Category Archives: mental health

On being human…

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Sometimes I wonder at how the human race has been able to survive.  Humans can be pretty stupid. At least this human can.  There are a set of behaviors that, when I do them, make me feel great.  When I don’t do them or do them half-assed, then I feel like crap. So it seems really simple that I would do the behaviors right?  Wrong.

When I am not exercising, I make every excuse in the world to not go exercise.  I say things like I don’t feel well, or I didn’t sleep well, or I don’t have time because I need to work… blah, blah, blah.  In actuality, if I make time to exercise then I have more energy to get more work done, I sleep better and it makes me feel amazingly great.

That leads to the question, why don’t I consistently exercise?  I am sort of a yo-yo exerciser.  There are times in my life that I have been very consistent, usually when my life is in routine. Then something happens, usually something big that takes me out of my routine…a death, surgery, moving, etc.  And then months (years) go by until I am on the edge of miserable and pick up the threads of exercise again and get into a routine.  You’d think by now, at 50 years old, I have learned to keep my exercise routine especially when my life is out of routine.  Nope, not yet.

Another behavior that I have to do to maintain good health is eat right.  I am not a fan of any certain diet plan, but I do believe we are what we eat so I prefer to just eat real food.  I try to eat things that have ingredients my grandmother would have recognized.  So nothing that contains diglycerides or weird words like that and no “artificial” colors or flavors.  I mean really, what is in an artificial flavor anyway?  Why not just use the real flavor?  When I eat real food, my body just feels good.

When I am not eating right, I make every excuse in the world to eat crap.  I don’t have time because of work, I don’t feel well so I want comfort food, I am tired so don’t feel like cooking wholesome food… blah, blah, blah. In actuality, if I make time to cook great food, I have more energy for work, I feel better and I sleep better.  HMM…I am seeing a pattern here.

So why don’t I just eat right all the time?  Well usually it starts with doing something outside my routine like visiting people or going to a party, packing and moving, traveling, etc….times when it is easy to stop for something quick or throw together something processed.  Then it just spirals downward.  Finally, when I feel like crap, I get back into a routine of cooking and then I feel great again.  You’d think by now, at 50 years old, I’d have learned the lesson of staying in a routine of eating well especially when my life is out of its routine.  Nope, not yet.

A third behavior is making time for fun, rest and relaxation. When I do that each day, give myself a little time to just let down, I am a lot more centered and happy.  But instead, I take fun activities and make them stressful by putting pressure on myself to do things perfectly.  Riding or working on a bike should be a fun activity, but I have to do it perfectly.  Skiing should be a fun activity but I have to do it perfectly. Knitting should be a fun activity but I have to do it perfectly. I can suck the joy right out of a fun activity.  So in essence, I make things chores that should be fun.  When I allow myself to let go and relax, I feel better, sleep better, and have more energy for work. Unfortunately, I don’t just practice perfection when I am out of routine, I do it all the time. I should change my name to Joyce Ucher.   By 50 years old, you’d think I’d have learned to work on consistently making time for fun and relaxation every day.  Nope, not yet.

No, I haven’t learned all of life’s lessons yet, but that is the great part of being human, to allow myself to make mistakes, very human mistakes. I feel great right now because I have been sticking to my intentions and my plans for my life that I made back in Nepal. I am getting back in a routine…. which is very different from the way my life has been since I started this blog.

So here is my lesson: today is a new day.  So whether you have stuck to your New Year’s resolutions or not, cut yourself some slack.  Remember that each day is a new day, it doesn’t have to be on January 1.  You can start again.  Today.

For me, today, I will do my best to eat right, exercise and relax.  Tomorrow, I will do my best for that day.  And maybe by the time I am 80, I will have learned.  Nope, probably not… but the thing I hope to have learned is just to do my best…every day.  I am never going to be perfect and I have to stop beating myself up whenever I am not.

