Finding Purpose

Very recently, I hit rock bottom.

When I say rock bottom, I mean the lowest I've been in my life.

What got me there was a family member coming dangerously close to taking their own life. In response, I came ridiculously close to ending my own.

Let me explain what ridiculously means: For the first time in 35 years, I came to a conclusion as to how I would end my life.

I didn't know when I would do it, but in the moment, I felt it would be soon. I decided I would go ahead and update my will and start getting rid of any excess goods I had to lessen the burden on my survivors. Because I'm me, I suppose, I also came to the conclusion in the moment that I was not in a rational enough frame of mind to take action right then. I decided I would need to sleep on it and give myself a few days before I started the process.

You might think of me, what's happened in my life, what I've said about having a member of my family consider their own life and think, "Well, of course you hit rock bottom. Perfectly understandable." But as having had depression my entire life and having been through many other stressful situations, I myself was startled by finding the bottom. I was so startled that I struggled for a couple of weeks to get my head above water.

Fortunately, I already had a scheduled visit to a counselor because I've been feeling overwhelmed in general lately. Everything has felt immeasurably harder and I've been frustrated as to why. My conversation with my counselor involved a requirement to sign a contract that I wouldn't hurt myself.

Initially, I was angry:

"You can't take away my autonomy," I told her, "if I decide to take my life, that decision is mine and mine alone."

"Of course, it always is," she replied, "but the sum of it is that if you won't sign a contract, I have to call the police to take you to the hospital so you can be committed."

"Okay, let me think on that."

After a couple of minutes, she interrupted my thoughts with, "How would your children feel? There are still people that need you."

I became enraged, "But the whole point is that I don't have anything to live for. And I can't and won't live for anyone else anymore. I have to live for myself, but I have to find a reason why."

After I spoke it, I realized what I needed and was able to sign a contract, adding my own addendum that if I felt I was a threat to myself, I would take myself to the hospital. Over the next few days, I talked to those closest to me, letting them know what was there for me and telling them what I was searching for.

Finally, after a conversation with a friend I hadn't seen in almost a year, I realized what I was missing: My Purpose.

You see, when I was a child, as mentioned in A Promise to Myself, my sole purpose in life became turning 18. With all that was happening, I reasoned all I had to do was make it to age 18 and my life would be in my hands, to do with as I pleased. While I was still 18, I met my now ex-husband. On our first date, as he told me what his children had already been through in their very young lives, I discovered my next purpose: to ensure they reached adulthood feeling loved and cared for.

Well, guess what? My youngest turned 18 just over a month ago. This left me totally without purpose. Also, since he's a quite independent young man and has been for some time, I started feeling purposeless back in June or so. But it took this situation with the family member and then my own to realize that purpose was what I was missing.

I'm pleased to announce that I have already discovered my next purpose: To Love and Care for Myself. You've probably already noticed me working on this to some degree, but I feel it's time to own it. So I'm going to spend the next chunk of my life working on discovering what makes me happy individually and then obtaining it. I'm also working on falling in love with myself, loving myself the way I've always wished someone would love me.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to find this purpose fulfilled, but I do hope that I'm more aware next time, so I can find one soon after.

I can say this, at least: having the purpose of loving myself and making myself happy makes it so much easier to swim and not sink when major stress comes along.

Turning 35

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." --Barack Obama

Wow, this year has been one heck of a wild ride.

The amount of personal growth I've experienced in the last twelve months has been so exponential, it's been mind-blowing.

This time last year, I wasn't working due to a back injury and I was mostly laying around feeling sorry for myself.

For my birthday last year, I did the same thing I have done every year for 35 years: I sat around and wished someone I loved would do something spectacular to demonstrate how much they loved me.

This year?

For the first time--ever--I took my own birthday in hand and decided how I would celebrate my own life.

Rather than wishing and hoping someone else would celebrate me, I decided to celebrate me. I thought about what would make me happy, what would be a pleasurable way to celebrate 35 years of life, and I planned it out.

