neuroses and emotional baggage. Yet our marriage is good. Our life together is more than good. We have built a partnership through the years that sustains us, a business, and our four children. Part of the reason our marriage is still good twenty years in, is because we pulled together when things got hard instead of pulling apart. That required conscious decision from both of us and bucketfuls of forgiveness that we splashed all over everything.

Howard is a bright spot in my life. He makes me laugh. He makes my days better, which is why it hurts so much when this amazing person vanishes into himself and radiates despair or anger. Suddenly instead of having a life partner who is carrying half the load, or even saving me because I’m stumbling, I have a person who is faltering and struggling to carry only a fraction of what he usually does. Not only that, but he radiates the bleakness and it permeates the house, actually creating additional stress and strain. These days we have good strategies for minimizing the impact of a depressive episode. That was not always the case.

The first time I really got to see inside Howard’s pit of despair was on our honeymoon. I was twenty, still trying to figure out who I was as an adult. Still trying to choose which life patterns I wanted to emulate from my family of birth and how I wanted to do things differently. I’d been around depression before with one of my siblings, but my family did not name it. It was the elephant in the room around which we all danced, trying to create a peaceful life. I carried that approach into my marriage. I knew Howard had mood swings. I’d witnessed some during the course of our engagement. But there we were, about halfway through our honeymoon, laying in the dark together while Howard cried and talked. He was letting me further into his heart than he’d ever let anyone before and it was terrifying for both of us. I stared into this deep, dark, seemingly bottomless pit and knew it could swallow me whole if I was not careful. It could swallow us both. And I did not want that to happen.

The next morning the bleakness had passed and my wonderful Howard was back, but I did not forget that the pit was a possibility.

Our family, the new one that Howard and I made together, danced with the elephant for decades. We built habits in the hopes of increasing the good times and reducing the bad ones. We looked for cyclical patterns. We evaluated. Early on I might have suggested therapy of some kind, but Howard had done therapy following the death of his parents and he reported it hadn’t done much for him. We were smart people, surely we could figure out the right diet, or exercise program, or spiritual regimen. All of these things were good management tools and we used them. Sometimes they helped. Other times they were powerless. We were powerless.

It was not until eighteen months ago that we named the elephant. That was when we finally saw this thing that had always been in the middle of our lives and said it was
A. real
B. a problem
C. something we should address.
That shift came because of many things, the most obvious being when our friend Robison Wells began speaking publicly about the mental illnesses that plague him. Rob and a couple of other friends showed Howard that admitting a problem could be a step toward better answers. There was also quite a lot of spiritual guidance and inspiration. Howard and I are religious people and we believe that we were guided. We also wish we’d been a little less thick headed to inspiration when we were younger.

The other thing that shifted was me. I’d been sorting some old emotional baggage (because of inspiration) and finally realized that my job was not to fix Howard, nor to save him. I was to love him no matter what. In fact that was a very clear inspiration directly to me, that Howard is strong and that my job was to love him, not fix him. After realizing that, I changed my answers. When Howard was filled with despair and said “I’m broken.” I stopped saying “No you’re not. It’s fine.” I allowed broken and suddenly let’s get this fixed became an option. Howard no longer had to live up to my need for everything to be fine. He finally had the space to consider and then seek treatment. This is exactly what I mean when I said that some of the difficulties were caused by me, even though I am not the depressed person. He worked so hard to be fine for me.

Howard has a problem with the chemicals in his brain. They sometimes make him feel like a complete failure as a human being, even when everything in our lives suggests exactly the opposite. It means that yesterday was happy, but today is miserable even though nothing has changed overnight. We tried all of the non-medicinal options for nineteen years and we still found ourselves occasionally trampled by the unnamed elephant. It was not good for us, nor for our kids. But a year ago things changed. That was when Howard saw a doctor and we started fixing the chemistry by applying medication, and it worked.

When I say “it worked” that doesn’t mean everything is all better now. Howard still has depressed days, but they aren’t as often and they don’t get as bad. Visits to the pit of despair are a rare occurrence, where they used to be regular. Howard has had the chance to experience a steady happiness where life feels generally good. More important, when Howard is having a bad brain chemistry day, we see it, we name it, and we know how to adjust for it. This is quite different than trying to adjust for an elephant that no one wants to admit exists.