Cheers and happy New Day!  Robin

 

The best kind of guide…

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A few years ago, the day after I took my first and only powder skiing lesson and while I was still only a comfortable blue run skier, my friend Matt and I went up to Stevens Pass where, on the first run of the day after a foot of new snow, Matt suggests we go up Seventh Heaven, an ungroomed, black diamond run.  Matt, with his usual encouragement says “Robin, you can totally do this, I will stay right beside you the whole time”.  We get off the chair at the top, Matt straps his boots into his snowboard and he is gone…I got down that mountain by myself solely for the purpose of wringing his neck when I finally got to the bottom.  His response to me, “but you did it, and now you know you can do it again”.  I swear I don’t know why I listen to that kid sometimes.

When Matt suggested I come to Nepal, his words were “come to Nepal, I will be your guide. You just get here, I will take care of the rest”.  Yeah, I still haven’t learned yet.  When I got to Nepal, as typical of the way he “guides” me, he starts off by getting us a bus ride to Pokhara where he asks me, “did you get a hotel room”?  Hmmm…. is this part of the “you’ll take care of everything plan?”.  Typically, it was like that with everything that happened in the two weeks I was there. The kid had no plan at all… or did he?  I joked with him one day and asked exactly what “kind of guide he was” since he pretty left me to figure everything out on my own and to handle all the crises that came up.  His answer: “I am the best kind of guide”.  I am still trying to figure out whether the boy is a brilliant or just an accidental genius.  Either way, once again, it worked.

But it takes coming home to truly realize how far you’ve come.  The greatest gift of travel isn’t the adventure, new countries, languages, foods, customs, etc… or all the things that traveling brings.  Those are all great but are only part of the real gift of travel.  The real gift is returning home, forever changed.  I am very proud of where I am at this moment.

P1080585So where am I? Physically, I recently returned to my son’s home in North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving (American) with my son and my lovely daughter-in-law and the two most amazing grandchildren ever, Brooklyn and Charlotte.

I have been here less than 48 hours and I am already amazed at how I feel. In the past, when I visited my son, who lives in my former marital home, I was always bombarded with memories and thoughts of how life “should have worked out for me”.  I had always expected to be living in this house, happily married to the man I loved, celebrating holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas with our children and grandchildren coming to visit us. I would ride past the university I went to and used to teach for and just be overwhelmed with missing the friends I had, the job I was great at, the life I loved, all of it.  I would long for my past life back. I hadn’t realized how much that longing was holding me back until now.

The night I cried to Matt in Nepal, something changed in me. Maybe it was the yoga and meditation or maybe it was the stark conditions of the country and pushing myself through physical difficulty and preserving.  red scarfMaybe it was the spiritual nature of hiking up to the World Peace Pagoda or up to the top of Sarankot or maybe it was the awe-inspiring site of looking out at the Himalayas which is a sight I will never forget as long as I live. himalayasMaybe it happened while I as paragliding with vultures or when I fell off the side of the cliff and was hanging by the vegetation and lost my shoes and had to walk back to my hotel barefoot. Maybe it happened through just overcoming obstacles and crises and realizing that I could face any challenge on my own.  Regardless, sometime during that time, something changed.

IMG_3305I knew I felt different when I left Nepal and went to Barcelona, I just didn’t realize how different I was until I came back into the familiar environment in which I spent almost half my life.  The familiarity of that world was in stark contrast to the person I have become. Now, I sit in this house and it glows with the energy and vitality of my grandchildren and the love my son and his wife share.  IMG_3259I got to meet my ex-husband’s lovely and charming girlfriend and watch them interact with my two beautiful granddaughters who love them dearly.  I couldn’t help but feel joy in my heart for all of it, for such a loving and happy family.  It is something I never could have imagined over the darkness of the past 6 years.

I look around this place where I used to live. I have appreciated the beautiful changing seasons, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the campus and know that I hold no attachment to it other than in appreciation of the memories of all the wonderful times I spent here.  It was a wonderful place to raise two beautiful, well-adjusted children, and where I had the opportunity for an amazing career teaching high school and the start of my college teaching career. It is a place where I had spectacular friends and experiences, and where I loved and laughed and lived over half of my life.

