For the past several months I have been resolving my physical health.  Not that it was generally bad or anything.  Just the basic "eat better, exercise, drink more water, get more sleep, stop smoking, drink beer less."

 But in this I failed to notice my mental health which has been slowly sinking into the cesspool that is my brain and now here in the midst of some sort of break down wouldn't you know it?  My physical health is starting to suffer.

I am secretive with the life long depression and anxiety that I first started experiencing very young.  Much too young.  Childhood age really.  Because sometimes when I said it out loud I fear that I will sound silly or over dramatic as so many people I know are.  I feel guilty over it too because I didn't come from some shit-in-the-gutter childhood like my husband did, a man who takes things with a grain of salt, who can carry the world on his shoulders but still get the recommended eight hours of sleep, who doesn't have heart palpitations, who questions little that has happened to him, who has the ability to shut it all off, who tells himself it is God's will.  I come from a middle class home where I never doubted my mother or my grandparent's love.  The idyllic upbringing where a brown bag lunch was packed for me everyday, where homework was checked, bedtime stories read, where I was hugged and kissed endlessly and nobody beat or molested me, nobody suffered from drug addiction, nobody was mentally abusive.  A plethora of horror I could have been born into but wasn't.  I too get annoyed when people claim overwhelming sadness when their lives look like daisy's and rainbows.  This is me being a hypocrite though.  I cannot judge what I do not know; the things that go on behind closed doors or in people's heads.  One wonderful thing about the world is that we all have different experiences and different ways of rationalizing them and coping.  This is one of the reasons I like people so much, why I came back to the Xanga community after a five year hiatus and why I like reading all of these different collections of thoughts and ideas.  I may not understand people but I would at least like to try.

I fall into depressive states normally about once a year so this really isn't out of the norm.  I easily recognize when I am starting to sink beneath the waves and then I make the necessary steps to drag myself back to shore. 

 I let this one get away from me though. 

Initially I blamed maternity leave for my blues.  The boredom of being stuck at home with a newborn who is a shitty conversationalist, trying to rearrange my life to now include two kids, trying to figure out how I was going to be able to have a social life ad keep my hobbies.  Regular thoughts for any mother.  I figured once I was off my maternity leave and back at work among adults and using my brain to solve problems at work this would lift.

So far it hasn't and it's been almost four months.

Hurricane Sandy hit two days after I returned to work.  Living on the East Coast several blocks from the Raritan Bay, the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean, meant that I was traveling from a dark, cold apartment to a dark, cold office.  Seven days at home and 11 days at work with no power or heat.  I was happy though that all I lost was power and the food in my refrigerator.  Across towns homes were being condemned.  So I was really very lucky.  And then, of course, my two year old car that I had purchased with on;y 40,000 miles on it broke down and needed $1,100 worth of repairs.  I was broke from maternity leave.  Thanksgiving was less than two weeks after we got power back so nobody was really in the mood.  My daughter was sick over a Christmas that I could barely afford but struggled to try and make magical.  She couldn't care less and I was exhausted anyway from dealing with a newborn.  Somewhere through all of this I found that i had stopped calling friends, having sex with my husband, eating, sleeping, and was snapping at my four year old on a constant basis, something I had never done.

 I let myself slip down the rabbit hole and I have told no one until recently when I called my father who, too, is crazier than a loon.

 I have generally been anxious which really starts to take a toll on the body, though my friends are envious that in times where I am lacking any sort of mental well being  lose weight as opposed to gain, as many people tend to over eat when they are stressed and I go the opposite way.  They can have the weight loss if they are willing to take the others stuff; the heart burn, the nausea, the acid reflux, the diarrhea, the insomnia, the constant waking or waking at 3 am and then being unable to fall back asleep, the shakiness, the racing heart, hot flashes, the lump-in-the-throat that I can't seem to swallow away, the dry mouth, the jitters, the teeth grinding that actually caused me to crack a tooth two weeks ago, the FUCKING HAIR LOSS for fucksake!  And that isn't even the mental side of things.  I lose things left and right, buried so deep inside my whirlwind thoughts that I forget what I am doing and the reason I was doing it.  All the meals I have been ruining because I lost track of time.  The times I have been late for work because I forgot where I was going and missed my exit.  The "To Do' list I write myself every morning when I come into work and then spend the rest of the day reading it over and over and over again, comprehension of even the simplest task lost amount the other bullshit that has just been compiling in my head.  I can't afford to lose ten pounds.  I am thin to begin with.  Now I just look like I have a drug problem.  I'd give anything to gain weight if it didn't mean I had to deal with the other stuff.  Please, just take the rest if it means you can lose those then extra pounds.

I have been here before, this place I coined "The Great Below" when I was in my mid teens.  I wouldn't call it my "dark place" either; it's actually gray.  Gray, foggy, and endless without any dimension or time value.  Just a big expansion of endless gray space.  The last period of time I was a visitor in The Great Below was the winter I was 21.  I lost a period of two months; depression and too many drugs.  The time before that was when I was 15.  I lost about two years on that one; foggy memories that I cannot really grasp.  Snapshots of things that may or may not have happened.  I had yet to experience it as a wife and mother.  I worry that I am dragging them into this place with me or at the very least forcing them to watch as the slow unravel picks up speed.