So tomorrow, I leave for a 3 day road-trip with my best friend. We're going to Austin, where I most recently moved from and we're going to generally have fun and visit some of my old friends. People I miss, people I love.

Because that has been the theme to the last twelve months:

Identifying what I want and need and getting it for myself.

I took my first trip to Europe this year, spending half of the time travelling by myself, seeing or not seeing sights as it pleased me. And before I left for this trip, I had already started hatching plans for future trips, not just to Europe, but to other places I want to go as well.

I decided multiple times this year that if no one was available to do with me what I wanted to do this was perfectly okay. I spent lots of time by myself, doing things that made me happy.

I took myself out to many dinners, trying all the restaurants I wanted to try and seeing all the movies I wanted to see. Instead of buying people in to do things with me (which I still did if I thought they'd truly enjoy it and I wanted to see them enjoy it), I simply went and did them, reveling in the moments of self-joy.

I've spent the last twelve months getting to know myself. Identifying ways I was being that didn't work for me and changing them.

Truly, for the first time in awhile, I took my own life in hand and began sculpting it exactly as I wanted.

When I hit major depression, I recognized it for what it was and went through a medical inventory, soon discovering I was empty on an essential hormone.

When other's needs conflicted with my own, I sometimes said, "I'm sorry, I need to do me, you do you. Once I'm done with me, if you still need help, I'll be glad to help you, but I've got to get me first."

I showed my adult children how powerfully they could take their own lives and selves into their hands. I showed myself that despite my lifelong belief to the contrary, I am a lovable and worthy person.

It's as my now 18 year old son says, "You are what you think you are."

Most importantly, this year, I decided I am the most important person in my world.

My son told me the other night he's been watching me try to find myself for the last few years. The next day I realized,

I FOUND ME

And damn, I like who I am!

Here's to 35 and all the rest of the years, I'm excited to see what else I become. <3

Walking Away

There's this song currently playing on the radio. The first time I heard it, I thought it was beautiful. I was driving in the car and as soon as I heard the piano introduction, I was hooked. I got home that evening and wanted to share it with my kids, so I looked up the YouTube video. Like many others, the song became even more poignant for me after seeing the video. Take a look:

Now here's what makes me different from most others: Most people, when they watch the video, become emotional at the scene where the elderly couple is introduced. Watching the emotion of the man as he is saying goodbye to his wife stirs great emotion. For me, though, I'm teary from the first scene. The scene of the little girl huddling on her bed, with a blanket wrapped around her, which she eventually pulls over her head.

I've mentioned bits and pieces of my childhood before, that things weren't good. So when I reacted with strong emotion to the little girl, I assumed I was simply identifying with her fear, her isolation, hiding under the bed to escape frightening scenarios. From there, I went on, always listening to this song with a touch of emotion, remembering each time the little girl who felt so alone. For that reason, I typically avoid hearing the song, I don't need to spend every day remembering my childhood: I find that best left for the occasional thought.

Then, a friend of mine posted to Facebook a cover of this song. The band covering the song is called Pentatonix and I absolutely love their music, I sang in an a cappella choir for eleven years. When I saw the video, I absolutely had to watch it, knowing the music would be even more beautiful than the original song. I commented before I clicked the link, "OMG, I know I'm going to cry!"

Sure enough, I did. I bawled my eyes out watching this video, crying so hard tears were dripping off my chin.

Afterward, because I take a walk down memory lane every time I hear this song, it finally dawned on me why it is this song touches me so much. It can't possibly be just the image of the little girl, she's not in the Pentatonix video.

No, what touches me is realizing I did exactly what this song suggests one might do: I walked away.

I've mentioned previously walking away is a big deal for me. One of the reasons I end up (and stay) in abusive/disrespectful relationships is I can't stand walking away from people. I felt like my parents walked away from me when I was a teenager, because they kept passing me back and forth, "My spouse has a problem with her, I need you to take her for awhile." "I can't handle the stress, I need you to take her back, I'll pay for her plane ticket." And so it went until I moved out on my own.

Wait. I moved out on my own.

