• Unattended Grief and The Dark Night of The Soul

    February 25, 2024

    I’m in a very sorrowful place, crying almost daily and doing everything I can to process the emotions that are long overdue.

    I know intuitively that it is time to feel the feelings I have been pushing down for as long as I can remember.

    How did I get here?

    I’m sure if I dug deep enough I could trace everything back to my childhood, but it isn’t the time to do that. For now, I’ll start with adulthood and my history with anti-depressants.

    I was married at 21. My husband was only 6 months older than me, and we were both attending college and working as food servers during the early years of our marriage. At some point I caught a flu that lasted over a month and drained me of my energy for several more. I went to the university health clinic and discovered I was infected with mononucleosis. Looking back I don’t know how I managed to get my studies done but somehow I did.

    The months following the acute illness were a struggle. My appetite was non-existent and I had no energy. When the doctor suggested Prozac, I decided to give them a try. I’ve always struggled with side-effects to medications, and this marked the beginning of attempting anti-depressant after anti-depressant and contemplating how much the benefits were worth the costs. Are the nausea and headaches worth having the crippling sadness taken away? With Prozac, the side effects were horrible. I still remember experiencing my first “brain-zap” while standing in the Chili’s that I worked at in Reno. I didn’t stay on that drug much longer.

    Within a few years I would have my first child and experience bouts of post-partum depression. Sometime after the rush of childbirth wore off the exhaustion and depression began. I was simultaneously happy and fulfilled while also exhausted and miserable. I turned into a giant clam, and I told no one that I was suffering. I’d have to repeat this struggle 2 more times before I would finally tell my doctor as I approached delivery that I was most likely going to get post-partum depression.

    It was between my third and fourth child that a doctor would find an anti-depressant that I found tolerable. The doctor was an endocrinologist I went to be checked for thyroid problems. Within days of being put on thyroid medication, the depression I felt lifted. For a few years, that’s all I needed, but then my job in tech started becoming stressful in ways that no woman should ever experience. My appetite disappeared, I lost weight, and I wasn’t sleeping. When I went in for a regular checkup with that doctor, he suggested I try an atypical anti-depressant called Mirtazapine. He suggested it because two of the side effects could work in my favor: weight gain and sleepiness.

    Initially that drug was a miracle that I was grateful for. It wasn’t until over a decade later I began to understand what a nightmare it really was.

    Sometimes I wonder what person I would be and where my career would’ve ended up be if I had not taken that drug. I slept well and I looked healthy, but I was emotionally blunted and only felt a few of the major emotions: mainly anxiety. Depression that had taken away my appetite and my will to live morphed into a very functional, career-driven anxiety while on Mirtazapine. I regret the disconnected mother I was during those years. I regret how I let the stress of taking care of my family financially overwhelm me to the point where that drug seemed like a great way out.

    Fast forward to the end of 2019. Mirtazapine had stopped working, and I wasn’t sleeping well anymore. My job at that time was quite stressful, but not in the ways that my first job in tech was. I quit taking Mirtazapine and did a sleep study shortly thereafter. What I learned was interesting. When I laid in bed for hours thinking that I was not asleep, I was in a light stage of sleep. I also learned that for whatever reason, I really wasn’t getting much REM sleep. Looks like I probably wasn’t processing emotions well either: https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-emotion-processing-20578/

    It took me years to get off of Mirtazapine. I had been gradually tapering down for close to 3 years prior, thinking that many of my other health problems might be tied to that drug. At the end of 2019, I was to the point where I could go off of it and not experience a psychotic break because of it. Luckily I had a doctor who would work with me and my own plan for how to taper down. Most doctors would taper you off much faster than I found feasible, so eventually, I would come up with my own plan.

    I ended up quitting the stressful job in April of 2020, after the pandemic had started. The stress of the societal upheavals combined with my marriage ending was intense, but looking back, I still was not emotionally present in the way that I am now. I believe it took four years for the emotional blunting effects of that drug to wear off.

    At the end of 2023, my heart was broken by a rather sudden and cold withdraw by a person whom I thought would never do such a thing to me. I was going through some other major stressors when he told me it was over. I was worried about possibly losing my job in consulting and dealing with a possible ulcer and gastritis infection. I was in pain and losing weight, and now the person I felt closest to in the world was gone.