IMG_3318Life is sweet, all of it, the good and the bad.  Because of everything that happened, my beautiful daughter got to finish college, start a great career, and meet her amazing partner Ethan. Everything that happened gave me an opportunity to fall in love with the PNW and all the remarkable treasures that area of the world holds. It gave me the chance to reach down into the most creative part of myself and take risks in my career. It has given me a wealth of new experiences and friends that I never would have otherwise met.

I am more centered, happy, confident, peaceful, and accepting than I have ever been in my whole life. Traveling and returning home has made me that much more aware of how great a gift my life has been.

Namaste

From a friend…

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Greetings from Wichita Falls, TX!

The first time I met Robin was in a bar in Paso Robles, CA. Although I had never met her (we began our friendship online), I felt I knew her well. In the heat of my impending divorce, she became one of my closest pen pals, offering emotional support and advice to get through the turmoil that had replaced what I thought was a very good life. Little did I know that meeting her would change how I live and redefine my personality.

It all started with a sexy black dress. That black dress revealed an artistic truth (her tattoo) I was unaware of. I don’t know what I expected, but the person I met was both exactly who I thought she was and someone completely different than anticipated. With a warm hug, the Internet personality was replaced by a living, breathing individual possessing warmth, depth, and vulnerability. I do not believe she realized this at the time, but she instantly became one of my most cherished friends. We mingled throughout the bar that night, meeting people from various parts who came together for the joy of cycling. What struck me the most was how engaged Robin was in every conversation. She listened to everyone, invested 100% in the subject matter at hand. Robin’s sincerity was new to me. I began to realize that most of the people I knew – colleagues, friends, etc. – just did not possess the emotional investment in others that Robin invests. In a word, I immediately trusted her.

After some great riding, we gathered as a group to celebrate the day’s events. I remember feeling isolated. I am a large guy, a former football player, not exactly the typical cyclist. I felt out of place. Sitting on the steps of the porch, drinking a beer, Robin came over, sat down beside me, and we quickly moved into a deep conversation, relaying our fears, our hurt, and how we planned on moving on. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but she mentioned her sabbatical, a yearlong event that was to be an awakening, an exploration of the world. As I often do, I offered to help her move out of her apartment, even though I lived 1200 miles away. I really didn’t think she would take me up on the offer. But she did. A few weeks later, I was in Seattle (my favorite city), immersed in Robin’s life…. and her stuff. Between eating great food, seeing her favorites spots, and meeting her wonderful friends and family, we went through all of her possessions, slowly purging all of the things that were a part of a former life. In the end, everything that she owned was in a small corner of a one-bedroom apartment. Her purge was truly impressive.

The purging process was at times very emotional, and other times, funny as hell. (Robin: remember the jean shorts argument?) Most of all, it was courageous. Robin’s courage to change EVERYTHING in her life, to move on from the shackles of a former existence, impressed upon me how much metaphorical baggage we carry. This is not to say there was no fear; she commented many times how she didn’t believe she could do it. Yet, she never wavered from her commitment to see it through. Robin’s belief in herself and her ability to rise above fear should never be underestimated. She once said to me that it isn’t about the absence of fear, but the acceptance of fear, fear that is a natural part of who we are.

As I have moved into a new job, new city, new relationship, a new design for how I plan to live my life, I cannot thank Robin enough for her influence on me and on the lives of others. In reality, she helped save me from myself. I volunteered to help write a blog entry before I actually thought it through. I didn’t think she would hop on board with it so quickly. And while I feel my life is rather mundane in comparison to Robin’s experiences, I thought this would be a great opportunity to explain to her how much her friendship means to me, and that, while absent physically, those who read this blog travel with her in spirit. Robin has lived more in the past year than most do in a lifetime, sharing her experiences and vulnerability without succumbing to the fear, and for that, Robin, I thank you. I am humbled and can only hope I live up to the standard which you have set.

Matt (the other one)

Like the layers of an onion…

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I am always amazed when life lets me hear exactly what I need to hear exactly at the moment I need and am ready to hear it. I don’t know why that amazes me because it happens all the time.  For me, it happens when I feel like I have reached the bottom.  Maybe that is the only time in my life that I stop struggling and just let go trying to control everything and just allow myself to BE.  That is when I can hear what I need to hear.