If you have a loved one, a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, partner, who is depressed, and you want to help, there are some things I think you should know. The first and most important is this: You can’t fix it. There are dozens of ways that depression can be managed, healed, or even cured depending on the causes of it, but you can’t fix it for them. The depression exists in your loved one, maybe it is chemical, maybe it is situational, but it is inside them, not you. I tried to fix Howard’s depression. Believe me I tried. For eighteen years of marriage I adjusted all of the things I could conceive of adjusting in the hope it would prevent or alleviate the dark days. He’d have a dark day and I would clean all of the things because then a dirty kitchen wouldn’t add to the stress. I’d manage his schedule. I’d take over chores that were usually his. I’d hug him when the shape of the darkness allowed for that. (Sometimes it didn’t and he would flee from all touch.) I argued with him when the dark manifested as verbalized self-loathing.

My efforts helped some. I could see that they did, which is why I kept trying harder. I kept hoping that I could exert control over this thing. My efforts also masked the problem. When your loved one says “I’m broken.” It feels like the right answer is “No you’re not. Of course you’re not. Everyone has bad days.” The more powerful and helpful answer is to say. “Yes you’re broken. This depression is not normal. I love you anyway.” I love you anyway is the answer which allows the depressed person stop being strong, and start seeking help. I love you anyway gives the depressed person permission to change instead of demanding a status quo.

As soon as Howard decided that maybe he was willing to see a doctor, I did the research. I found out who we should go to. I made the appointment. I continue to make appointments for him from time to time. Because making an appointment is an act of will. It feels like an admission of illness. Making the appointment is a barrier that can be really hard to clear. I schedule half of the things which end up on Howard’s calendar anyway, so me doing this is a natural extension of what I already do. The frustrating piece was sitting on a waiting list for three months before they would make an appointment. (There’s a shortage of mental health professionals in Utah.) I went with Howard to the first appointment, but not any of the others. Again, this was me helping him over the first hurdle. After that I needed to stay out of the way because Howard has to own this process.

That is the second thing I want you to know: the depressed person has to control their own healing process or it will not work. I suppose it is possible to force someone to take drugs, but that doesn’t make them want to change the way that they’re relating to the depression. Howard had a huge emotional process to go through with taking medication. He had to grieve. I don’t know why daily medication requires grief, but I felt the same thing when I had to begin thyroid medication. It feels like weakness, or failure. It feels unfair. I see lots of friends who take psychoactive medications making snarky comments about the meds that they are on. Howard started taking the medicine and at first he didn’t want to see that it made a difference. Then he could see the difference and was angry at the medicine for working, because it meant he needed it. Slowly Howard is learning the ways that the medicine helps him. He’s learning that it is a useful tool and that it is okay to use all of the available tools in dealing with this.

Naming the depression changed everything. The moment that we looked at Howard’s depression and said “maybe this isn’t normal.” It changed all of our conversations on the subject. We started talking about the depression as if it were a phenomena that could be observed, which it is. We developed a taxonomy of sorts to describe the different variations. Howard directly asked me to be his spotter with the medications because he is very afraid of slipping into abusing medicine. He and I used calm times to discuss how to handle depressed times. I began to pay closer attention to the sorts of things he would say when he was sliding into depression and I learned when gently pressing him to take a pill was the right choice. I don’t have to press as much as I used to do, because Howard has learned to watch his own brain and identify when he needs the medicine. It took lots of practice. I am very much a part of Howard’s management process, but he is the director of it.

Even with excellent treatment there will still be hard days. Some depressions can be worked through and resolved in a permanent way. We may yet find a way to do that for Howard, for now we still have to manage the down times. The hardest days are the ones where I’m not feeling completely stable myself. I could be ill, under stress, tired, or just feeling a little down. If Howard hits a depressive patch during those days, it feels massively unfair. I find myself angry at him for being depressed, even though I know he would never choose this. There was one day where all manner of little things went wrong, and I was ready to cry. That was the day when two of my kids had emotional meltdowns simultaneously and Howard was having a medium-down sort of day. I lamented to Howard how unfair it is that I never get a turn to fall apart while someone else picks up the pieces.

