One of those days...

If you've known me for a long time, this might come as a surprise, but I've dealt with depression for at least the last 20 years. Most people don't know because it's just not something I talk about, nor is it something that I even think about most days. I'm not saying that it's not a struggle, because it is; it's just not something that I have allowed to control my life. I've never been medicated for it at all since I learned ways to cope with it. I knit, I talk, I make people laugh, I do things to help others, so I don't always have to focus on myself. Are there days where I feel sorry for myself and dwell on the depression? Absolutely. Sometimes I take that day and allow myself to be sad and other times I get my butt off the couch, head out the door and actually DO something about it. I'm finding that exercise works wonders, even when I have to go alone.

Since my divorce, I've been happier and healthier than I was during my marriage. Looking back, I can see that my marital situation had a huge impact on who I was, and that impact was negative more often than not. While I was learning how to be a wife and a mother, I somehow lost myself. I closed myself off because I wasn't really allowed to go out and do things very often. I found comfort and friendship online because the internet was always there for me. I didn't have to find a babysitter to watch the kids while I had a conversation with another adult. I didn't have to come up with extra money to go out and do things because I could sit at the computer and talk to my friends for hours while none of spent a dime. It was wonderful. Know what else I started to find on the internet? Courage. My sense of self. That I was more than a wife and a mother. I was still a person. I could make new friends on message boards and in chat rooms and I could hide my social anxiety quite well.

Over the last few years, I have met some really wonderful people. Many of the people that I consider my best friends are people that I have never met in person, or have only spent a few hours with. However, they know me better than anyone else and they love me for who I am, even in the moments when I don't love myself so much. There are so many days where I would be lost without them. Yes, there are a handful of people that I know IRL that also fall into this category and I appreciate them just as much.

The last few months have been a struggle for me. School has not been going well and I feel like my life is falling apart in other areas as well. There are some personal things going on as well that I'm just not going to delve into here, but they have been quite trying and have taken a toll on me mentally and emotionally. During this time, I started reading about PMDD and some of the pieces started falling into place for me. I've been on birth control for this for about a month now and I can tell that it's making a difference. It hasn't made everything perfect, but it's helping and things are more manageable now. The doctor said it might take a few months for the full effect. I'm okay with that. I'm trying to focus more on school and my personal life...and give more attention to the people that I want to spend time with and less attention to the people that have a tendency to drag me down with them.

The real thing I want to address in this is that people somehow have decided in general that they are undeserving of love. Or that a failed marriage is the worst thing. I don't know. I glanced at that article that's making rounds on the internet about how marriage doesn't work any more and then looked at a few of the rebuttals. There is a lot of judgement concerning both on social media. The bottom line is that sometimes marriage really *doesn't* work. It's not always a matter of two people not working hard enough. Sometimes the people are just wrong for each other, to the point that them staying together is a toxic situation and no amount of counseling or shame or guilt is going to help. Don't judge someone for getting a divorce, even if the marriage always looked great to you from the outside. People generally don't like to talk about how crappy things are. I can guarantee that if you had to spend a day in half the marriage/divorce situations that you have judged, you would feel differently. If your marriage is on the rocks and counseling works for you, great! If there's something else that works, awesome! You keep doing that and be grateful because every single marriage is different. As I've learned over the years, there are very few things that hurt worse than watching someone you love be destroyed by a marriage. Be kind to each other.