It was funny, I had been stressing about filling up the next two weeks in Andalucía for the last two weeks. Nothing I tried to book worked, from my B&B reservations that got cancelled, to my debit card not working to book my train tickets, etc.  If all those frustrating things hadn’t happened, I would still be miserably stressing over how to fill up my days. Because of my frustration, I lamented that to Matt in a message a few days ago and he said, “come to Nepal” and I said, “if I can work the details out I will”. After all the frustration I had in Spain, I thought there was no way in hell I would be able to organize a trip to Nepal in 3 days, I hadn’t even been able to get a hotel room in Granada. Yet amazingly, all the plans just fell into place, like this was exactly what I was supposed to do at this moment.  Funny how that happens.

Now I sit here, all checked in for tomorrow’s early morning flight.  I have to admit, I am looking forward to seeing my friend even just for a couple of days.

I process things in a cyclical fashion, maybe we all do. It is like a spiral, where I go round and round with an issue, thinking I have got it solved, until it rears its head again. Only when I look at it closely, it isn’t quite the same, it is better than it was, just not finished yet. And it keeps spiraling around and around getting tighter and tighter, kind of like being caught in a whirlpool or a black hole, until all of a sudden, it is actually gone and isn’t an issue anymore.  In this case, my struggle has been with the same old thing that I have been whining about for months, maybe years… my attachment to the past and the way life “should” be.

And then, a couple of days ago, this is what someone told me about my “stuckness”:

Start with what is clogging you up, figure out what isn’t relevant to your life or is harmful to your well-being.  If it is still there, there is a reason.  Find it, learn that reason and then find another way to acquire that need and then get rid of what isn’t relevant. When that thing is out of your life, look again at what is holding you back.  Layer by layer, like the layers of an onion, peel away what is in your life by habit that serves you no purpose, refine what is left so you understand what’s their use. In the end it should get very slim.

Remember you are not letting go of the love or the lessons, only the attachment. Some people need to stay in your life, not because of your need but theirs.  Some people need to go, not because you don’t love them but because they aren’t good for you or you for them. Be gentle but strong, lovingly push them away, send them with good wishes and a prayer but walk away. By giving people their freedom and letting go of things you find your own freedom, even though it is the last thing you planned.

Yeah… that did it.  I felt like I had been shot from a proverbial cannon.  What hit me was that is what I have been doing ever since I started this journey when I started giving up all my stuff.  I have been methodically peeling away all the layers.  With each challenge I have faced, I am more and more exposed to the core of what I am.  There is nothing left to hide behind.  I have finally reached the really, really hard internal attachments that I still cling to.  And basically, I am stuck because I don’t really want to face them. I have been blaming the lack of home and physical possessions, but it isn’t the “stuff”… things like money and furniture… where I am stuck is my story and who I believe I am and the disconnect between that and who I want to be.

I knew this would be the hardest part.  And it is. It makes giving up my physical stuff from my apartment look like it was a walk in the park.  Yikes.  I will say it again, because I personally need the reminder, life is exactly as it should be.

Eat, Pray, Love

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I have never read the book Eat, Pray, Love.  I understand basically how it goes: girl gets divorced and travels around for a year (paid for by her publisher) and “finds herself” by going to Italy and nurturing her physical self, then to India to discover her spiritual self, and then to Indonesia where she meets the man of her dreams. It was immortalized in a film by Julia Roberts. I have never seen the film either. I just want to go on the record to say that I am not trying to recreate a novel that I haven’t read or a movie that I haven’t seen.  But I have changed my plans and am going to Nepal.

In what has been a series of events from when I first started planning my sabbatical to now, life has just unfolded and happened the way it has happened. I have no regrets in anything I have done. Life is an adventure and best savored fresh and hot in the moment. Whether I enjoyed the taste of it or not, it all was meant to be experienced and learning happened.  And with that said, it is time to stop traveling and take a break for a little while.

