The Pain in Quiet

Ever since January of 2014, my nights have always been filled with noises, some small and subtle, others loud and a bit obnoxious. Those noises were caused by my pygmy hedgehog, Tesla, who died in the absurdly early hours of the 15th. He was a couple of months past 5, which in hedgehog years is roughly 80 years old, and relatively old for those living in captivity.

For those who aren’t familiar with these adorable & prickly pets, hedgehogs are nocturnal, which actually worked out pretty well in a college setting. It meant that when I was in classes, he was sleeping peacefully, and when I got home & had either finished or put a pin in, he was awake and far more receptive to snuggling & playing. Yet, despite my own tendencies to fall into nocturnal patterns, he was inevitably awake while I was sleeping, or working on falling asleep, doing his own thing. The softer sounds of him rustling around his tub, from munching on his favorite cat food to rearranging his “furniture,” quickly became the ambient noise that typically fell to the background. The scraping sound of him sprinting like a marathon runner on his wheel took longer to get used to, but not much. An absence of that noise kept me awake more than hearing it, because it was so abnormal. I remember when I was living in a suite at school, my friends and I would be up late binge watching a show or watching movies and, usually around midnight, the sound of Tesla running on his wheel would start up down the hall from our lounge. For those of our friends who didn’t live with us (or spend so much time in our suite that they were honorary suite members), the squeaking, scratching noise more or less spooked them. For those of us who lived there, we barely noticed when he woke up and got going.

The ambient noise of Tesla running, shuffling, eating, and drinking became an assumed part of my evening. Nights when he was abnormally quiet set me on edge, and for those rare trips where I didn’t bring him with me, it felt mildly unnerving to not have those sounds going in the background. What feels like they key difference between those trips and now is that when I was away, I knew he was okay & doing his normal thing back home. Now, he’s just gone.

My room feels so empty now. Beyond the concrete and literal interpretations of that – which are also accurate; his tub, food, & other things took up a substantial amount of space in my home bedroom – I’m the only one in my room now. I used to talk to him, in what I imagine is a typical manner for pet owners. I’d talk to him about things that were stressing me out, about things I was excited about, or about him. When he’d make sudden noises, or when he’d hiss at me because he didn’t want to be disturbed, I’d chuckle and then take on that voice that most people shift into without thinking about it to talk to babies & animals to give him gentle rebukes. I’d make small, usually slightly sarcastic, comments as I finished up my nighttime routines and climbed into bed – “good morning, buddy;” “ah, hush, ya grump;” or “happy running, stinker” being some of the most frequent ones (A small aside for anyone contemplating getting a pygmy hedgehog. I have no regrets about getting Tesla, but there was one glaring fallacy that my roommate and I kept encountering in our research: hedgehogs don’t come with a particularly strong aroma. Maybe it was just Tesla, but dear God were his feces pungent. I may concede that there wasn’t any particularly strong smell coming from Tesla himself, but there’s no way we could have cleaned fast enough to keep up with his pooping schedule, and there was no masking that odor. He very much earned the nicknames Stinker & Stink-butt, the latter being a favorite of my sister’s).

Now, I’ll start one of those comments and turn towards where his tub used to be out of habit, before remembering that he’s not there. I haven’t been away from him for more than two weeks in the almost 5 years I had him.

Almost two weeks ago, I found him laying on his side half-way out of his igloo radiating an exhaustion that I’ve never seen in a living creature other than a few people who were close to the end of their lives. Almost two weeks ago, I picked him up to see if I could cheer him up or get him to eat, only to be startled that he didn’t prickle when I gently scooped him up into my hands. Almost two weeks ago, I let him run around on my lap like I did when he was little, although his attempt at running was slowed by arthritis. Almost two weeks ago, I cradled him in my hands as he struggled to draw his last few breaths around 4 in the morning. Almost two weeks ago, I choked back tears, telling this small creature who’d been in my care for almost 5 years that it was okay to let go.

Almost two weeks ago, I found myself sobbing in my room after my companion for the last 5 years had shuddered into stillness in my hands, unable to make myself put him down for over half an hour.

