Depression – My Therapeutic Garden

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.

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.

Tag: Depression

Grounded in the Dirt

Here’s to 2018