A little story read by Brooklyn for anyone who might need to hear this message today.
One of the very few memories I have of the first time in the hospital last year was when I was getting ready to go home. One of the mental health specialists gave me this sweet book to read to my kids.
Brooklyn said it best at the end of the video, "You are exactly loved too!"
If I had to name this chapter of my life, it would probably be "Doing Hard Things." But each hard thing I do adds to my list of things I am slowly overcoming and how I am healing.
Yesterday in counseling, we talked about the things that happened between July 16th and August 5th last year. Things that have been haunting me this last while and that have brought back such strong emotions and memories.
We talked about Glacier National Park. How it was when my husband and I got home from that wonderful week that everything broke. For so long last year, I wondered what it was about Glacier that caused this to happen. Did I not get enough sleep that week and that caused me to collapse emotionally? Was I too physically active and that somehow affected a certain vitamin level or the effectiveness of my medicine or something else that caused such a strong intensity of anxiety coming home? Did I not eat enough food or drink enough water and that led to those fateful months? What was it about Glacier that made all of this happen? Because in my mind, they were surely connected.
Now I can recognize some huge triggers, along with months of less intense anxiety before that was slowly wearing me down, that I believe caused everything to spiral down the way it did. But I still have had such a strong connection in my mind to Glacier and the subsequent anxiety/depression that led to so many hospitalizations and trauma.
I have avoided looking at pictures or really remembering the beautiful trip to Glacier at all, because it has been too painful. But yesterday, we decided it was time for me to remember, time for me to help my mind disconnect what happened in Glacier as the cause of all the following pain, which meant finally looking at the pictures of that week and remembering all the good.
I did it. I looked. At first it hurt so bad seeing our carefree happiness and all the incredible beauty, not knowing what was just around the corner. It hurt seeing how something so good could be followed by the most painful experience of my life just 2 weeks later.
But it was also healing. Remembering what felt like the most magical week. Remembering how incredible it was to see the most beautiful sights with my favorite person in the whole world. Remembering how we connected and grew closer being together for that time alone without our kids. Remembering so many little details that simply brought joy.
It's going to take time to overcome the pain, but for now, I'm making the conscious choice to remember the good.
August 1st. A day that is seared into my memory forever. A day that just the thought of it coming again this year brought incredible fear. A day that I dreaded and wished it wouldn't have to come at all.
The day last year that I left my family because I was in so much pain and didn't know how to go on, the day that Kyle somehow broke through the darkness and took me to get help, the day that I went to the hospital for the first of three times in four months, the day that I felt like I was living in a nightmare and could never be okay again, the day that my life felt shattered and irreparably broken forever.
At the beginning of this summer, I was completely terrified for that day to come. I cried to a friend explaining how I was feeling, and she suggested planning something fun for the day, so I had something to look forward to instead of being so afraid. I loved that idea, so Kyle took the day off work, and we made plans to kayak the Coeur d'Alene River together as a family.
Last week, I cried every day. I woke up every morning with my feet shaking in terror. I felt like I was constantly reliving all the pain of everything I can remember from July to November of last year (I actually can't remember chunks of time and some of it is just a blur like an actual nightmare). Most of all, I remembered August 1st. It felt like if that day came, everything that happened last year would happen again, and I wouldn't be able to handle it this time. I remembered details of things that I hadn't thought about in such a long time and remembered new things that had previously been blocked from my memory. I tried to keep reminding myself that it was just a day like any other day, that I'm doing so much better now than I was, that we have so many more tools in our toolbelt than we did before, but still the trauma seemed to overpower me.
And then today came. We spent the whole day together as a family. We had such a great time swimming, exploring, kayaking, and finding the beauty all around us. As scared as I was leading up to this day, I knew that if I could make it through, it would be one more triumphant moment in my journey of healing. I still have a long way to go and more to overcome, but today was a really good day.