So I am going to meet my friend Matt in Kathmandu on Sunday morning and head to Pokhara.  I am not sure what he has planned for me and I am sure that whatever it is, it will make a good story and probably end up with me jumping off something while screaming my fool head off or ending up in a Nepalese jail somewhere. Whatever the challenge is, when Matt asks me if I want to do it, my answer is going to be yes, with no fanfare, I am just going to jump.  What I hope to gain from this change of plans is a chance to see what my friend loves about Nepal and its people.  I hope to blog about it and take wonderful pictures to capture a world that, for one of the people I respect most in life, gives him tremendous personal joy and meaning.

Another hidden agenda item for me that has made me give up my original goal of heading to Andalucía is that I want to go to a yoga/meditation workshop in Nepal. Not because of any Eat, Pray, Love ideas. I am searching for inner peace and the ability to let go of resentments. I have had some success at that in the past, mediation and yoga have kept me centered throughout my divorce and the subsequent abuse and manipulation by my therapist.  But for some reason, since this spring when I gave up my apartment, I have struggled to maintain any kind of consistent practice.  Maybe because of the inconsistency in living arrangements or the moving around from place to place.  But that, along with all the other life upheavals in the past few months, has been effecting my physical and emotional well-being. It has been too much all at once.  I am ready to change that.  I am hoping to increase my knowledge of meditation and yoga practice so that I can manage more effectively on my own regardless of where I am or what life brings me.

So, this is my last full day in my beautiful sunny apartment in central Madrid.  What a beautiful, fascinating and lovely place. I highly recommend it as a place to spend a lovely, relaxing vacation.  I debated what to do today and finally I decided… nothing.  I am going to get the big camera out walk around and take photographs.  This afternoon, I am going to find some lovely tapas bar and have my last gorge on amazing ham, seafood, and Spanish wine. Then tomorrow I am going to move to a hotel near the airport for my early morning flight on Friday to Nepal.

When I get back from Nepal, I will spend 4 lovely days in Barcelona before flying back to North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with my son and daughter-in-law and the two most amazingly intelligent and beautiful granddaughters ever. Then a trip to Maine to visit with some friends from high school who I haven’t seen in 30 years (yikes!) and a visit with my wonderful Maine family before flying back to Seattle for a travel time-out.  I need to spend some time skiing with my friends, enjoying happy hours with Tony and Marisa, supervising Keri’s dissertation, laughing with Maurea, and just refilling my soul with some continuity and familiarity.

The traveling has given me clarity on where my greatest needs are.  I need to be exercising daily, meditating, doing yoga, spending time on my bike and skis which bring me joy, spending time with my friends who make me feel loved and supported, writing and reading for my research, and going back to therapy.  Yes, I said it.  I, the person who distrusts the mental health care profession more than anyone on the planet, am going back to therapy.  I realize there are some things in my life that I am ready to make peace with and that can’t happen without some help. Finding a therapist will be an interesting challenge.

Then, maybe this spring, I will be ready to travel some more.  But right now, I need a break.

The girl who wrote a blog…

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Have you ever climbed stairs?  When I used to work out with my favorite trainer, he loved to make me work out on this stair machine at the gym.  I hated that machine.  I would climb and climb and never go anywhere, I would just be profoundly sweaty in the end, even after just about 3 minutes.  Even though externally I didn’t get anywhere, internally, I gained lot in terms of fitness (thanks Chip). Stairs are hard work. It takes a lot of effort.  Making huge changes like developing a new identity, or even small ones requires steps and those steps feel like climbing a staircase, and it is hard.  I sweat and breathe hard and want to stop and take a break, but just like on that stair machine, if I stop, I go right back down to the bottom.

I read this great blog last night.  It was called Life Divided by Zero. All I could think of is how smart and creative the author is and I wondered, where to hell is she now??  Because none of those words felt consistent with how I am behaving. I have been going down the stairs, or at the very least trying to rest on the step I have gained without going further.

