My Struggle with Depression–Part 1

This is not my regular type of post but I am committed to sharing more about myself on the blog this year and my journey with depression. Yes, you read the title right. There is something less than a dozen people know about me. (Until I press publish on this post). For nearly the past two years I have struggled with depression. It comes and goes and for me I can only describe it like the commercial that says depression hurts. I have written this post over and over in my head a thousand times but I wasn’t quite ready to share it yet. I didn’t want this post to be a reason for people to feel bad for me but rather a way to bring awareness. Depression is still something that seems to be kept hush-hush and swept under the rug or hidden. I think for some people they hide their depression because it may be seen as a sign of weakness or embarrassing (which is how I initially felt). The fact is that many people struggle with depression and talking about it or getting help can really be the best thing. It all started in the Spring of 2011. I had my two boys and at the time Wyatt was 3 and Mason was almost 2. I was working part time, taking online classes and was home with the boys on my days off. My husband works a high stress job which requires 12 hour shifts and rotation between nights and days every three months. I felt overwhelmed. I either felt like I never got a moment to myself or was struggling to meet due dates on my schoolwork. I was in a constant state of stress and anxiety along with mood swings. I blamed the mood swings on my irregular period and birth control. After Mason was born I had an implant put in my arm which was supposed to last three years. Now after nearly a year and a half my period became irregular and I just didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t know if it was because I  had joined the gym a few months prior and had lost about 20 pounds but if anything I thought that would have helped my stress level. When things didn’t get better I called the doctor and made an appointment to have the birth control removed. I spoke to her about my blues and she told me that they could have been due to my now smaller size and the power of the birth control. I opted to stop taking birth control all together. A few months went by and my period returned to normal. My happy go-lucky self did not. I had always been a smiley glass-half-full type of person. I had always tried to see the light in any situation but there was this constant stress of bills that never seemed to be up to date, the feeling of loneliness while my husband worked or slept and on top of that my grades were the worst they had ever been in my life. I tried to keep myself so busy that I couldn’t even think about the stress. There were still bad days when I yelled at my kids for being too loud or energetic around the house or literally cried over spilt milk. Most of the time I cried though. I cried when I was mad, sad or for absolutely no reason. All of this seemed to happen behind closed doors and while my husband was at work. My husband is my best friend but he didn’t understand it. He would get fed up or mad with my attitude. He didn’t even want to be around me when I cried because it got to the point where it was a regular thing and he didn’t know how to handle it. None of this made things any better. When he wanted to go places on his days off and I gave him a hard time he thought I was being selfish. I wasn’t communicating my real feelings with him and assumed he should just read my mind. I assumed he should understand that I was going through a rollercoaster of feelings and just needed his support. Looking back it was my way of crying out for help but not in a very good way. Sometimes people need you to just tell them straight out what is going on. Deep down I knew I was depressed and something was wrong but I was too proud to admit it. My husband wasn’t able to put it all together. I felt like I was carrying the weight of resentment towards him on my shoulders and the more I kept things in the worse the next wave of depression would be. Things went on like this until the Fall when my husband finally started to see what was going on and planned an intervention of sorts but everything got worse before it got better. To be continued…. (This is the most exposed I feel I have been on my blog before so please be kind with your comments. I am not asking for pity but rather sharing this because I want to bring awareness to the situation in hopes it helps someone else who is going through what I have gone through on this journey.)