Back to Life

After leaving grad school in 1977 to have babies, and run a working farm complete with cattle, horses, chickens, raising a garden, raising four children, mowing pastures with a tractor, stocking a catfish pond and finding the simple pleasures of feeding the fish daily.  So much has passed under the bridge.  So much.  Grief has a hold on me and I cannot let go because if I let go I am afraid her face will fade away and with that the memories which kept me alive with her.  So now I am back on school.  I am taking an MFA class at the University of Alabama where I dropped out in 1977, it was after my first breakdown, that horrible place that finds you and suddenly makes your depression an "event".  So, I had two options to tell my parents I was indeed in a serious fixation of suicide or buck it and do it by myself, I spent many days sitting in the back of my car wrapped in a blanket fixating on leaves falling off trees and counting the acorns as they fell onto the windshield.  Who could I tell?  My friend G rallied and convinced me to seek professional help and I did and wouldn't you know I got a freak for a therapist first time around, he was fixated on masturbation as a cure to depression?   So my assingments were to go home, masturbate (what if I didn't know how?) and come back the next week and give him a detailed translation of my experiment in dedepressing myself through "pleasure".  It still seems surreal to me and after many therapists, I have had the same one now for 11 years who knows me inside and out and has never asked me to masturbate to alleive my depression. 
The funny thing about untreated depression, it grows and grows and grows into a mountain you can't possibly scale and with it comes anxiety, mood disorders, cycling, rapid cycling and finally you are told the reason behind the depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Oh.  But, isn't that reserved for army vets and people with really, really bad memories like 9/11?  No.  PTSD is a result of abuse I learned.  Oh, you mean the beatings from my parents, locked in basements because I misbehaved in church, beatings that become cathartic for my parents so they assume if it makes them feel better then let's do it more, and more, and more, until they have nothing left of their daughter but a battered shell of who she was or might have been or could have been.  There isn't a solid place to walk.  The ground feels shakey and there are goblins under every bed in every room you have ever slept in.

This journey has been a hell of a ride for me.  I have taken a vow to speak out on mental illness and give it a face, a face of a woman many look at and think "she has it together, I mean look at her, four children, 5 grands, a wonderful husband, nice house, nice car, blah, blah, blah"  My new pscyhiatrist suggested it is time to divorce my family or origin and start a family of choice only it is hard to talk to strangers and no normal person would want to join my family of choice if they knew how difficult it is to pull myself up by the boot straps each day and face life.

Slowly each day since I learned about the concept of divorcing your family of origin I feel empowered and sad.  Sad because aren't we supposed to love our family.  No, not when you have been the victim of abuse either physical or emotional.  We owe it to ourselves to love ourselves first and foremost like when they give the talk on the airplane and tell you to put the mask on yourself first so you can help others.  That is what this new freedom feels like for me.

I am back in school, in a new place of grace for myself to myself, and I am learning to talk again, it is hard to know the right words, with the right way, but I have a feeling saving myself is going to be easier than I ever imagined.  I have even learned to tolerate the bleak face of winter.