I have realized that I am trying to make a huge change and transition in my life.  There are steps to doing that.  Steps require climbing.  I climbed to the top of step one which was figuring out who I wanted to be and pictured it, visualizing my life as I want it to be.  Then, I made a mistake, I stayed comfortably on that step, magically just waiting for my life to be transformed.  Yeah, it doesn’t work that easily. When I reread the words I had written that “I had to let go of all I am in order to become who I want to be”, it hit me.  I need to climb to the next step.  I know who I want to be and I can visualize it.

Step two, I have to figure out what is holding me back. When I went through my physical stuff last spring, I allowed myself a set amount of space (8 boxes) and then I picked up each thing I owned and asked myself a question: Is this important enough to go in one of those 8 boxes?  From the answer to that question I made three piles: the things I was sure I wanted to keep, the things I was sure I wanted to discard that weren’t working for me anymore, and the things I wasn’t sure of. Then I packed what I wanted to keep, discarded those items that didn’t work, and did a second culling of the “not sure of” pile. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

Just like when I got rid of my physical stuff, I have to go through my internal self. What are the internal and external barriers to becoming the person I want to be? What am I still clinging to in my old life, why am I clinging to it, what purpose is it still serving me?  I have to examine my internal beliefs, attitudes, self-talk, memories, and all the things that are barriers to moving on.  It isn’t just giving up stuff, it is giving up resting in the dysfunction I have been living with in order to keep from doing the work needed to become who I want to be.

This step is even harder than the step where I gave up all my physical stuff.  This step requires going through all that emotional baggage I carry around with me packed up nice and tight in my internal Sampsonite. I have to open it up, expose it, and go through the mental exercise of examining each piece and separating it those same three piles: those things which work for me, those things which I need to let go of, and those things which I am not certain of.  Then letting go of that which I am sure isn’t working and then going through another cull and really getting to the minutiae of the parts that I am not certain of.

If I want to be the girl with the guts and courage who could write this blog, if I really want to BE her and not just talk about being her, and if I really want the life I have visualized, I have to go through the internal work.  Change only comes with the internal processing to make the internal consistent with the external.  This is gonna suck.

Majorca bound

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Here I sit at my gate for my final flight to Spain.  I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it.  Flying across the Atlantic, being in a German airport, it was just a few weeks ago that I did both of those things and cried most of the way. Here I am again. It brought back the waves of emotion I felt after leaving Africa.

A lot of people haven’t been able to understand what my problem has been. And I get it, they look at me as having this fabulous holiday to play. Well let me tell you, as someone who has suffered from and been able to manage PTSD symptoms for most of her life, any traumatic event fires all my emotional neurons. And before my readers poo poo what I am saying, everyone has experienced it.  It is that day of getting emotional and being an ass to everyone before you realize that it was the anniversary date of your partner telling you that she/he wanted a divorce, and when you realized it, you went AH HA…that is why I have been being such an ass. You didn’t even realize the latent emotions that were affecting you or why you couldn’t control them. It is that feeling of remembering exactly where you were and how you felt, even what the weather was like on 9-11-2001.  Or the emotions that are brought on from a smell from childhood, maybe the pumpkin cookies your mom used to make. Or maybe it is fall leaves blowing across a road that triggers it.

If we think that memories of things don’t trigger emotions and that sometimes we don’t realize what is happening, then we are fooling ourselves, because being human means that it is has happened to you at some time.  People who have long term PTSD symptoms feel that feeling magnified and intensified many times over and every traumatic event is a trigger.  We learn to deal, sometimes we deal with things better than others  Having support is key even when we don’t want to tell someone what is wrong (thanks Matt for messaging me all the way from Nepal when I was on the way to the airport.  You are the best.).  And what really sucks is telling people what is wrong and no one understanding how you feel.  They just wondered why I wasn’t all excited for the great adventure.

So I have been struggling. I know I am going to have a wonderful experience in Spain, but I didn’t want to get on that plane. Every fiber of my being was shouting at me to turn around and find a safe place to hide. But here I am. I am looking forward to riding tomorrow and getting all my emotion out in pushing myself physically on a bike tomorrow. I am nervous about riding a bike that isn’t mine, I have only rode steel and this is a carbon fiber bike.  I am not sure what to expect. But regardless…I am going to ride the hell out of that bike.