In light of my previous recollections/thoughts from, "A Promise to Myself," I remember from a very young age I couldn't wait until I was old enough to get away. I promised myself over and over and over again as soon as it was legal for me to be on my own, I would move out. That is exactly what I did.

When I was thirteen, I needed out of my mother's house so bad, I wrote every adult relative I had asking if I could move in with them. When that failed (one of my aunts turned me in, read the letter to my mother), I turned to looking for my father. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of him in seven years, my last memory of him was him being arrested outside my house while I screamed and cried and was dragged away from the window by my older brother. The military police jailed him and held him long enough for my mother to pack up my brother and I and move us out of state.

When I went looking for my father, my mother reminded me he was a junkie and an alcoholic and abusive. "Not to me," was my reply, "he never abused me." With that, the search went on until I eventually located my father, who was five years sober at that point. How that ended can be found in, "Attention, Love, and Affection," after telling my father for over a year that I would leave and never look back if he didn't stop abusing me and start parenting me, I finally left.

This is the point of this story: My parents didn't leave me, I left them.

While I was homeless, shortly after moving out of my father's house, my mother begged me to come back and live with her. I told her, "I can't. I have to stand on my own now, I have to prove to myself that I can stand on my own and be okay."

So I did.

The little girl who sat huddled in a ball, rocking, crying, stroking her own hair, she got up and she walked away. She proudly and boldly looked her abusers in the eye and said, "No more. I will not take it anymore."

Just like the song says, they were the ones that I loved and I said goodbye. Now that's empowering.

A Promise to Myself

One day in mid 1992, a nearly thirteen year old girl sat huddled in the smallest place she could find. Here, she found solace. She felt reasonably hidden from her abuser and as safe as the moment could allow her to feel. As she sat rocking, crying, arms wrapped around her knees, pulling herself as close together as possible, she reflected on her life.

"Life only sucks because I'm not in control of it," she told herself. Rocking, stroking her hair now in long comforting strokes, she thought, "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. All I have to do is make it to 18, then I will have all the power and I can make myself happy, it doesn't matter what anyone else says, thinks, or does."

Fast forward twenty-one years.

The same girl, now a woman, divorced, with three children lays in bed reflecting on her life.

"Wow, I think I've let myself down. Yes, I've been in control all this time, but at the same time, I haven't. I let society tell me I needed someone else to make me happy, but look."

And look she did. She reflected on the previous weekend.

Through a number of circumstances, she found herself completely alone for the weekend. Only one other soul occupied her home for most of the weekend.

What did she do with herself?

She loved herself. Friday, Valentine's day, a day which she never really celebrated except in small ways as expected by others (an "I love you," here, a pack of Valentine's cards in school there), she decided that she needed to treat herself.

And treat herself she did. She took herself out to see--of all things--a love story. Sitting by herself in the theater, she laughed for 10 minutes straight and burst into random tears of joy and sorrow as a beautiful story unfolded on the screen before her. After the movie, she bought herself dinner, went home and watched an episode of her current show. As she headed to bed, she felt buoyant and alive. Overflowing with joy and happiness and a feeling of being loved. In a moment, she stopped and reflected on her feelings and the words surfaced to her mind, "I love me. I love being alone. I forget, so easily how much I love to be alone. Why? Because nobody loves me like I love me!!" And with that, she went to bed, smiling herself to sleep.

Over the course of the weekend, she went out and spent time with people, casual acquaintances whom she desired to know better and perhaps spend more time with. People with whom she had a good time, good conversation, good food. But at the end of it all, she returned home, alone.

But she did not feel alone.

And now, she remembers that day, all those years ago. She remembers promising to love herself, take care of herself, make herself happy. She remembers how she spent the first eighteen years of her life almost totally alone and hardly ever regretting it.

She remembers, too, all of the times where she has lain in her bed and cried for her loneliness. She remembers all of the times where she has felt that she is destined to walk the world alone. And in this moment, where she remembers all of this, she does not feel lonely. Nor does she feel sad.

Instead she feels powerful. Because she realizes she loves and is loved. She is surrounded by people: friends, family, lovers. Some she talks to nearly daily, some she talks to only when they remember to do so. But none of this means that she is lonely or unloved.