The “never” part isn’t true, of course. There have been many times when Howard has rescued me and taken care of me. This is one of the reasons the depressive days hit so hard. I depend upon Howard. He handles his things, I handle mine. We’re both full to capacity with things to do, but without warning Howard will be unable to do his things. He’ll feel like he’s never going to be able to do his things again. He’ll say that to me as he’s sorting the thoughts in his head. And the horrible little voice of anxiety will whisper in the back of my head “what if he’s right?” Right now depression shows up and lays him flat for a day or two. But we don’t know why it shows up. We have no way to make it go away. What if some time it doesn’t leave? This is the horrible fear that I lock away in the back of my brain during the hard days. I see the depression and I know it could destroy us, because when Howard is deep into a depressed day, he is different. His thoughts and attitudes are different. His capabilities shift. The Howard I love and depend on is gone and all I can do is wait for him to come back.

So that is a thing you should know too. Depression can be traumatic and terrifying for the loved ones because they are forced to face being powerless. Of course, that one is unlikely to be news to you. But it means that you are at a higher risk for anxiety and depression yourself. Be on the lookout for that. Be aware that you might also need help and treatment. It is possible that the best thing you can do for your loved one is to go see a therapist or spiritual advisor yourself. You need a support network, because this is a hard load to carry. Faith is a huge part of my support network. I have conversations with God about Howard’s depression all the time. I feel like we’re partners in helping take care of this amazing person we both love. I truly believe that any path that Howard walks toward eliminating depression forever will be an inspired walk of faith. I hope that we’re on that path already even though I can’t tell how far we’ve come or how far we have left to go. But if this is a lifetime-long walk, I’m okay with that. I didn’t sign on to be married to Howard just for the easy stuff.

Preserve your own balance. In order not to be pulled into depression myself on the days that Howard is down, I have to actively shield myself against his moods. This is hard, because I am a naturally empathetic person and I am highly attuned to the emotional states of my family members. Sometimes this means that I need to have physical space from Howard when he’s depressed. Sometimes Howard provides that space deliberately in acts of heroism. In recent memory we had a family party on a day when Howard was depressed. It was the first time I’d been able to enjoy the company of my siblings in a very long time. Howard hid himself away, keeping his bleakness contained so that I could enjoy the event. I recognized his sacrifice and told him that I did. The verbal recognition was critical so that he knew that I knew that he was making a special effort for me. Also so that he knew that I was aware of his depression and he was not abandoned with it. It was our way of working together to make sure that the depression did not ruin a party. We hope for future parties where Howard and I can both attend.

Listen without judgment. This is probably the most important function that I serve for Howard when he is depressed. He needs to process and think through what he is feeling. Over the years we’ve learned how to communicate the depression without wallowing in it. It is rare that I’m able to say something that alleviates the depression, but not being left alone with it is a huge help.

Talking about it can help. There is a silence that blankets anything that hints at mental weakness or illness. People are afraid to admit that they’re struggling with mental health issues. Some of those fears are founded in reality. Employers think twice before hiring someone with admitted mental health struggles. People look askance. The stigma is real. But part of what helped convince Howard to get help was when he first started talking about the depression with trusted friends. Part of his ongoing process is to speak up on the internet when he’s having a bad week. The responses to those posts are overwhelming support from others who have walked similar paths and thanks from people who are grateful that someone is willing to speak up. This is the reason I wrote this (very long) post. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs it. And because once I began it, I realized that I needed to say all of it. I’m certain there will be more things to say on a different day, but this is my last thought for you right now. Hang in there. You and your loved one can get through this and find a better place. Howard and I did.

Edited to add: As a result of questions and discussions prompted by this post, I’ve decided to add links to some support organizations which may be useful.

NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They have a page dedicated to helping people connect with support groups and discussion groups both online and in person.

