Tag: depression

mental health

Brain Bruises

by Kim2 Comments on Brain Bruises

“It’s important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story.” -Iyanla Vanzant

I went camping this weekend. Actually, if I’m honest, it was more of a blend between camping and glamping. We had a cabin, running water, and electricity, but we still cooked everything over an open flame in the fire pit outside. The details of the trip aren’t really relevant to this post or the thoughts in my head right now though, so I’ll just move on.

I went on this trip with three friends I went to high school with. We were all in choir together, but with them being a grade below me, they knew each other far better than I did. About halfway through the second day, one of them asked me a bit hesitantly if I had been married, or if she had just imagined it. Admittedly, it is a bit of a touchy subject, but I really don’t mind sharing it with people because of the simple reason that I feel a bit of relief and a sense of calmness after getting it off my chest yet again.

This is why I write what I write, and this is why I share so much of my personal struggles: it’s always felt healing to me. I think our culture has become such a culture of secrecy and false exteriors. It has become so important to create the illusion of “everything is perfectly okay”, but the consequences of living that way are incredibly detrimental to our health. So I write about divorce. I write about insecurities. I write about depression.

Lately, I’ve been caught in the midst of another depressive period. It shows itself in the lack of energy to do much of anything, in the feeling of utter exhaustion, in the inability to feel emotions even a fraction as brightly as last year, and in the annoyance and irritability of the people who tell me to just “cheer up”. The difference is that I’m able to recognize the symptoms this time around. The last time it was this bad, I felt completely lost and like I was drowning without any way to be saved.

There’s this quote I love about depression by Jeffery Eugenides that says, “Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It’s always there, though.” Yes, last year I was doing better. I was the healthiest I had been in close to a decade. But the thing about depression is that once you’ve truly been held captive by it, it’s so easy to be recaptured. Sometimes there’s almost a relief to not feeling emotions as strongly anymore. It sounds twisted, but there’s some sort of comfort in the familiar nothingness. However, the comfort is coupled by a terror that this time, you might not get back out of the hole, that you might not get to be healthy and feel anything anymore.

The reason I write this is because practicing a life of openness and honesty, a life of true vulnerability, means sharing the struggles along with the triumphs. After writing about my struggle with depression over two years ago for the first time, I was able to really see and experience that I wasn’t nearly as alone as I felt. Depression is such an alienating experience, but writing about it helps take the edge off.

So this is who I am: I’ve had high moments, moments where I still feel joy and excitement, but the empty nothingness is very present in my day to day life, and the road to recovery will be one that I’ll be trudging through for a very long time to come. I’ll continue writing about it, because sometimes that’s the only thing I can do.

Bluebonnets at Black Rock Lake Park, Texas - April 2015
Bluebonnets at Black Rock Lake Park, Texas – April 2015

listening to: Phosphorescent

mental health

A Bit Too Exhausted

by Kim3 Comments on A Bit Too Exhausted

I’ve been relatively quiet lately.

There’s something that happens to me when I spend a lot of time out with friends. I become mentally exhausted and really just too worn out to get any sort of outside work done. The past few weeks has been all about hanging out with friends, working, and even a weekend trip to Austin.

The thing is, no matter how social I seem to the outside, I’m an introvert at heart. I’m a person who needs quiet time to reflect on emotions, actions, choices…and I haven’t had any of that lately. Often times, I don’t even realize that I’ve missed out on that quiet recharging time until I get so restless and anxious that I feel irritated by everything going on around me.

Now it’s time for a simple confession: I haven’t written in almost two weeks. I haven’t even tried.

I know I shouldn’t have any excuses. For someone who wants to be a published author, I really should be more dedicated to writing and put everything else lower on my priority list. But sleep has been taking over. Depression has been trying to fight its way back into my life. Thoughts of future responsibilities have me wanting to run away and forget that I owe anybody anything.

If you don’t know me in person, I’ve found myself in a bit of a unique situation. I’ve written about my adoption multiple times, but what I haven’t really hit on is that my parents are older. Older than even some of my friends’ grandparents. While they are right now still in relatively good health (which I jokingly tell them they owe me for), the truth is that I don’t feel like I’ve gone through enough life stages to have parents who might need me to stick around for a more permanent style of care. I have so many things I want to do with my life, but I can’t justify many of them if anything were to happen to my mom or dad. There’s no way I can live halfway across the world and expect them to be perfectly content with some stranger giving them the full-time care they might need in 10 years.

