I Hate Depression

     Over the last few months I've been trying different antidepressant medications trying to find the right one to help me function the right way during the day. It wasn't all that easy for me to even think about getting help like that. I hate depression, and the fact that I need help. It just got to the point that I felt that it wasn't healthy for my daughters to see me struggling to keep up with the house work, and with cooking dinner. I don't have the type of depression where you feel sad all the time; which is probably why it's so hard for me to accept that I need help. I just felt so overwhelmed by everything around me that it paralyzed me to the point that I didn't feel like I could get anything done around the house. When I did finally go see a doctor she tested my serotonin levels which turned out to be very low. This does help me to realize that I have a chemical imbalance that I have no control over, and that taking medicine should be able to help me feel better. I do not think that taking antidepressants is a fix all solution. It is something that I plan on doing for now, but I plan on someday being healthy enough to get off of it.

     I recently tried switching the antidepressant that I was on, and well...I'll just say that it's not the right one for me. I haven't felt this bad in a while. I didn't want to get out of bed, I was having some trouble sleeping, and most important of all...I had ZERO drive to do ANYTHING during the day. I pretty much spend all of yesterday on the couch. The whole day I was yelling at myself in my mind...saying things like, "what are you doing?!" "get up and do something!" "don't just sit there" "why are you doing that". The more I yelled at myself the more bogged down I felt. I couldn't stand feeling the way that I felt yesterday, and I wasn't going to continue on that medicine to see how long it would take to see if it would help. I had been on it for about a week; most take a few weeks to fully help, but there was no way that I was going to wait that long and to continue to feel that way. So, I've put myself back on the previous medicine that I was on until I go the next time to see the doctor. It's not that the previous medicine was all that bad (it did help me some); I just thought that there might be something out there that would be better. Which is why I was trying the current antidepressant that didn't work out too well.

     The reason why I hate depression, and having to take medicine for it has a lot to do with my childhood. My mom was suicidal pretty much all through out my teen years. She would just sit there and cry, and do nothing. I grew to see crying as a weakness that I never wanted to have. Yeah, sure my mom went to doctors for help, but it wasn't much help. The more medicine she got on the more suicidal she got. It was all just a bad mix of medicine. She would have side effects to one medicine, and instead of changing the medicine the doctor would just add another medicine that came with it's own set of side effects to add to the mix as well. I remember hiding the car keys from her so that she couldn't just drive off...driving while crying is such a dangerous thing. She would tell me that she just wanted to run away or drive off a bridge. I even stood behind and in front of her car so that she couldn't leave the driveway on different occasions. I did my best to help / "fix" her, but nothing I did worked. So, you can see why I was so hesitant to be on antidepressants, but I'm still not going to allow myself to be put on a lot of medicine all at once. It has all boiled down to what kind of mother I want to be, and what kind of memories I want my children to have of me. I don't want my girls to remember me as a mom that couldn't get anything done, and just sat around the house. I want to be so much better than that for them...they deserve it.