And in this feeling of power, she knows that it is her heart's earnest desire to live alone. Not in a state of never having company. Friends, lovers, family, these will always be welcome in her home for days at a time. But in the end, they will return to their space and her space will be her own.

Because no one loves her like she does and that's exactly the way she likes it.

Reconnecting with Myself

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
--Joan Didion

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you are aware that I have spent this year in a state of self-discovery and self-improvement. This has been quite the life-altering process as I have done more growth in the last year than I had done in the previous ten.

With everything that has happened this year: the car accident, repeated hospital trips, break-ups, moving house...the list simply goes on...it's a wonder I've had time to introspect and at the same time, not surprising at all. Great stress brings with it great change--whether for better or worse.

Some of this year's changes have seemed for worse. Lately, it has been brought to my attention that I am overly critical of myself. We all know the phrase we are our own worst critics. This year, my internal critic has been a right bitch. Completely and totally unforgiving of even the slightest mistakes. And to boot, I've been fighting her through the haze of all the stressors of this year. The language I've used on myself recently has been the very thing I would take another to task for were they to use it on someone I love.

Why, then, would I use it on myself?

It's become quite obvious: I do not love myself.

I do not think I am a bad person, I do not think I am an ugly person, but at the deepest root of my being, not only do I not love myself, I also do not find myself a lovable or worthy being.

Once I concluded this last weekend, a friend pressed me on this topic: "Andrea, why? Why don't you love you? Why are you unlovable and unworthy?"

Initially, I could not answer this question. I've always known I don't hate me and while I've been harsh of myself lately, I know there's no way I've been this harsh my whole life or I would think much less of myself than I do.

But in digging through my psyche, I realized I have never believed myself lovable or worthy. I have been told, "When I tell you there's nothing wrong with you and you are beautiful, you dismiss my words. You don't believe me." And this has nothing to do with the speaker, this has entirely to do with me and my self-view.

Now, I could go on and tell you what happened in my childhood that led me to this place. I could tell you of the drugs and the abuse, the absent and/or unavailable adults, the way I jumped between an adult and another child in the hopes that my tiny body could shield someone I loved from pain. And the feeling of utter defeat when I realized I had no power to save the people I loved.

In the end, though, it makes no difference. The fact is, I was a child. And from my child's perspective, I could not understand the grown-up things that were going on simply took more precedence than me and whatever I was doing. Later in childhood, I tried to make up for it by becoming a delinquent and miscreant, since it seemed to garner attention. Then, in late adolescence, I came to the conclusion this was not a sustainable life model and I began my journey to who I am now, carrying with me the most unworkable conclusion I had come to.

That conclusion was that no matter what I did, I could never be worthy or lovable. But that I should always try. My entire self is predicated on this notion. I have struggled for the last thirty plus years to make myself lovable and worthy, the one thing I had already concluded I could never be.

Damn. No wonder I could never feel secure in a relationship. How can a person prove they love me if, at my root, I believe myself to be unlovable?

So, then, the question now stands: What do I do with this information?

Who am I?

Knowing that I came to such an erroneous conclusion frees me to know that I am lovable and worthy. But without this notion of unlovable and unworthy, again the foundation which I have built my self upon, how do I know who I am?

The answer to this is really quite simple. I am still me. All of my values, goals, loves, hard work, remain the same. What is removed is simply the notion that no matter how hard I try I can never be loved. What is also removed is the need to be loved, the feeling of desperation, the feeling that I am not worthy. Don't get me wrong, it's not wholly gone, but it's on its way out the door, I can feel it.

And in the meantime, I'm spending time reconnecting with myself. Doing things I haven't done since I was a child, things that when I was a child I berated myself and called myself unworthy for. As silly as it may sound, I have started coloring. Actually went out, bought two coloring books and a box of crayons and sat down and colored some pages:

The simple act of sitting down to color has created not only a sense of zen, but a quiet appreciation of myself. Something that I did not do, even in childhood, because I told myself I was incapable of doing so. And here I am, finding peace in the smallest of activities.