There’s one thought that keeps running through my head: right now, being a grown up is the most undesirable and hardest thing I can think of. I want to be free. I want to run off and make all sorts of decisions just for selfish reasons. i suppose that’s the key though. The key to maturity is realizing how difficult growing up and taking on responsibilities can be, but fighting through it anyway and making the best of hard situations. It means putting others before yourself and maybe giving up a few of your own desires along the way.

Getting back to my original thoughts now. I’m finally getting some actual alone time in a few days that will last for over a week, and that thought is the golden thread in my life at the moment. I’ll have a house to myself, actual quiet with no distractions bustling around downstairs. I’ll finally get to do what I’ve been dreaming of for months: turning off the internet and my phone and just writing. Writing in whatever room of the house I choose, writing at whatever time of day I desire, writing for hours without being reminded that I need to eat something or sleep. I’m taking one entire day completely to myself. That kind of recharge is exactly what I need to function.

I’ve rambled a bit off topic, but it’s late and I’m experiencing one of those word-vomit moments, the kind of moment where you’re finally writing again and all of your thoughts just pour out of your mind and through your fingertips. I suppose that I just needed to get these thoughts out. There’s something oddly therapeutic about blogging for me. Journaling is still probably my favorite form of writing, but blogging gives my brain the opportunity to think that there’s somebody out there reading all of this nonsense and knowing exactly how I feel. So if that’s you, thank you. Even if you never comment, but just have read any line of anything I’ve ever written, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Austin, Texas - February 2015
Austin, Texas – February 2015

listening to: Father John Misty

mental health, Reflections

High School Mentality

by Kim5 Comments on High School Mentality

“You’re going to have to get out of that high school mentality at some point”

Someone said this to me recently during a conversation about my present situation. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that comment. Part of me agrees. Part of me knows that I have far more to offer than what I’ve putting into life at the moment. I know that I have all of these skills and talents that could be turned into something to be proud of if I just worked harder. I think of the could-have-beens, the different paths I had planned for my life when I was younger. I see the people I graduated with who are successful in the traditional view of the word.

Then there’s the other part of me. The part that’s incredibly proud of how far I’ve come in the past couple of years and who I’m becoming. Two years ago, I would have never seen myself on the other side. I’ve written about this before on a previous blog, but it’s been a long time. Up until about eighteen months ago, I was suffering from severe depression. Severe in the sense that I couldn’t manage a job or even a couple classes in school because I could barely make it off of the couch on the bad days. I gained a little over eighty pounds, had crying episodes that turned into panic attacks, and felt that my life was generally just over.

I had a moment of clarity in April of 2013 when I finally started seeing a psychologist. There had been several moments in my life, both as a child and as an adult, that I was able to begin working through, and for the first time in years, it was almost as if a fog was beginning to lift from my life. I removed myself from a very emotionally and mentally damaging relationship, but I lost many material things in the process, including a house and more money than I could comprehend at the time. However, the most important thing to me was (and still is) that I was healing. I was becoming a person who could enjoy life again. My time spent in Germany was another way to heal. Since I had pretty much lost everything in the past year, it was a good way to remove myself from everything, get my priorities straight, and in a way hit the reset button on my life. I was able to get some more of my mental clarity back while learning new things and having adventures that will be with me forever.

While I know that from the outside, the life that I’m currently living doesn’t look like the most responsible or put together, it is a vast improvement from the one I was living when nobody knew the internal struggle I was fighting every day. There will come a time when I will have to move on and do something more productive with my life or find a different job to support the writer’s lifestyle that I dream of living daily, but I’m not planning on pressuring myself too much. There are far more important things in life to me than the “American dream” of marriage, a high-paying job with benefits, a house in the suburbs, and 2.5 kids. At this stage in my life, I’m just proud that I have some sort of drive and desire to do anything at all. I believe that depression is something that sticks with a person, even if it just skulks in the shadows. Right now, the fact that I’ve held some sort of job for the past year and have been able to continuously build strong friendships is an overwhelming win for me. There are people to meet, experiences to be had, and places all over the world to see. If that means I’m irresponsible and living a high school life, then that’s some other person’s opinion.

Winged Victory of Samothrace- The Louvre, Paris, France (July 2014)
Winged Victory of Samothrace- The Louvre, Paris, France (July 2014)