There are a lot of people who can only fall asleep if it’s quiet – who can’t fall asleep if music is playing or the tv is on. For me, the silence in my room is just a reminder of the void situated right next to my door. For me, the lack of noise makes me wish for the noises I’ve been used to for years… for the little creature who often made himself resemble a pin cushion to be there making those noises.

The only thing that gives me any comfort at this point is that he isn’t hurting anymore. One way or another, his pain is over and he’s free of a body that had wasn’t working the way he wanted it to and made it impossible for him to do the things he loved to do.

Maybe it’s a bit ridiculous for me to be experiencing the level of grief that I am over a pet hedgehog. After all, I knew when I got him that he wasn’t likely to live more than 3 or 4 years. He made it longer than I’d let myself hope he would. I’ve spent the last few months watching his body betray him as he got older, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. Part of me is relieved that I don’t have to sit on needles anymore waiting for it to happen.

Unfortunately, emotions rarely follow logic. Tesla was with me for a little more than 1/5 of my life so far. I couldn’t sleep in my room for a week after he died. I’m not excited about the rapidly approaching day that will mark the longest I’ve gone without him with me in nearly 5 years.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, thank you for bearing with me through this. I know it’s not the uplifting post that would be typical for this time of the year, but it’s the post I needed to write.

I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday season, whatever your celebrations may be. May 2019 be a much kinder and benevolent year than 2018.

Goodbye, Tesla. You may have had your grouchy days, but I wouldn’t have traded you for anything. You are loved and you are missed. I hope you found your way home. ♥

Sensing the Storm

It’s been a long time since I last posted. Far longer than I’m really okay with, but at this point, it is what it is. A lot of stuff has been happening over the last few months, and I’ve tried to start a few different posts, but I have a talent for rambling more than I should and then not being in the right space to finish a post later if I don’t manage to finish it in one sitting. I keep feeling the impulse to try and write about everything that’s happened since… when was my last post? February?… but it’s honestly too much to try and cover all of it, and even if I did write about all of it, it should really be broken up into different posts.

Anyway… as I catch myself starting to ramble again, I really sat down on my laptop a little while ago because I had a few hours – the majority of the nonprofit I work for (4 out of the 5 of us) was driving home from a trade show, and I was sitting in the back seat for around 3.5 hours or so – and the depression is coming back.

Over the last couple of months – really since mid-June – I’ve had the strangest sense of foreboding that I couldn’t quite place. The timing didn’t help, not that there’s ever a good time for your gut to suddenly start telling you something bad is coming. I was in the middle of trying to write a hefty grant application to fund the program I’m developing, and a few weeks before the submission deadline, I felt it. Just this certainty that there was emotional hell on the horizon, even though I had no circumstances that could really explain why it would be coming on now.

I spent weeks trying to clamp down on it, my biggest goal just to finish my grant and get it turned in, but I don’t think I had a lot of success there. For about a week, I just shut down; I felt completely fried, and doing much more than getting out of bed and pulling out my laptop was a struggle. Admittedly, this was in part due to having my wisdom teeth removed and then getting a severe dry socket, but still. Long story short, there were other factors that played into this, but I didn’t get the grant in on time. While the degree to which it hit me it feels disproportionate, I was crushed. I’d put around 100 hours into the application, just to have it fall apart in the last two weeks. It wasn’t what brought the flood on, but it blew open what was left of the flood gates, and I’ve just been trying to remember how to swim.

It’s weird how I’m noticing things this time around. I don’t remember knowing ahead of time that the last couple of rounds were coming like I did this time. I don’t think I was quite as conscious of how the last couple of rounds were impacting me in the moment. I don’t think I noticed the apathy creeping in and wedging itself between me and my work, hobbies, and relationships until after I had started pulling myself out of it. This time, I can feel it all encroaching. I feel the fatigue, the urge to isolate myself and hide, the beginnings of apathy clouding over everything. My reaction to it has been oscillating between hopelessness and anger, and I’ve been trying to cling to the anger when I swing that way. Anger at least has an energy to it – something with a spark. Hopelessness is paralyzing.