But more importantly than peace, I'm finding love. Love for myself, my capabilities and lack thereof. My daughter sat next to me at the table and while I know I can't draw or color as well as she can, at the same time I know that I'm capable of anything I set my mind to and that anything I choose as worthy is worthy because I'm worthy. And that's the long and short of it.

Being Too Independent

It has been brought to my attention multiple times lately that perhaps I'm too independent. I don't rely on others the way humans ought to or something of that nature.

The most recent example of this was my last trip to the hospital. I woke up in severe pain and quite reasonably, so I felt, did nothing about it, attributing it to food I had eaten the day before. Around one in the afternoon, I attempted to take my kids to the State Fair as had been planned. Let me say here, since I attributed the pain to having eaten something I knew I shouldn't have, I was expecting it to go away by afternoon. But I've also been in chronic pain due to an injury and so I took the pain medication I had for that with me and dosed myself while waiting to park, absolutely determined to enjoy the fair with my kids.

When I went to get out of the car after parking, the pain was so bad, I could barely get out of the car. I told the kids I wasn't sure I was going to be able to go to the fair, but I would at least get them to the gate. Despite the drug I had swallowed approximately 30 minutes before, I was in so much pain I could barely move. I shuffled along at a snail's pace and then finally, I became dizzy, clammy, nauseous, and began hyperventilating. I stopped my kids and got down to the ground in the event I lost consciousness. I described all my symptoms to the kids, in the event an ambulance had to be called. I had a moment of absolute panic. The symptoms subsided within five minutes and I realized I could not even get the kids to the gate. I chalked up the symptoms to taking the drug, the hot sun, and the energy drink I had consumed in the car. I told the kids they were welcome to go to the fair, but I needed to go home and possibly to the hospital, but I was unsure. The kids walked me back to the car and then took themselves to the fair.

I drove home, contemplating whether or not I should go to the hospital. I've been in lots of pain over the last six months and while this was different, it didn't necessarily translate to needing treatment or warranting emergency. After I arrived home, I rested for an hour or two, attempted to take something for my stomach (remember, I thought it was something I ate) and when I realized I had been in severe, unsubsiding pain for over 7 hours, I finally admitted that I needed to see a doctor to have the systems checked. I should include here that both of my parents are nurses and I have a LOT of medical knowledge. I grew up with parents who assessed my symptoms and followed a lot of "wait and see," before seeking treatment, both with myself and themselves.

My personal experience with emergency rooms, whenever I've sought treatment for myself or one of my children is that, for the most part, they administer a lot of first aid. Unless something is truly life-threatening, there's not much they can do. Much should be handled by a regular physician as opposed to the staff whose real job is to save lives.

So why didn't I go to the emergency room sooner?

I didn't feel there was any threat to my life.

Why did I go to the emergency room when I did?

Because when pain has lasted that long and has not responded to a drug which is designed to eliminate/reduce pain, there's potentially something life threatening going on.

And indeed, six CT scans later, I was admitted to the hospital to have my abdomen hoovered and my appendix needlessly removed (it was an excuse to hoover the abdomen).

Was there ever truly an emergency?

Probably not.

Should I have gone to the emergency room sooner?

I could have, but it wasn't necessary. Even the surgeon agreed that my timeline was reasonable and acceptable.

But now, I have an increased reputation for being "tough as nails," "too independent," and "stubborn." I drove myself to the ER, and had some intervening company while I was there. I was mostly by myself in the hospital and while I might have liked more company, I was zonked, so when my bestie and my daughter came to visit, I sent them away within a half hour so I could sleep more (they also had a toddler with them and they are contradictions to rest).

I balk a little at this reputation, but on the other hand, I accept. I know myself to be logical and reasonable. And sometimes, just like any other human being, I get illogical and unreasonable, but I'm always willing to hear out the reason of others. That's why I'll be going back to the hospital tonight or tomorrow (is there ever a convenient time to do so?) and getting treated for my continuing issue. In the meantime, I will know that those who call me too independent and stubborn are doing so because they care.