Google also led me to DBSA the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. They also have a page devoted to helping people connect with the resources that they need.

There is the ASCA, Adult Survivors of Child Abuse. If a history abuse of any kind factors into your loved one’s depression, it is probably best to talk to someone who knows how to thrive after that.

If you want a faith centered approach to healing, you might consider looking at the LDS addiction recovery program. Reading through their 12 steps, most of it applies if you just substitute “depression (or anxiety, or mental illness) for the word addiction. You do not have to be a member of the LDS (mormon) faith to use these services.

I am certain that these are only the beginning of the resources that are available to you both locally and internationally. The world is full of people who understand your pain and would be delighted to help you find a happier way to live.

Adding Something to an Already Full Book (and Life)

By / February 26, 2014 / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on Schlock books this week. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse will be heading to print in about a week. I’ve also been working on Massively Parallel, which will be the biggest Schlock book we have ever made. The page count is 256 pages in the preliminary layout. It was really important to lock down the page count so that Howard could have a firm number of pages to plan for the bonus story. It is a sad day when Howard has written a ten page bonus story and the book only has seven blank pages. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but I’ve been afraid of it often enough that I started working layout early and nailing down the basic layout before telling Howard to start writing.

I knew that MP was going to be big when I started working. In fact both Howard and I were afraid that it was going to be much bigger. We worried about spine strength and whether we ought to split the story into two books. So my driving focus as I began to put strips into place was “waste no space.” In most Schlock books I’m very careful not to split up a multi-row strip across pages, even if I have to add white space to do it. For MP, I broke that rule some. I still tried, particularly in dramatic story moments, but I leaned toward taking less space. Then there we were with 256 pages and nineteen of them were awaiting a bonus story. Then I talked to Howard about my process. He agreed to the necessity of splitting multi-row strips across pages, but asked that I go back through and make sure I wasn’t splitting them across page turns. I knew that I had and we certainly had enough spare pages to re-shuffle. But how many pages would it take? Every page added meant a white space created for which Howard would have to draw margin art.

I was surprised then when the very first added page had a cascading effect through the following thirty pages. I shifted strips around, placing for dramatic effect and to keep multiple rows together. At the end of thirty pages, I was staring at a blank page. I had just majorly improved the book and not reduced the number of pages available for bonus story. I went through the whole book that way, optimizing for story instead of space preservation, and I ended with a 256 page book that had 13 pages available for bonus story.

It is counter-intuitive, but there are times when adding a thing does not result in less for all the other things. In January we added cello lessons for Patch and horseback riding lessons for Gleek. These things combine to use up at least four hours of my time per week. As packed as my schedule gets, it does not seem I can spare those hours. Yet these things slipped right into our lives without even a ripple. If anything, I’ve seen a reduction of stress and an increase in productivity. That was unexpected. I’m thinking about this because there is a writers group that I’m considering adding to my life. Logically it is going to use up some time that could be spent on other things, but I hope it is going to do that magic trick where it just enters my life without diminishing the time and energy that I have available for all of my other things.

Applying Changed Focus in My Life

By / February 24, 2014

This changing focus thing is hard. I started the day feeling happy and ready to continue being happy while doing the work in front of me. I was going to do what I could and not blame myself for the rest. But then my intentions met my To Do List and The Schedule. The sad truth is that The Schedule got ahead of me while I was sick and while I’m trying to accept and adjust, there is still a large part of my brain which does not want to fall behind. It tells me I should hurry because there are dire consequences for falling behind and for disappointing people who are depending on me. The voices from that portion of my brain are loud and there were several points in my day where they were ready to take over my worldview. Some examples:

Over the weekend Patch when into hardcore avoidance mode over reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book assigned by his teacher. Eight times I told him to go read. Eight times I found him ten, twenty, sixty minutes later having done anything except read. It isn’t that he dislikes the book, it is because there are some active reading assignments that go along with it. The easiest way to avoid the assignments was to avoid the book. This morning I sat him down and made him read where I could watch him. I then spoke to him about avoidance and how sometimes our brains will try to avoid things without even letting us know what we’re doing. It was a good learning experience for him. I’m not sorry it happened this way. He’s the one who has to deal with the consequences. (His teacher scolded him.) Yet part of my brain kept measuring chapters read against due dates. It wanted to calculate out a schedule and force Patch to stay on it. It was angry with Patch because his failure to follow through on his assignment meant that I had another thing to track, and I have too many things to track (insert moaning wailing sideline about the impossible nature of my to do list). Changing my focus meant letting all of that go. This assignment isn’t about me, my stress, or my list. It needs to be about Patch and his learning. Incidentally, that focus removes stress from me and allows me to experience more happiness.