    I knew instinctively that the sadness that surfaced after the breakup could not entirely be pinned on the breakup. I knew that there were other emotions tucked away that I had neglected tending to: the guilt and sadness for the end of my marriage, the death of the person I used to think that I was, the guilt for not being a better mother and for being career-obsessed when my children were young. The guilt of being a reactive coworker who’d get triggered at the slightest thing, and the employee who gave too much to her job while neglecting her marriage and her children. I regret all the present moments that I wasted by being trapped somewhere else, worried about the future or obsessing about the past.

    I find myself somewhere in The Dark Night of The Soul. Perhaps I’m still experiencing the existential depression. I feel that my ego is dying and none of the things that used to drive me matter much anymore. What does matter to me? In many ways, I have lived my life up to this point for others, deriving no real happiness from it and running on the fumes of anxiety, trying to be what everyone else expected me to me. I am done with that style of living, if it can be called that. I think what I’ve been doing can more accurately be called “coping”.

    A few things are emerging, and I don’t find it coincidental that they are all creative. Writing, music, dance, and painting all hold a sacred space for me. I love to cook and travel and spend time in nature. I feel called to finish a book I’ve been working on for years. I’m questioning whether or not I will always work in tech. Perhaps after my children are grown I will reevaluate and see if I want to teach like I originally planned to when I was in college.

    I don’t know what the future holds. I’m scared these dark emotions will continue to linger and no rays of sunshine will ever come through again. I’m scared that I’ll break from the pressure of having to support my family when I really just want to rest. I’m finding ways to take care of myself that I have never bothered with before, like meditation and learning how to be still and in solitude. I have hope that the darkness will pass, because it has always passed before. Is this time different? Yes, very much so, but I know that it is different in ways that will significantly change me the rest of my life. I’m in the in-between stage between being in a cocoon and being a butterfly. If you look too closely, you would see a gooey disorganized mess, but if you wait long enough, you should see the butterfly.

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  • Paralyzed with Fear

    February 18, 2024

    I must’ve been about 7 or 8 years old, but it’s unclear. Most likely it was somewhere between 5 and 9.

    I woke up suddenly with a sharp pain under my left ribs, and a man on top of me. He had his other hand on my throat and a sharp object in my side. The pain under my ribs was so intense that I wasn’t aware of the feeling of being raped.

    The man was familiar to me. Family. He was probably in his late teens or early twenties at the time.

    He said things to me, but the details are unclear. I laid there as still as I could, confused about what was happening and in shock from the pain.

    This sequence of events was from a dream that woke me a few years ago. It was at a point in my life when I was in therapy during my divorce and going through EMDR treatments for a handful of other traumatic experiences I’ve had. The dream was so real that the pain under my ribs woke me. As soon as I woke up, I knew who the man was: my mom’s youngest brother, a schizophrenic who’d struggled with drug abuse for many years and who also served time in prison for being caught in a child-porn sting.

    I knew some details about this man’s childhood because through the years my mom and other family members revealed the horrors that came from growing up in that household. Both brothers would end up becoming schizophrenic. It was clear that they suffered the brunt of the abuse. I don’t know much about what the sisters went through, but I’m sure it was deeply traumatizing as well.

    Growing up in Las Vegas, my mother kept us away from her family in Ogden, Utah. I remember traveling from Las Vegas to Ogden only one time before traveling for my grandfather’s funeral at some point during my teenage years. It didn’t occur to me until years later that she may have been strategically keeping her distance to protect her own children from the monsters in that house. Sadly the next generation did not escape unscathed- I know that the same man in my dream, my mother’s youngest brother, abused some of my cousins.

    I do not know if he abused me or my brother. My mother died in 2006. I asked my dad if he was aware of anything, and he was not. My dad had his own traumas he suffered from while I was growing up, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was too caught up in them to notice anything suspicious happening with his children while we were in that house visiting my mother’s family.

    I do not know if the dream that I had was a memory. Perhaps my brain concocted it from the things I learned over the years about the horrific childhood my mother and her siblings had.

    If it was real, it would explain many things about why I am the way that I am. The fears that I have that do not make sense.

    Perhaps I will never know if that dream was real, and perhaps that is for the best. Is it possible to heal things that your consciousness is repressing?

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  • Heartbreak and Art

    January 31, 2024

    Recently I started drawing and painting with watercolors with my daughters, as a way to give myself a break from the sadness of heartbreak. Most people I’m close to know that I do not consider myself artistic, beyond dance. What they don’t know is that my mother was an avid painter, and she was talented. I remember growing up with an oil painting of hers in our living room of a forest scene with a river and a deer. It was beautiful.