Last year, during my trips with my mother and sister to and from D.C., my mom and I would sometimes talk about depression. My grandmother, who has bipolar disorder, was in the depths of a truly crippling depression that summer, and my mom and I had been trying to figure out how to help her weather the storm without becoming permanently disabled by it – she was staying in bed as much as she could get away with, and with her age, it was leading to muscle atrophy that could have lasting damage if allowed to progress too far. While trying to puzzle out how we could get her moving, we talked about her patterns with depression, specifically how she described it and approached it. Over the years, she’s gone through several long cycles of depression, mania, and stability, and she’s typically been able to feel the depression cycles coming – she can perceive the chemical shift happening. She also doesn’t tend to try and fight it in any way, shape, or form. My grandma’s approach to her depressions is to just give into it and wait for it to pass, and then – using her spectacular capacity to modify her own memories – forget what it was like to be in the throes of it.

Even now after taking time to try and wrap my head around it, I can’t. Our conversation about my grandma led into me reflecting on my own experiences with depression, and while it must be said that I’ve never been in a place nearly as dark or severe as what my grandmother experienced that summer… I have experienced depression that stopped me from being able to function independently. I had to take a semester off of school to figure out how to acknowledge the depression and learn how to essentially reclaim myself from it. While talking to Mom, I was trying to figure out how to articulate what it felt like immediately after I got home that semester, when I would spend most of my time (that I can remember) either in bed or sitting in a chair out in the living room, watching tv or looking at my phone without really paying attention to what was happening.

Depression can stem from a number of causes and manifest in a number of forms, which can make it hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it at all, much less your version of it. For me, though, depression is like a void. A void that constantly pulls at you, dragging you deeper and deeper into a dark corner of yourself. It’s that cloud of apathy that creeps in so incrementally at first, that if you don’t know what it is, or to be on the lookout for it, it will have already dampened your ability to experience your life the way you normally would before you notice it. The beginnings are subtle:

You start to lose interest in things that you know you do, in fact, find interesting and important;
Your attention span shrinks as your interest does, and you just can’t seem to make yourself stay engaged with anything, be it an article, book, movie, tv show, game, conversation, etc.;

These initial effects kick off the process of retreating and isolating yourself… You slowly stop trying to engage in work and hobbies because the lack of success is aggravating and feels terrible. Talking to friends and family gets harder, and the longer you go without talking to someone, the less likely you are to initiate anything because guilt compounds the difficulty that’s already introduced by the depression. And then the next stage really kicks in – getting cut off from not just the tangible things around you, but from yourself.

When I say you get cut off from yourself, I’m referring to the void that pulls you into itself and away from everything else. I have more of a mental image of it than a verbal description, which makes the experience harder to explain from here on out. In my head, I picture two… layers, almost… of myself. There’s the outer layer, which everyone sees, and then there’s the mental layer – a little bit like Inside Out, for lack of a better comparison. Normally, the mental me is in synch with the physical me, and is able to access all of the controls, emotions, and connections in my head. When the depression sets in, the mental image changes, so that I’ve become partially hollow inside and the mental me is being sucked into that dark, hollow space. As the depression ramps up, the hollow portion grows and the mental me gets dragged down even farther into it.

From that hollow space, I can’t reach things as basic as my emotions, much less things that stem from them, like interest or enjoyment. The deeper I get pulled, the more disconnected I get from those things, going from being able to see the things I normally engage with easily, but not being able to reach out and touch them, to not even being able to see them. I ultimately find myself drifting through an abyss, usually without anything to ground or orient myself. Occasionally, an emotion will spike strong enough that I can just reach out and grab onto it, however briefly, but it feels incredibly rare when I’m that deep. Usually the emotions that make it that deep are the less pleasant ones, like anger or sadness. When I’m able to reach one, I cling to it like a lifeline.