Link went back to school for a half day today. He felt great afterward and plans to do a full day tomorrow. I’m glad. Even better, Link is smiling and being cheerful in a way that I have not seen for a month. I remember this guy, he’s clever and fun to be around. In the car on the way home from school, Link told me about his plan to do three assignments. He’s taking charge of his life and his work. He did it too… sort of. One assignment proved impossible because the online resource wasn’t available. He needed to ask questions about a different assignment. Naturally I suggested that he do some different assignments, but that wasn’t how he’d pictured the day. This is where I cue the frantic voice. It knows how much work Link needs to make up. It is frustrated with him that he doesn’t use every minute, or at least a large chunk of time and energy, working to catch up as fast as he can. He doesn’t use lists they way that I do, and he resists my attempts to schedule for him. He has so much to do, and I have to keep track of it all (cue wailing moan about the impossible nature of my to do list here). Truth be told, I was struggling with this with Link even before he got sick. Link’s ways are not my ways and I have to back off and let him learn what works and what doesn’t. But that is hard when I have a worst-case-scenario scene generator running on overtime in the back of my head. I have to let this be his challenge, not mine.

This afternoon Howard was working on his last push to complete Marginalia for LOTA. He got to The Keep and called me because he was missing a preliminary sketch he’d done. We both remembered where it should be, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in any of the other places either. I activated my full finding-things capabilities. This usually results in finding all the missing items. This time, nothing. I was coming up blank. I was ready to feel bleak about this. It was all my fault. I should be better. I should search harder. I should not have misplaced it. (Though I didn’t. In no way was this my fault, but that voice does not use much logic.) It was so very hard to do a reasonable amount of searching and then say “Sorry. I can’t find it.” Then leave it be. Truth be told, I did a little bit more than reasonable searching before I said it. When I did, Howard shared some frustration with me. WITH me. We were both frustrated together because somehow this one paper was missing. We could be annoyed without having to blame anyone in particular. Howard wasn’t blaming me and, for once, I refrained from blaming myself. And my day was less miserable than it could have been. Howard found a perfectly good solution and the work got done even without the missing sketch.

Paying attention today made me realize the quantities of miserable noise that want to take over my brain all the time. No wonder things have felt so hard for so long. Today was good, but I had to work at letting it be good. Hopefully as I clear away the back log of things, and as I practice, then having good days will come easier and easier.

Changing Your Focus

By / February 23, 2014 / 2 Comments

Yesterday I wrote a little post about focusing on good things instead of messes. The post felt charming and complete to me, so I didn’t want to alter it, even though I knew there was more to be said on the topic of focus. Because changing focus is sometimes no harder than deciding to do it, other times my brain can be uncooperative. As was the auto-focus on the camera was while I was trying to get it to focus on the hot chocolate instead of the spill. It stubbornly kept that spill clear even when the frame was almost entirely full of blurry hot chocolate. I was fortunate that Gleek knew a trick. She put her finger into the frame and the addition of that one new element made the camera immediately re-focus. So when I’m trying to teach my brain to focus on the good things, I’m going to have to use some tools to control the auto focus.

Tool #1 Write the Good Stuff.
I’ve heard people praise gratitude journals as a place to write down the good things of the day. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A list of good things will do. They can be small good things. The very fact that you know you’ll be writing it down later teaches your brain to look for and retain the good things that happen during the day.

