The Ashes

 

At the very beginning, I very naively named this blog, Life More Beautiful. I wanted our life to be beautiful. I am not alone in wishing life to be beautiful. I think most people in America wish for their life to be beautiful. Why else do we have Pinterest and glamourous magazines?

But what I didn't realize is that to get to the beauty, you must first go through the ashes. Seriously? Why does it have to be that way? If we could just cut out the ashes and get straight to the beauty, life would be happier. Probably a lot more shallow, but happier.  Being the ashes, stinks. It's just a pile of mess (sometimes the mess is made by you and sometimes it just happens to you) and there is no way to tell when the beauty will come or how the beauty will be made. Somedays there doesn't even seem to be hope for beauty. You just feel stuck; sifting through whatever is left. There is the promise that there will be beauty.

I wish I was typing that we have made it thru and pen some great, wise advice for you. Advice about to handle the ashes and waiting for beauty. But, the truth is, some days it feels like there are so many ashes in our life, that we will never leave. I don't always handle it well either. Which stinks for Brent and the kids and probably anyone else in close proximity to me.

One thing we deal with is that I started taking anxiety/depression medicine several months after we adopted the kiddos. Apparently adoption can be just as stressful or traumatic on the parent as it can be on the children. And apparently there is post adoption depression just as there is postpartum depression after giving birth.

Everything was going along just fine until a few months ago. I had some side-effects from the medicine where my body was acting almost as if I had quit the medicine cold-turkey. So my doctor cut my dosage in half. Yay. Maybe now we can get off this and carry on with life. HA! Nope. About a month after the dosage was cut, my body turned on me. I had extreme nausea (TMI?) for about 30 hours. Brent wound up taking me to the ER early Sunday morning.  When I say extreme, I mean it was like having a panic attack for an entire weekend. It took me about 2 weeks to get back to "normal".

That weekend I felt like daylight never came. It always felt dark to me. The "dark" continued for a few days. I didn't like being alone and I was terrified that the experience would come back. I still get worried about it.

It's sort of weird writing about this topic. I have been planning to write about it for awhile, but just wasn't sure what to write. I have a friend who recently blogged about her dealings with depression. So I decided to just get on with it.

I think depression/anxiety come with a stigma which is probably why I was reluctant to say something. It's also not the most exciting topic either.

This is one part of the ashes that could have really been left out.

I'll leave you with that. It's bed time. And I could say a lot more, but this is a post, not a book! I'll finish it up in a few days.

Good night!