As terrible as it sounds, when I’m depressed, I strive for the anger whenever possible; it’s easier to hold on to than anything else at that point, and it’s more energizing. It has to be understood that at that point, I’m usually not feeling much of anything – I feel empty, and like the things that make me who I am are being stripped from me. Going back to the mental image, it’s like I’m just drifting through space without any touching points; as contradictory as I know this is, I feel cold… I feel lost… I feel alone… and it’s terrifying. I don’t know how I manage to experience an all-consuming apathy and feel terrified of it at the same time, but that’s what it is to be in that void. I cling to any emotion that cuts through it because at least it’s something, and I especially cling to emotions that come with an urge to do anything. Those touch points give me something I can use to try and pull myself out, even if it’s only an inch or two.

Which brings me back to my grandma and the disconnect between us where I cannot understand her approach to depression. There are few things that scare me more than that void now. If I just gave into the depression, I’m pretty confident that I’d be sucked right into the heart of that abyss, where I really wouldn’t be able to reach any of my emotions, reach any passion or motivation, or anything that I could use as a source of energy. My gut says that I’d be letting myself fall deep enough into that hole that there’d be no guarantee of finding a lifeline to eventually pull myself back up with. I don’t trust it to eventually blow over, and even if I did, I don’t want to fall any deeper than I can help. I don’t understand how someone could not fight against that undertow…

I hate sensing the undertow, just waiting for me to slip and lose my footing. I hate the paranoia that comes with the onset.

Is my fatigue stemming from an actual lack of sleep? Did I catch a bug? Is it just the fatigue that goes with my meds? Or is it a symptom of the depression? And is it trying to give me the heads up that the depression is getting worse?
Is my trouble focusing due to being overworked? Over-stressed? Is it the difficulty that can come with my meds from time to time? Or is it a symptom of the depression? Is it a sign that the apathy is creeping closer?
Are the really long bouts of facial pain and migraines just due to irregular sleep and whatever the weird problem is that’s triggering the pain in the first place? Or am I perceiving it more strongly than usual because of the depression?
When I want alone time, is it because of my natural tendency to be an introvert who finds interaction with multiple people, or extended interaction with a couple of people, incredibly draining? Or is it because I’m falling into the void of depression, and starting to struggle more with being around anyone?

Anything that could be even remotely tied to the depression, I second guess. In the last two months, I’ve wondered whether I caught something at least ten times, even though only two of them actually drove me to the doctor and my doctor only thought I was sick one of those two times. People ask me how I’m doing, and I’m at a point where I’m not even trying to bullshit a “I’m doing good, how are you?” although maybe I should. When people ask me how I am these days, I either respond with “Meh?” while shrugging my shoulders and probably making a weird, awkward face, or I respond with a brief summary of the last week or so, trying to pull in a couple of good things to offset the more negative stuff. The deciding factor as to which I go with typically depends on how well I know the person, and how long it’s been since I talked to them.

People rarely seem to have any idea of how to respond to me when I do that. I don’t try to hide my pain and problems from my closest friends and my family; when I keep starting conversations by honestly answering their questions and saying that I’m struggling, I feel sick with fear that they’re going to stop talking to me, much less wanting me to visit. I get scared that no one would want to be friends with someone who deals with depression and the associated complications as often as I do… that I’m more burdensome as a friend than helpful… Who would want to be friends with someone like that? Who would want to be with someone like that? It’s the poisonous trains of thought like those, which play on loops over and over and over again in your head, that lead you to isolate yourself… to hide from your friends and loved ones for fear of scaring them off, not realizing that hiding is probably doing more damage than you were doing by being honest and open with them…

I’m trying to be more cognizant of the symptoms I’m experiencing this time. I’m trying to do the things you’re supposed to do to help mitigate them. I’ve started exercising again – admittedly probably not as much as I should, but it’s a start – and I’m trying to make myself expand my diet to include healthier things. I’m making sure I leave the house every day and I’m going places where I’m around other people.

I don’t know if it’s enough. But I’m trying to make this round different. I’m trying to make it better. And I suppose that’s all any of us can really do.