Tool #2 Conscious Attention
When anxiety for my kids is eating away at me, I have to spend some time thinking of the qualities that they already possess that are the opposite of my fear for them. Usually to do this I need some quiet space and time where I really think about the kids good qualities. Because writing is how I process my thoughts, I often do this by writing things down. The thing is, once I have that list of good qualities, I can suddenly see how those qualities are express every day. Thirty minutes of conscious attention changes my perspective for days.

Tool #3 Break Your Patterns
Do something outside the usual schedule of your life. It could be going to see a play, visiting a park, taking a jog, lunch with a friend, participating in a service project. When you step outside of what you usually do with your time, it causes all your thoughts to shift around. While your thoughts are shifting, it becomes easier to refocus.

Tool #4 Attend Church or Other Worship Service
Religious services are structured to remind people of grand priorities. They provide a perspective that is sometimes absent from daily life. It is like standing on a hill in the middle of a hike, you can see where you need to go next. I also believe that God is there in those services and he wants you to be happy in your life. He can help you change your focus if you ask. For me, this is really tool #1, but I didn’t want non-religious people who need those other tools to be turned off by seeing the religion focused one first.

Tool #5 Enlist a Friend
If you’re having trouble seeing the good things in your life, have a friend sit down and help you find them. It is possible your life doesn’t have enough good things, then maybe your friend can help you add some.

Tool #6 Seek Additional Help
It is possible that you’re unable to focus on the good things in your life because you are experiencing anxiety, stress, or depression. These things seriously interfere with a person’s ability to feel positive emotions. A therapist or doctor can help you identify if you are depressed and what steps to take next. This may be your situation if logically you can see that you have good things in your life, but you’re unable to feel happy about them.

These are far from the only tools, but they’re a good place to start.

Focusing

By / February 23, 2014 / 2 Comments

I put the cup of hot milk down in front of Gleek along with the can of hot cocoa mix. She looked up from her book and her face lit up.
“Thanks Mom!”
“You’re welcome, but there is one condition. I need to take a picture of it all mixed up before you drink it.”
Gleek’s forehead crinkled. “Okaaay.”

She dumped and stirred. Some of the powder slopped onto the table, adding to the spill that was already there from yesterday’s hot chocolate. Vigorous stirring added a little bit more. When she was done stirring, I lifted the cup and started arranging it so that both cup and spill were in the frame.

“What are you doing?” Patch asked, attracted by the unusual request I’d made of Gleek.
“Are you taking a picture of my spill? I meant to clean it up, but I forgot.”
“Yes.” I said. “Your spill is part of the pictures.”
“Why are you taking pictures of spills?” Patch asked.
“I want to write a blog post and I need pictures for it.” I said.
“About what?” Asked Gleek.
“I want to make a point and I think pictures will do a better job than words. So I’ll show you when I’m done.”

Gleek hovered, making sure nothing bad happened to her hot chocolate. She helped make the camera cooperate by placing her finger where I wanted the auto focus to aim. I took several shots both with and without the flash. They weren’t perfect, but they would do. And Gleek was ready to claim her treat.

“Here kids, come see.” I said and I showed them the pictures on the camera.

In this first shot, you can clearly see the spill, but the hot chocolate is blurry.

The second shot changes the point of focus for the camera. The hot chocolate is clear(er) and the spill has gone all fuzzy.

Both shots contain the spill and the delicious hot chocolate. Focus doesn’t change what is in the picture, but it makes a world of difference in what I see. I have been focusing too much on the spills and messes in my life and not enough on the good things. Life is always messy, it is up to me to find enjoyment in it anyway.

“Ah!” the kids said, enlightened.
“Can I have hot chocolate too?” Patch asked.
“Of course.” I answered “And when you’re done, will you two please clean up the spill?”
They nodded and the day was a little better than before.

Women’s Support Group Meeting

By / February 20, 2014 / 2 Comments

A sign on the table in the middle of the meeting circle admonished us all that the words spoken there were not to be shared elsewhere. I will honor that, because it is a vitally important part of what makes those meetings safe. But what I felt during the meeting is mine to tell.

