A Teenage Girl

This post has been sitting in my drafts since January 23, 2012.

Today at work I spent the second half of my day printing up insurance claims. The monotony and simplicity of getting each claim ready to print and then printing it allowed my mind to wander. I've always been a thinker, reflecting a lot on my own life, nostalgic at times. Even in elementary school, my journal included more than just a recording of what my daily activities were. I wrote down my thoughts about how my life used to be and what I hoped it would be. I wrote I wished I was five years old again because being eleven was too hard and my life was too difficult. Depression set in early for me.

But it was that teenage girl I thought about at work today. I thought about my old journal entries, my old livejournal entries, ramblings I had scribbled between science and english notes during high school. I thought about that girl who was so confused and so sad and so alone. The girl who wanted to graduate early and go to college, go to boarding school, kill herself-- anything to get away from where she was, who she was. The girl whose blogposts indicated she was angry, whose journal entries indicated she was despairing, whose ramblings on random pieces of paper indicated she was confused. That girl who thought she was in love many times but was really just in pain and used boys as band-aids for an illness that needed open-heart surgery. That girl whose parents didn't trust her and whose father told her he was worried about her character and she said she didn't care if she didn't have any morals. That girl who wished she could feel nothing at all so she would never be sad again accepting that if she got her wish she'd never be happy either. That girl who would sometimes feel completely numb, attempting to break her own fingers to feel anything at all. That girl who simply could not figure out how to be happy.

I was thinking of her today. And I felt so bad for her. And right now I'm channeling her through her old music, remembering those feelings, those nights she would go to bed with her silent tears and headphones. That girl didn't really know what she was doing. Locking her bedroom door, lying about having theater rehearsal so she didn't have to go home, turning in a completely blank Pre-Calculus exam, sending herself to the hospital three times. Pretending she knew how to make herself happy.

I want to tell that girl things will be okay eventually. And that she's strong and she can keep going, to just hold on. I remember telling myself many times, "Tomorrow. Just make it until tomorrow," and then I would go to bed early, listening to music, keeping the pills away. That girl I was then, was scared and almost hopeless. She often thought she was hopeless but she couldn't have been because she held on for another day, day after day. She didn't like making plans for the future because she wasn't sure she'd be around but she did anyway, just in case. She made a lot of mistakes. A ton. Probably more than you'd actually believe. But she wasn't the bad person she always told herself she was. She was good. But she was very sad. And I wish that this version of me, this older Natalie who got through her teenage years and graduated high school and college and married a wonderful person and is making plans for the future, could just go back in time and tell her she did well with what she had and I'm proud of her for holding on and to look forward to her future. She will still be sad sometimes, more often than she'd think is fair, but she will also be more happy than she knew she could be and she will love and be loved more than she thought possible.

Is it strange to think of myself in this way: my past self and my current self? Sometimes I miss that girl-- with her intensity, she wrote deeply and poetically-- but mostly I'm glad she's grown up. I just wish she could've known what her future had in store for her. She might not have been so depressed all the time.

Bedroom Corner

There is something about this time of the year that makes my mind especially restless. Music becomes more and more necessary to calm my mind and I listen to it almost constantly.

Right now I'm lying in bed, listening to The Velvet Teen,  spilling words onto an old blog.

Orange light lines my wall, a dirty window creates spots. I feel sick and sick and sick. But I'm not, besides my chronic condition, at least.

Sometimes I wonder if the hatred I felt towards myself in the past somehow became my autoimmune disease. My body is destroying itself. It would almost be poetic if it wasn't so devastating. Now I'm taking pills that make my body weak so it doesn't kill me. I'm faced with the same dilemma I faced even before SLE- how do I fight the thing trying to kill me if that thing is myself? When I think too much about it, I know it's time to go to sleep.

None of it makes sense anyway.

A Trip to Athens

The insomnia is coming back. 

How can I not sleep?

Seriously.