They Sprouted! … Really Early

Lupine (foreground) and Chamomile (background) Sprouts

This’ll just be a brief blip of a post, but…

So much for 10-20 days for germination! I just checked on my seeds four days after planting them to discover seedlings in their place. I’ve had a fair amount of success sowing seeds before, but part of me was still worried that it would take far more than the longest estimated germination period before I started seeing any sprouts for any of the plants I’m trying to grow.

While there is the slight concern that they’ve actually sprouted earlier than they should have – where I live, our last frost should be somewhere in late March according to the Farmer’s Almanac – I have to say, I was grinning and giggling like a kid on Christmas morning when I saw them. There’s just something about that distinctive green of a new plant standing starkly against the rich brown of the soil that instills me with an oddly pure sense of peace, happiness, and excitement.

Not all of the different plants have started emerging yet, but the vast majority have. I can’t wait to watch how they continue to grow. The wait before moving them outside may require a little bit of creativity to give them the space they’ll individually need ~~(not to mention patience)~~, but I’ll figure it out. For now, I’m just going to relish in their apparent eagerness to grow!

First of the Snapdragon Sprouts (Center, Left)

Update:

The morning after posting this, I left on a two day business trip. When I got back tonight and went back to check on them, I was stunned yet again by their progress. The sprouts that had already started coming up are looking great and the really young seedlings that were less obvious, like the snapdragons and the lemon balm, have some very clearly present seedlings now. I’m so proud of these little guys. I’ll try to stay on top of transition updates as they keep growing!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Flowers Tray (above) and Herbs Tray (below) 1 week after planting.

I promise there are a couple sprouts for the Butterfly Flowers, they’re just sparse, small, and hard to see. Same with the Lemon Balm.

(Sorry about the relatively low photo quality; I took them with my phone camera.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Soaking in the Warmth

I generally enjoy winter to some degree, particularly if it snows, but with my new desire to set up and maintain outdoor gardens, I’ve been pretty eager for spring to get here this year. Living in Virginia, trying to figure out where we’re at with the seasons can be a struggle. There’s a saying, which I know isn’t exclusive to VA, that if you don’t like the weather around here, just wait a couple hours – it’ll probably be different. People also frequently joke about how we frequently cram all four seasons into a week.

It’s been cold enough outside lately that I haven’t really wanted to go out and try to start prepping the flower beds and set up a plot for the herb garden. Today, though, the weather shifted and it’s in the 70s. It’s a little overcast, with a beautiful breeze, and I’m about to head out and capitalize on nature’s generosity in providing a mellow, warm day in the middle of a frustratingly long winter.

Depending on how much progress I make before the rain that I’m anticipating starts, I may update with before/after pictures. We’ll see. I’m just excited that I actually get to go outside to do some gardening rather than being cooped up in a crowded room in the back of our house!

Whelp, the rain came in a little earlier than I’d hoped – I only got to work on the yard for an hour – although it can’t decide if it just wants to sprinkle or actually rain. The main thing I was able to knock out was raking out the front bed against the house and start tackling the bed between us and our neighbors. It didn’t really look like I got much done, but I never think it looks like I got much done after the fact, and I think the six packed bags of leaves sitting on the curb show that I did at least make some decent progress.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Divider Bed (Above) & Front Bed (Below)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It might not be as much progress as I’d hoped to make today, but hey, we can’t control the weather and it’s still progress.

Hopefully next time the weather cooperates, I’ll be able to finish the leaves and actually start defining where the beds are again; the running gap we used to have between the beds and the “lawn” (we’ve tried again and again to get grass to grow there, and it very stubbornly decides not to; I might try again this year) gradually filled themselves back in over the years. I’m also going to need to figure out what to do about the moles we have in our area. I felt my feet sink into the tunnels they’ve dug over and over while working on the leaves.

So, still quite a bit of work to do before it really starts looking nice, but it’ll get there. It should be fun and it’s not a bad workout either.

If only spring would hurry up and get here already.