I walked into the wrong room first, before I discovered the right one down a hall. I’d nearly not come. I’d nearly gone home because I made a wrong turn trying to find it. I found the wrong classroom. Then I walked into a meeting where I hoped to be anonymous and immediately recognized someone other than the friend who had invited me. It was a women’s support group meeting focused on many issues, including perfectionism and anxiety. I went because my friend felt inspired to invite me and then the thought would not leave me. Go to the meeting. So I went, even though I felt awkward and out of step with these other women who already knew the format. It was a meeting patterned after addiction recovery meetings. There are aspects of that pattern which felt strange to me.

I began to cry almost the minute I walked into the room. I can’t quite say why, except that I knew this was a very good place, a place of healing. I was there because my Father in Heaven knew how much I’ve been struggling with weighty emotional matters in the last year. He knew I needed to be healed. He knew that six weeks of sickness had buried my spiritual senses under a layer of depression which had congealed. He sent my friend to me and then sent me to that meeting in order to crack through that layer. It was scraped away and I came home able to see my beloved family members clearly. I was more peaceful than I have been in a long time.

I can’t say why the meeting had that effect on me. It happened separate from the words that were spoken, none of which I can really remember now. But I could see when the words of one woman describing her experiences healed or helped another woman. I don’t know that I’ll make attending support meetings a regular part of my life. I do know that I really needed that one on that day. I also know that I needed to bring home the manual they offered and that I needed to write about the experience, because there may be someone else who needs this sort of support and they need to know where to go.

The group meets on Wednesday nights at 7:30 in the Mountain View high school seminary building just west of campus. All women are welcome.

I came home with peace of heart and some direct inspirations about how my hours need to be arranged in the next weeks. I feel so much lighter.

Thoughts on My Birthday

By / January 27, 2014 / 1 Comment

It is always interesting to me what transformations occur on my internal landscape when we hit my birthday. There have been years where I reached a landmark age and felt strange about it. Some years I’ve really needed affirmation and appreciation. There were times when I needed it and didn’t get it. Other times I needed it and it arrived. For several years I posted short stories on my birthday, but then came a year when that felt too stressful so I stopped. I’ve had forty one birthdays, which is a large enough sampling that I can confidently say that I don’t know how birthdays will affect me in the future.

So much of how I approach my birthday depends on the months that came before. This year I had an extremely affirming Kickstarter experience in December followed by a wonderful convention last week and another convention to look forward to. I’m feeling full-up and that fact of my birthday feels somewhat irrelevant. I like feeling this way about my birthday, because on the years where I really needed recognition I wanted to feel this way instead.

Except I think I might be wrong in this. There is true value in celebrating a person, not because of anything they did, but because each person is a miracle worthy of celebration. That core fact sometimes gets buried in the trappings of gifts, notes, cakes, and balloons. Then we lament the physical symbols of celebration, when what is truly lacking is the recognition of value. It is so much easier for me to celebrate someone else than to celebrate myself. It is easier to see how amazing my friends are than it is to recognize similar things in myself.

“How old are you Mom?” Gleek asked as we drove home this evening.
“Forty one.” I answered.
“Really? I thought you were like 38.” She kept talking and I got the sense that somehow she didn’t want to think of me as being that old.
“I like being Forty one. It is a good age.”
“I thought people got upset about being forty.”
“Some people do. But I’m here. I’m healthy. I’ve accomplished many of the things I want in life and I’ve got time left to accomplish more. This is a good place to be.”

It seems like a good assessment. I’ve got a whole year ahead of me to enjoy being forty one.

Speaking About Therapy

By / January 8, 2014 / 2 Comments

“Okay Patch, I’m going to drop you at home and then I’ll take Gleek to her appointment.” Patch nodded. He knew that something was going to be different when Gleek was in the car for the pick up from school. Usually I come alone.
“What does she have an appointment for?” Patch asked.
I hesitated before saying “It’s just an appointment.” Patch accepted that and the conversation moved on.

The appointment was for therapy. During that moment of hesitation I was acutely aware that Gleek was sitting in the back seat. I realized I did not know how she felt about therapy. Did it embarrass her? Did she care if her brother knew about it? Did she even think much about why she is going? It had become just a thing we do, but after that question I began thinking about all the times I said “appointment” instead of clarifying what it was for. In the tiny omission of the word “therapy” I was obscuring it’s existence and I realized this was due, not to consideration for Gleek’s feelings, but because of my own discomfort.