    Looking back on my childhood, I knew I was not talented with drawing or painting very early on. I have clear memories around age 7 or 8 of trying to draw, becoming frustrated, and giving up. I didn’t try much after that point, and only did enough to get by when it was required for a class assignment.

    Perhaps the heartbreak sadness put me in a different neural place than I am normally. I have spent the majority of my life being anxious and emotionally shut down. I can count the number of times I’ve been sad as an adult on one hand. It’s not a place I’m comfortable.

    When I began to draw and later paint, I discovered that I am not as terrible as I remember being. This fascinated me, as it was like a piece of my mother I didn’t know existed was alive in me. She died suddenly on my birthday in 2006, my first year working as a software developer in tech. The small piece of her emerging made me wonder what else from her was inside of me, possibly suppressed all these years.

    I’ve been reflecting on these thoughts the last few weeks, and what I’ve found was startling. I buried all the soft things in myself away from the world, myself and even most of the people in my life, to be safe.

    Why though? What would possess me to do that?

    My father was abusive. He verbally abused my mom almost every night, escalating to physical violence more times than I’d care to admit. My brother and I occasionally became his targets, but my mother was his favorite victim. She was so kind and patient, even while he was in an alcoholic stupor. She did not deserve his violence. I think I must’ve blamed her somehow, and on some deep level decided I’d rather be like my dad than be on the receiving end of the violence. Childhood psyche’s do weird things to protect us. Perhaps I gravitated towards math and away from English and the arts in an attempt to be like him. As young as 5, I was subconsciously shaping my identity in a way to embrace him and shun her.

    My identity formation would not be complete for quite some time. In high school, I was quiet and barely spoke, and people often demanded that I stop mumbling. I felt invisible. Nothing I had done through the years to gain the approval of my father had worked. He was an alcoholic workaholic who missed school performances and award celebrations often. It wasn’t until college that I stopped mumbling, and it wasn’t until I was working in tech that I started speaking in a way that would discourage men from ignoring me and talking over me. I was firm and assertive, quick with the words, often sharp-tongued. I see that now as an over-correction to the mumbling and to the verbal abuse, but it would be one that would persist for a very long time.

    Kindness and patience were traits in me that only my children would see. I’ve always been grateful knowing that the good in me came from her. The traits that made me good in math and tech came from him, or so I thought. It’s possible psychology pushed me that direction more than genetics did.

    With these new revelations about my mother’s traits in me, I’m excited to find out how I will change as I attempt to dig into the past and reconcile the parts of me that have been long exiled. I’ve missed her so much over the years, but I’m only beginning to properly grieve the loss. Now that I know there’s more of her inside of me than I thought, in some small way I find myself comforted.

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  • Reflections on Dating, at 48

    January 28, 2024

    I do not enjoy dating, and also do not have much experience with it. I only dated a small handful of men (boys?) by the time I got married at 21.

    Now that I’m older, I have things going for me that I did not back then. I’m a bit wiser, educated, and not in a rush to have children since I have four, but I find myself missing the naïveté of youth. I miss the excitement of dating and getting to know someone without the weight of the world on my shoulders. I miss the days when it felt like time would never run out, and we had everything to look forward to and nothing to regret. I miss the simplicity of days long gone.

    Lately it seems that everyone dating at my age is in a weird rush. So eager to find the next person but too busy to get to know them, willing to make quick judgments based on looks and initial chemistry, and not interested in assessing for compatibility and depth. It makes me wonder if our culture has irrevocably broken relationships with its collective short attention span and fantastical definition of love.

    Not all hope is lost though! While dating apps have trashed the modern dating scene, there is a focus online with emotional intelligence and healing. Many terrible people who have no real intent on “doing the work” use the psychological lingo as an attempt to signal that they are healed while continuing in their toxic behaviors, but there are also many good people undertaking the hard work of looking inward and correcting their own bad patterns. I’m sure my own bad patterns will show up on this blog in many of my posts as I have painfully become aware of many of them over the last several years.

    I’m grateful for therapists and psychologists putting free content online, and in abundance. I am thankful for the wisdom of people like Matthew Hussey and Jay Shetty. I find a great deal of hope knowing that so many people are listening to them.

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