Grounded in the Dirt

Speaking as Captain Obvious for a moment, I haven’t been having a whole lot of luck keeping up with my resolution. I’ve been working on a different post that I’d wanted to put up back in January, but it’s been a bit of a monster to work through, and it recently got harder. It’s also yet another dive into the land of depression, and I’ve been wanting to try and make sure there are some happier posts or posts that actually relate to gardening going up every now and then. So, while my other post is still under construction, I thought I’d try to write a shorter, cheerier post.

28124516_1828155887204113_1670705479_o — Rosemary: The lone survivor

Like I think I said in my New Year’s post, I haven’t really had much of a garden over the last couple months. I’d been growing my indoor herbs in my kitchen (admittedly taking over the kitchen table in the process), and when the holidays rolled through, we had to clear them out to a different room. The only room available for housing plants right now, other than the kitchen, is one in the back of the house that I don’t tend to spend much time in. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” became painfully relevant to my garden, and as a result, the vast majority of my plants died between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There was one plant that actually flourished from the neglect, though; everything in the AeroGarden I have died from a lack of water except for the one pod that hadn’t had much luck with sprouting – rosemary. It’s actually doing really well, especially when I continue to mostly ignore it. Still, having to throw out the dead, dried out remains of most of my other plants was a bit soul crushing. I’ll admit I have a tendency to get slightly over-attached to my plants.

With spring just around the corner, I’m looking forward to overhauling the beds in our front yard and resuming my project from the summer to start a bed in our back yard as well. I’ve got a couple seed-starter greenhouse trays, and I’ll own up to my lack of patience; I set them up and planted a bunch of seeds yesterday. Of course, patience was worn away by a painful and stressful week. My family and I learned on Tuesday that a close family member has a degenerative form of dementia. We’d thought she was coming out of an extremely deep depression and we were going to have her back again, but it turns out we’re never really going to get her back. Yesterday morning and early afternoon was filled with phone calls to her close friends to let them know and phone calls amongst our immediate family to start making a care plan for her. Pretty much every call led to its own round of crying.

So I started my seed-starter greenhouses earlier than I probably should have. I went into the back room and unloaded a bag of seedling mix into my two trays and planted herbs for the back garden and flowers for the front bed, trying to find comfort in getting dirt under my nails while I kept trying to choke back tears as a few of the phone calls drifted back from the living room… not necessarily the happy, hopeful start that I’d envisioned for my new garden ~~(or this post)~~, but hey – I started gardening to help me through things like this. Kinda makes sense that this would spur me into planting several of my herbs and flowers a couple weeks early.

28117277_1828153450537690_1332608720_n — Herb Tray: Calendula, Lemon Balm, Borage, Rosemary, Lavender, and Peppermint

And it did help; pouring and evening out the dirt in the different cells, sprinkling seeds that came in a diversity of sizes and shapes that surprised me, and watching the dirt slowly absorb the water and even out – it gave me something else to focus on; something else to do with my hands; something new and hopeful, while I tried to hold myself together and process the conversations I was hearing, and the reality that I’m going to be losing someone near and dear to me as I watch her slowly lose herself, piece by piece. Not only will we be losing her in a drawn out, almost cruel manner, we’ll also be watching her go through the pain of feeling herself slip away and losing more and more of her independence.

It didn’t keep me from crying, or having to stop and recollect myself every now and then, but I know how much worse that experience would have been if I hadn’t gone to work on my garden. Yesterday afternoon would’ve had me curled up on the couch, crying a lot harder than I did and unable to stop. Working in my garden helped me feel my pain without drowning in it, and I think that’s really at the heart of why I find it therapeutic.

I did say that I was hoping to write a happier post, though, and so far I don’t think I’ve held to that. I’m not sure I’m really holding to “short” either, but that’s an entirely separate point. Before the events of the last couple days caused me to rewrite a decent chunk of this, I was excited about what I was planning on growing this spring. The excitement is still there, even if it’s a bit buried by the anxiety and grief accompanying recent developments.

I’ve really enjoyed growing herbs, especially the ones I frequently use in my food. Adding that extra layer of functionality to the things I grow has been incredibly satisfying. Recently, I found a book on making homemade bath & body products using several herbs that you can grow at home (for anyone interested in the book, it’s rather aptly called The Herbal Bath & Body Book by Heather Lee Houdek; it’s aimed at people who are new to herbalism) and now I’ve expanded my list of herbs that I’m going to be growing this year.

