Jami, where the hell have you been?

Ugh. What a summer. I for one am glad to bid it good-bye. For reasons both internal and external, my mental health was on very shaky ground for most of the past 3-4 months.

Mental illness no longer carries quite the same stigma as it has in the past, but it is still not talked about much and there are still people who do not get the treatment they need. Is it shame? Is it lack of information? Is it hopelessness?

In June one of my former employees died (at the age of 31) due to complications of untreated depression. It did not need to happen.

Believe me, there is help out there.

I have had a few episodes in my life when the world just seemed to be a dark place and I was barely able to function beyond the basics. The first was when I was in middle school. I told no one and suffered alone with my thoughts for several months. I still recall the anxiety and despair I felt. I had another, shorter, episode a few years later. Again, it resolved with time.

About a dozen years ago I had a short nervous breakdown a few days after having surgery. I cried for 2 days and actually had to call in sick to work because I couldn't stop crying. I got an emergency appointment with a therapist and after a few days things were better.

As I've gotten older, my anxiety has increased. When the boys were infants I would wake up in a cold sweat thinking that terrible things were happening to them. Later, I started losing sleep and sometimes would drive to the vet clinic in the middle of the night because I was convinced that something had happened to a patient of mine. Last year I developed anxiety around doing spay procedures. That one was weird because I don't really know what triggered it. However, during every spay I would just envision the abdomen filling up with blood. That would make me super nervous, so I would start to make mistakes, which then sometimes did cause bleeding, so it was a self-fulfilling anxiety. No, I never had a patient bleed to death or anything. Last I also had a couple months of mild depression (or more accurately quiet hysteria) surrounding my breast cancer diagnosis/misdiagnosis.

So yeah, I have a history.

But nothing compared to this summer. My summer of mental anguish was precipitated by an event that caused so much shock and grief that it was almost unbearable. Until now I had never had to deal with a really major traumatic event. I had no idea how much such a loss can affect a person. Wow.

I did reach out. I talked to friends. I started therapy. I began to meditate. I tried several different medications (most had such terrible side effects in me that I would rather face my depression/anxiety than suffer through the medication). I read a ton of books. I'm sure it all helped but the one thing that really helped was time. We as a society do not give ourselves enough time to grieve. Any major loss can take months or years to recover from, and we are expected to "get over it", at least externally, in a few weeks. One helpful book for me was "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. In it she described in detail the year after her husband died. She is a normal, rational person but owned up to the fact that it took a year to even begin to function normally and rationally. I really wanted to rush through my grieving, thinking that if I just did a, b, and c, I would get better. But it doesn't work that way.

I was able to "function". I went to work every day. I took care of my kids. I even exercised a bit, although I lost 10 pounds in the first weeks and had no energy. But I completely shut down in every other way. No fun times. I shied away from almost all social events. No volunteering. No competitive races. I cried almost every day for months. The old Jami was a shadow of her former self. And yes, there were days when I really did wake up wondering if it was even worth facing life. Thank God for the kids. They at least gave me a reason to get out of bed.

Unfortunately, each and every one of us will experience profound loss in our lives. And we will all deal with it differently. I like to fix things, so I made my mental health a project. But in the process of trying to actively make myself better, I came to the realization that sometimes we just have to sit with our emotions. We have to feel uncomfortable. We have to feel sad. Not allowing ourselves to feel these emotions will prolong the healing process.

So I have felt a ton of sadness, discomfort, anxiety, anger, and despair these past few months. But that's what it is like to be human. We have these great big brains and ability to feel emotions like no other animals. It is a blessing and a curse.

Am I better? Yes. Better than I was in July, which was better than June, which was better than May. But I am still not fully healed. I have a ways to go. However, I can assure you that when I am "better", I won't be the old Jami. Traumatic times tend to change people. I have taken active steps to make sure that my changes are positive (and I will describe all of that in a future blog entry). I hope that ends up being the case. I would hate to "waste" this episode of life trauma and not grow from it.

In closing, I would like to thank all of my friends and family members who have put up with my mood swings and ramblings, my kids who have had to deal with a distracted parent, and my co-workers who have had to pick up my slack.

And please remember this. It does get better. And you don't need to do it alone.