Mental Health Check In

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I am going to be talking about my mental health recovery journey. This has become a series of posts with the first one being I’ve Been Struggling and the second one was I’m Still Struggling. There are a few reasons that I have decided to share my check ins as updates in my blog. The first is that I think it is important for social media to include things from our lives that aren’t the sunshine or rainbows. The other reason is that I wanted people to have the chance to see that mental health recovery is a journey and not something that happens quickly or in a scripted fashion.

I have been using the Depression Spectrum as a tool to see how my symptoms are doing with the goal or doing this every 3 months. It’s been more then 3 months this time though. Ah well! Here are my results:

It has been almost a year and I am just starting to feel like things are starting to get better. This year has been an emotionally difficult one for me and has taken a lot of work to get through. I’ve been spending a ton of time on myself which has meant that I haven’t been as involved with others as I usually am.

I stopped working in hospitals in December of last year and until July of this year, I wasn’t working as a nurse at all. I think that long break from nursing went a long way to helping me in my recovery. I honestly don’t believe that I would be doing this well had I not taken that break. I really am grateful for the people in my life that supported me through that very difficult first step.

What have I learned this year? Seems like a lot and nothing at the same time. One thing that I am sure of is that the person that existed before the pandemic is gone. I will never be that person again and part of the recovery process is finding a way to be alright with that reality.

There are still days that things come at me seemingly out of now where. I will be driving along the road and a thought or memory will pop into my head. With that a whole flood of emotions come on quick and hard. Learning to ride those emotional waves as been hard. Carrying all this inside me also means that I don’t have the reserve that I used to have. When things get stressful or emotionally hard, I don’t have as many resources to handle that because there is so much of me already dedicated to handling this trauma cargo on a daily basis.

I feel like I am carrying a crate of cranky birds around with me. As long as they are sleeping, I can go about my day alright. But I have to be mindful of them all the time to make sure that I don’t wake them up. And I have to keep them with me. They are heavy and lugging them around makes me tired. Whenever they do wake up, they are loud and angry. Their squawks and squeals make it hard to attend to anything else. Not to mention that they like as not are going to be pecking at me right off as well which hurts and makes it almost impossible to deal with anything else. All I want to do it toss my crate, but I’m stuck with the damn thing.

And the worst part is that no one around me can see the birds. They don’t understand that I am struggling to pay attention to them because there are birds screaming at me rather then them being boring. There is no way for them to see the constant pain that they are inflicting on me. And how do you tell people about them? Talking about the birds will wake them up.

Having these experiences that not many others have is really tough. There is no way to connect and share with the people around me the things that I have lived through. Being isolated from others like this is part of what has made this journey so hard. Because yes, I can and have connected with other nurses online to talk about these things. But I feel like a stranger in my own life. It is like I am now fundamentally different then everyone I encounter on a daily basis in a way that deeply effects my ability to connect and engage with them. When they ask me “why” there is nothing that I can give them that will make sense to them.

And this is just who I am now.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!