I sat down to write this 4 times so far– yesterday I got as far as “My Messy Mind” before closing the browser.  I grew up in a tough area where mental health just wasn’t spoken of.  Kids with ADHD just needed spankings and adults that yelled constantly were just parents who yell.  There was no root cause or problem, it was just their personality.

Growing up I was an angry, self-conscious child.  I was mean to my siblings and spiteful towards anyone that I thought had a better life than me.  I made it through elementary school being the fat girl with glasses, middle school was okay, and then I was just mean in high school. Looking back I can truly say that I don’t know when my anxiety started, just that I was young.  My anxiety caused me to be overly emotional, avoid friendships, mean, snippy, and just irritable.  I lived with this anxiety for most of my life.

It was only last January when the depression hit. I had graduated college, had a great job, a beautiful family and yet that wasn’t a success in my book.  That was what should have happened 3 years prior. I took all the congratulations with a grain of salt as it wasn’t a success, it was too late and everyone did it.  Next I started losing weight, got down about 30lbs—but I shouldn’t have needed to lose weight.  If I wasn’t such a pig, I wouldn’t have had to do that in the first place. By this time I recognized there was a problem as I couldn’t do anything right.  I brought it up to my doctor and she recommended an anti-depressant called Paxil.  She said she normally prescribed newer medications but she had so much success with her patients on this she wanted to give it a try.  Literally two days later I called her in tears, “why did I allow myself to suffer for so long?” I felt amazing.  I was so happy and smiled so much that my jaw literally hurt. Life changed immensely—I was 95% less irritable, I felt accomplished when I did something worthwhile, I yelled wayyyy less, and even my road rage seemed to dissipate.

Along with anti-depressants I started therapy and training on an app that teaches “mindfulness”.  All of this was successful for about a month or two before I began having “break-through depression” that was fixed with a higher dose of Paxil. And all was well…For a long while at least.

I will continue this journey in future posts as it’s too long for just one! *muahz*