I'm currently listening to Radiohead's album "King of Limbs" and I'm thinking of when I lived in Athens. Earlier today I was listening to Smashing Pumpkin's "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" and it transported me back to middle school. I love how music has the ability to act as the soundtrack to my memories- even conjuring them. Most of my soundtracks are sad though because I had a tendency to listen to music excessively when I was depressed. I was listening to The Velvet Teen's song "Red, Like Roses" in bed the other night and I was brought back to high school and listening to that song in this same room when it was my parents'. I remembered the Sony mp3 cd player I had and the headphones that were plugged into my ears as I was curled on the edge of my parents' queen bed, crying. 

But right now I'm in Athens with Radiohead. And I'm driving the loop around town. It's night time and I can see the black silky silhouettes of trees in the moonlight. I'm driving fast- passing exits before settling on Exit 8. I turn by the movie theater and drive past the fancy new student neighborhood.  Past Publix and the gym and the crappy Asian restaurant that's open until 4am even on weeknights. I'm on Cedar Shoals, passing the high school and driving into the darkest stretch of the drive, turning onto Highland Park Drive and then up into my driveway. I pull in under the tree that leaves sap on my car during the summer. I forgot to turn on the porch light before I left so all I have is the dim orange glow of the street light by the bus stop.

I turn off the car.

A Beautiful Mess

Bottle up and explode over and over
Put it away and check out for the day

Thoughts on Depression

I was twelve when I started developing symptoms of depression. I was thirteen when I began self-harming. I was fifteen when I first overdosed on a bottle of prescription medication. For over a decade I have struggled with mental illness and though I willingly talk to people about my experiences, I gloss the whole thing over as something that happened in the past, something I'm over now. But it's not over. I struggle regularly and I find it even more taboo to talk about now that I'm a mother.

Because, you know, motherhood is a beautiful, exquisite experience full of rainbows and songbirds and endless buffet tables of cheesecake.  

When James was born, I didn't have the birth experience I anticipated and hoped for. My labor was long and exhausting. I wanted an all-natural birth experience but ended up using both Pitocin to help move labor along and an epidural to manage the pain. Then, I couldn't breastfeed successfully. I felt traumatized by our attempts at breastfeeding-- physically in pain because of a terrible latch and terrified as I anticipated each feeding because of the screaming and fighting that would occur. The lactation consultant I saw wasn't very encouraging and I really felt like it was a lost cause. Even so, I basically spent three months locked up in a bedroom trying to get that relationship working before deciding to maintain what shreds of sanity I had left and pump exclusively. One of my friends came to visit a few days after James was born and said, "It's sad nothing is working out the way you wanted it to." And I didn't really know what to say to that because, although it was true, I didn't want to admit anything about motherhood being sad so I said that yes, things weren't going the way I planned but it was okay because James brought so much happiness with his birth. This was true but didn't acknowledge the sadness I was experiencing too.

I had more than the "baby blues" that are so common in those early postpartum days but I'm not sure if it was truly full-blown postpartum depression. I had the sadness, the overwhelming guilt, the intrusive thoughts, the irritability, and the fatigue. I only feel comfortable talking about it now because I'm not currently in the throes of it. And that annoys me. Even after I've spent more years of my life in and out of depression than not, I'm still uncomfortable telling people, "I'm not doing so great right now. I need help."

I have no problem telling people I have a migraine or that I'm in the midst of a lupus flare but if I am going through a bout of depression, I have to go through that alone. It still feels like weakness to me. It still feels like a character flaw. I don't want people to know I'm depressed.

I find it interesting how surprising it is to me that even after I've become an adult that I am still me. I am still the same person I was when I was 18 and 15 and 12 and 8 and 5. Certainly there are things that have changed, but at my core I am still the same person I've always been. I guess I always thought something along of the lines of "when I'm an adult, I won't have to deal with these issues" so it surprises me when I do.

I still face depression regularly enough that it's not an extraordinary phenomenon. I even have thoughts of self-harm on the rare occasion though I can happily say it's been years since my last incident. I may be the same person I've always been but what's changed is how I deal with things. I guess that's good enough. I hope someday I'll be comfortable enough to say I need help when I do. It's still something I'm working on.