Psychology has come a long way since the days of Freud, and yet many of his basic assumptions still permeate the field. This is the natural result when a theory becomes the foundation of many other theories. Psychological professionals are no longer steeped in Freud, but many popular cultural assumptions come directly from him. For example if a child has emotional troubles, then it is assumed that those troubles are either the result of some sort of trauma or because of poor parenting. I’m seeing a shift lately where articles and movies are beginning to say that mental illness may be genetic or chemical rather than caused, but the other thought is absolutely there. We see an emotionally troubled child and wonder who caused it. Who is at fault.

I live with all those assumptions in my head and they turned on me viciously last spring when Gleek’s bundle of mental and emotional challenges manifested in a way that concerned school personnel. She’d veered out of quirky and landed solidly in the realm of disordered. I knew the right steps. We sought diagnosis and then therapy because the problem was bigger than we could handle alone. It is one thing to seek help and it is something completely different to feel at peace with the results of that decision. I struggled with a lot of self doubt. It took me months to realize that on a deep level I felt that having a kid in therapy represented a massive failure in parenting. Parents make jokes about that, about how their kids will end up in therapy because of this or that thing. Those jokes come from a place in the parental heart that is crying out “please do not let my child ever be in so much emotional pain that she needs therapy.”

We got there. We are there now, not because she is actively in pain, but because we’re hoping to teach her some emotional management skills so that if her internal world spirals out of control, she knows how to get it back. One of the very most critical of those skills is knowing that therapy is available and that going is not a weakness nor something to be ashamed of. If our weekly trips can remove that hurdle for the rest of her life, that is work well done. If she learns enough that she never spirals down again, even better. Yet there I was, subtly undermining one of the primary hopes because I was avoiding the word therapy.

I felt judged by Gleek’s first therapist, a young intern. I don’t think it was her fault, the judgements were echoing inside my head and attaching to things that she said. However it was obvious that the therapist was focused on treating the parent/child system, which did heavily imply I was part of the problem. I would walk out of the appointments feeling like I needed to be better, give more structure, set more limits. Those things did help. Yet the point was to teach Gleek to get to the heart of her emotions, not to teach me how to manage better. Half of the therapist’s suggestions were things that I already did. It didn’t seem like hugging her twenty times per day would make that much difference over the seventeen times I was already doing. I suppose it could have been an affirmation that I was doing okay at this parenting thing, but it added to my concerns. We were doing so many of the good things, yet the therapy appointments were necessary. I spent lots of time wrestling with why, until I realized that in this situation “why” is not really a useful pursuit. I also realized that that particular therapist wasn’t right for us. The second therapist, four months later, was better. Or maybe we were better. By then I’d begun to come to terms with my emotional tangles regarding having a child in therapy.

I asked Gleek if she minded me telling her brother’s she has therapy. She shrugged “I didn’t realize that they don’t know.”

The next week when I picked up Patch from school I said “You’re own with Link for a bit because I’ve got to take Gleek to her therapy appointment.”
“Gleek has therapy?” Patch asked.
“Yes. She just needs to learn some skills to help her figure out and resolve her emotions. That way things don’t get as hard as they were last spring.”
“Things were hard last spring?” Patch said, and I laughed one of those surprised laughs that bursts out like I’ve been punched in the gut. Gleek’s struggles had turned her world and mine upside down. Patch hadn’t noticed.
“You remember when she was having a hard time in school with panic attacks?” I said
“Oh. Yeah. I kind of remember that.” Patch said. We then talked a bit about anxiety and the kinds of things that a therapist can help people to learn. It was a good conversation because Patch gets anxious too and perhaps someday he’ll not be afraid to seek help learning skills in a time of need.

Slowly but surely I’m learning to mention the therapy when it is appropriate, rather than dodging the mention. Helping to normalize therapy is a small gift I can give to every child or parent who may need it someday.