In addition to the herbs that are a staple for me at this point – genovese basil, oregano, & thyme – I’m going to try some of the herbs that were frequently used in the recipes in the book. I’ve planted chamomile, peppermint, lavender, rosemary, borage, and lemon balm in my seedling greenhouses. I’m hoping to add some more down the line, but I think this is a pretty good starting point. If things go well and I’m feeling ambitious, I might try to get some rose bushes too.

I’m also hoping to bring the flower beds in our front yard back to life this spring. They’ve got the potential to be filled with color and vibrance, but most years they just stay covered with the leaves that fell on them during the Fall. This year, I’m planning on changing that. Alongside the chamomile in the second seedling tray, I’ve got lupine, snapdragon, foxglove, and butterfly flowers planted, and I’ve got calla lily bulbs ready for me to plant them in something a smidge larger than the cells of the seedling trays. I also have my eye on some pollinator seeds to try and attract more bees, butterflies, and possibly a couple hummingbirds. I’ve always wanted to be able to look out the window or sit on the porch and see the colorful flit of hummingbirds darting around. Hopefully, I’ll have some bee balm, echinacea, and milkweed seeds coming in soon for the bees and butterflies, and if memory serves, foxglove, lupine, and snapdragons all tend to be pretty attractive to hummingbirds.

28052710_1828152940537741_744271082_n-e1518753058663.jpg — Flower Tray: Butterfly Flower, Foxglove, Snapdragon, Lupine, and Chamomile

All in all, I’m looking forward to setting up my garden this summer, and I’m excited about the seeds I’ve got sitting under little plastic greenhouse lids. It may not eliminate or prevent the shitty and painful parts of life, but gardening gives me things to look forward to and enjoy. Working in the dirt quite literally grounds me, and I’m grateful taking up this hobby occurred to me when it did so that I have it to lean on now.

Here’s to 2018

With the incoming of the new year comes the annual tidal wave of New Year’s resolution posts and inspirational videos. My dashboards tend to become overrun with excessively cheery, optimistic, and enthusiastic posts which are intended to celebrate and help spark others into pursuing their own resolutions, but they tend to rub me the wrong way these days. Those posts usually strike me as being needlessly over-the-top and have more of a guilt-trip effect on me than a motivational one.

While I don’t say anything because I don’t want to rain on the parades of my friends and family who are in good spaces, my feeds have been driving me a little nuts over the last couple of weeks thanks to all of these posts. However, amid all of the stereotypically exuberant sentiments, there have been a few voices ringing in the new year that feel a bit more grounded, honest, and realistic. Sadly, most of them have been clustering around a theme pretty well captured by a comic drawn by Sarah Anderson (here’s her cartoon site if you want to see more of her work):

I say “sadly” because I find it inherently depressing that this is such a common theme among those who aren’t blithely plowing ahead, but it’s a theme that rings true with me as well. The last two years have been rough and painful for many of us, to put it mildly, and I don’t particularly see much reason to believe that things will suddenly and miraculously turn around in 2018. This isn’t to say that 2018 can’t prove to be a good year, but I don’t see that happening without each of us fighting to make it happen and putting in the work.

I started this blog a few months ago intending to actually post here, both about the garden I started and about my experiences with depression. This was supposed to be a therapeutic tool for me, and I’ve hardly touched it since I wrote up the welcome post. Since August, I’ve started a few different posts, but I haven’t finished or published any of them. Some were about my indoor garden which has since gone through two cycles of flourishing and then dying, once because of some mysterious illness that knocked out all of my plants over night, and once because of neglect from being moved to a back room for the holidays. Others were about a number of emotional ups and downs which were tied to hopeful opportunities followed by setbacks that have felt like crushing blows when coupled with more chronic challenges.