So that was just an update.  Hopefully by tomorrow or at least by Wednesday, I will have beautiful pictures from Majorca.  Cheers everyone. I am doing it, even though it is very challenging.  I am here, I am flying on planes and I will have some epic bike rides.  One day at a time, one second at a time.

You don’t have to tell the whole story, but it is important to tell people how you feel.

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I have this crazy belief that in order to solve a problem, I first have to admit that I have a problem.  As long as I am in denial, I can keep ignoring it.  When I can be brutally honest with myself and acknowledge it, then I can start thinking about solutions. But that is just me and the way I deal with things, I am not projecting that as advice to anyone else.  So far in my life, it seems to be working for me.

Since I came back from Africa, I have been experiencing situational depression. I have always been sympathetic to mental health issues, but this has given me even greater respect for those who are suffering from depression.  With my passionate Italian/Irish heritage, I would rather be my batshit-crazy emotional self than to have to deal with this soul-sucking emptiness day after day where I try to joke around and appear normal so no one will realize that I am struggling to cope with the simplest tasks like showering.

I think one of the worst parts of mental illness is the secrecy and stigma.  Talking about it, normalizing it, is one of the healthiest ways to deal with it, get support, and ultimately overcome it.  And at some point in our lives, we all go through it.  It isn’t just something that happens to other people.  Just like we get physically ill from time to time, we also go through low periods mentally.  Our mental health is as important and deserves as much respect as our physical health.

So now, I have named my demon. Just like when a person has the flu, there are things I can do to get healthy. What are my challenges and what can I do to overcome them and be well?

For me, I had to consider when it started.  Sometime, mid to late summer, I got overwhelmed by too many life changes.  Giving up my things, being homeless, living out of suitcases, relying on the goodwill of other people for places to stay and basic life necessities like a shower, travelling, etc.  All of it just started to add up and wear on me.  I am a person who appreciates time alone and it just seemed like I constantly had to be around other people or in their homes and there just wasn’t any place to just be myself.

Fly-swatter wands

Fly-swatter wand

Brooklyn & Charlotte

Brooklyn & Charlotte

Because of that, I wasn’t ready to take on the challenge of Ethiopia, so I left Africa, and came back to Seattle.  On hindsight, it might have been wiser to just go to the east coast and stay with my son and play with my granddaughters.  There is nothing like some time on a backyard swingset or playing pretend as fairies to perk up your mental health, especially when it involves fly-swatter wands.

Instead, I came back to Seattle and all I have really wanted to do is get a place of my own and feel normal again.  But of course, that isn’t what I did.  Sometimes I have to wonder, can I ever take the easy road in life?  Just once?  Instead, I booked a five week trip to Spain.  The plan is to go to Mallorca and cycle for a couple of weeks, then to go traipse around southern Spain from Madrid, Seville, Granada, Cordoba until ending up in Barcelona.  After that, I come back to the U.S. to play fairy with Brooklyn & Charlotte.  Sounds great right?  My problem is, I am not sure I have the capacity to get all the details done to make it happen, I am not sure I can get on the plane, I am not even sure I can get out of bed.

After beating myself up over not being able to snap out of it, I realized I had to admit I had a problem to myself and my friends and then go about solving it. I also had to stop the negative self-talk (thanks Jeff).  So for the first time, yesterday, as I was walking back to where I am staying from the grocery store, I was feeling sad and empty and I just allowed it.  I didn’t try to make it wrong and fix it, I just acknowledge the emptiness, and gave myself permission to feel that way.  And guess what?  I felt better.

So today, my goals are to exercise go for a run, shower, eat healthy, work some on my grant that is due next week, show Jeff the KinectMath software, do some rearranging of the suitcases (AGAIN), finish my Spain reservations, and to not get upset with myself if none of that happens. One day at a time and then nine days from now, we will see if I can get on a plane and go to Europe.