Generally speaking, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but this year I’m going to give one a shot. I had been doing a pretty good job of managing my depression for a while, but over the last couple of months, the depression has been wriggling its way back in. I’m doing my best to stay on top of it, including talking to my doctor to manage my meds, taking said meds, and looking for a new counselor, but I’ve always found writing helpful too ~~when I can get myself to sit down and do it~~. It helps me quiet the five or six different trains of thought that tend to run through my head at once, and it gives me a venue to work through the emotions surrounding the events and situations that contribute to the depression.

So, with the caveat of a little flexibility since I know that life in my house frequently explodes and that when I get into a topic that I really do need to write about, I tend to write excessive amounts, my resolution is to try and write a post at least once every other week, and actually post it. Even if it’s just to say that things are a bit crazy this week, or that the next post is an emotional one that’s taking a while to write, I’m hoping to really start using this blog like I’d intended to when I started it – as a place to do some therapeutic writing.

2017 was a year of pain, change, and tumult for me. Between political turmoil, a societal climate that was largely toxic towards families like mine, several new medical challenges, and my life being turned on its head in a number of ways, 2017 was a year of significant transitions which will probably be difficult to remember in a particularly fond light.

At the same time, even with all of that pain and change, there was quite a bit of good mixed in with the bad. The results of the 2016 election were crushing for me and my family, but just a couple of months later, I marched with hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children in D.C. who came together to support one another and stand up in the face of hate, discrimination, and hopelessness. I may not be planning on going into the field I have a degree in, but I graduated from an amazing college that encouraged me to reach out beyond just my engineering major and rediscover my passion for education and teaching. I made new and amazing friends who I’ve managed to stay in touch with even if I don’t get to actually see them nearly as much as I want to. The healthcare of millions of fellow Americans was threatened, as well as basic civil rights of individuals with disabilities, but as a result, I spent months in D.C. with my family, alongside hundreds of others, advocating to protect our healthcare and fighting to defend the rights of those within the disability community, which was an amazing and inspiring experience unlike anything else I’ve ever done. The year was filled with out-of-the-blue medical adventures being sprung on me, but I have an amazing family and support system that’s been helping me navigate the medical side of things and acclimate to the day-to-day challenges that come with chronic pain.

Last year was not a great one. I wish that many of the negative points above hadn’t happened, but at the same time, they led to several of the amazing experiences that were the highlights of my year, including the Women’s March and the protests I participated in at the Capitol. It was a year that forced me to grow in ways that I probably wouldn’t have – at least not now and not this quickly – otherwise. Somehow, I suspect that this year will continue the theme of painful growth, but I fully intend to face it down and continue to do my best to find the positives amongst the challenges.

So, here’s to 2018, growing, and putting in the work to make it a good year.

Welcome

Featured

Hello, and welcome to my therapeutic garden!

Life has a way of wearing on all of us as we move through it, and all of us carry our own burdens. They impact us all in unique ways, furthering us down our own paths, and each of us finds our own ways of dealing with them. Some types of burdens are easier dealt with than others; there are challenges that are very concrete, definable, and visible, just as there are challenges which are more intangible, internal, and difficult to define.

Those of us who struggle with mental illnesses usually face challenges that directly stem from them: articulating how the illness impacts you, getting others to see it and understand, being able to get a firm grasp on what it is yourself, or finding those things in life that help you manage, rise above, or work through it to name a few. There are a wide variety of mental illnesses that get swept under the rug, and which most people don’t really understand unless they’ve experienced them.

Depression is just one of these, and it is the one that I carry with me. Here in this blog, I’ll be writing about my experiences with depression and how gardening has become a significant tool when managing and pushing back against my depression.

It is my hope that in sharing these experiences with you, those of you also experiencing this particular type of burden will be reminded that you aren’t alone in these challenges.
It is my hope that in sharing these experiences with you, I may pass on some ideas for coping to others who need them.
It is my hope that in sharing these experiences with you, we will have the chance to exchange stories, knowledge, and support as we all make our way down our own paths.

So, once again, welcome to my therapeutic garden. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope that the stories you find here will pass on the knowledge, support, and comfort that you need.