I know it is getting bad when I have a panic attack in public.  I have gotten those sporadically over the years but the frequency of them recently is alarming.  I had taken my daughter to Monster Golf, and indoor mini golf establishment that has a DJ and is illuminated entirely by black lights.  We were playing some sort of Whack-A-Mole game when the familiar flash of heat washed over me.  This is how they start and it is followed up by the inability to breath, heart slamming against my rib cage, shaking, extreme thirst, dizziness, nausea, and the intense need to run from where I am.  Except I couldn't because I had two small children with me.  I could only have a death grip on the foam covered mallet as I pounded moles back into their yawning borrows for tickets to use for cheap, plastic toys that I will probably puncture a foot on walking through a dark apartment somewhere in the upcoming week. 

I could only describe it as getting into a near miss while driving and realizing that you were only a few feet from injury or death and that you start shaking so badly you have to pull your car over to the side of the road to collect yourself.  "Just keep it together, this will pass," I tell myself as I smack, smack, smack away at those moles.  And that's the things, why I get so frustrated with these issues.  I understand that this anxiety is all in my head, just a manifestation of worries over things that haven't happened or that I can't control.  Even when I get a panic attack, sometimes waking me up and so severe I find myself dry heaving over that toilet am I saying to myself "this is just a panic attack.  This will be done in a few minutes.  You are not drying.  This is all in your head."  But I am angry at myself that I let it get this bad that they are now coming at random.

I have tried to explain it to the few close friends I have but, as I mentioned in a previous posting, the friends I have now are suited to THIS Heather, the Mentally Stable Heather.  Not the Old Heather; the Crazy, Kinda, Sorta Doing Drugs and Sleeping With A Lot of Boys Heather.  So to them it's "Oh, problems with the husband?"  I hate when that go that route, assuming my misery is because of a man just because their misery is over a man.  Or my mother who assumes it is because I am unhappy with my job because that is what would cause her pain and anxiety.

I suppose people like reasons.  I do too.  I wish I had a laundry list but when you are already in The Great Below it's irrelevant.  Just the feeling that I am stuck, that while I should be thankful for what I have and be more humble I should still be somewhere else right now in my life.  I feel like I am letting all these good things waste away, that I should be further in my life that where I am now but I didn't even know where I should be going so how can I come up with a plan to get there?  I am eroding away as a human being.  I am letting my family down, I have failed them somehow but not in any tangible, outright way.  I go through the daily motions but they can see through it.  And here I am trapped under the weight of the madness I created for myself.  And I am angry about it too.  I am angry when I speak to my father and realize that he has dealt with this too his entire life and that I am the apple that didn't fall too far away from his own crazy tree.  To even use the term "crazy" makes me angry but I do it anyway before anybody else can.

All of this anger and frustration turned out to be a good thing because I finally was fed up and told my husband that I couldn't live like this anymore and if I had to live the rest of my life feeling this way with all the physical ailments that went along with it I would rather not live at all that that is not like me; to stop reading a story when I am already so invested in it.  Since I have already had 28 years of life and consider myself invested in it I scheduled an appoint with my primary doctor to speak about these issues and gent a referral to a mental health specialist.

 Jim asked me goal for therapy.  "To calm the fuck down," I answered him simply.

But to sound less like white trash I suppose I would like to gain the tools to be more proactive with how I live my life instead of sitting around and waiting for things to happen and then become miserable over either worry about things happening, not happening, taking too long to happen; ect.  I would like to be more focused in my goals, more organized in my thoughts, feel like I am 28 and not like I am 80.

 My grandmother, my father's mom, Kay, lived the life I have currently been living for the past few months.  Only she lived it her entire life.  It made her sick.  It made her bitter.  It made her alienate her entire family so that she lay dying at the end of her life with few beside her and looking back at a life that she regretted every moment of.  That is my biggest fear.  To die alone and full of a lifetime of regrets.  Simply put, my goal is to one day look back on my life and think "Man, that was an awesome ride."

THERE IS THIS BRIDGE THAT CONNECTS PISCATAWAY TO...

...New Brunswick and goes over the Highland Park Zoo.  When my grandmother use to take me and my younger brother there we would pass underneath this bridge, as it was over the entrance to the park.  The bridge was about 200 feet high and on the side in large, red letters it said "CRAIG LOVES SALLY."  My big question when i was little was "how did Craig reach high enough to write that?"  A few years later, my big question is "Does Craig still love Sally?"

I always wonder what drove Craig to risk his life to proclaim his undying love for this broad, Sally.  I wonder if they got into a huge fight one night and she yelled "You don't really love me!" and he yelled back "Baby, yes i do love you," and she yelled back "Well, saying it is one thing but showing it is another and you never show it!"

So maybe one night he got nice and drunk and decided to show it by grabbing a buddy or two of his and hanging precariously over the edge of this bridge and spray painting it for her.  And maybe he brought her back to show it to her and Sally yelled "But you could've fallen and gotten hurt, you moron!" as she covered his face in kisses and cried because though she acted angry that he had did something so childish and stupid, deep down she was happy he did something childish and stupid for her.

I always wonder if Craig and Sally are still together.  I wonder if Craig really meant it when he put his life on the line just so she could stay with him, and that they got married and had kids and every once and awhile Sally says to her kids "yeah, well your father once hung over upside down over the side of a bridge and spray painted 'Craig Loves Sally', and she roll her eyes at her kids but a secret smile will pass between her and Craig.  I wonder if they had a happy ever after.

Or i wonder if after he pulled that stupid shit  things where better for a while but then went back to the way it was.  He went out drinking all the times with his friends while she cried over the phone to her best friend who would promptly bring over a carton of Ben and Jerry's Cookies and Cream and she would cry as she'd choke down spoonfuls of ice cream.  Maybe one day they both went off to separate states for college and they'd talk on the phone every day and visit over long holiday weekends and then as time went on gradually the time between calls became longer and longer until one day they stopped thinking each other.  They both became involved in new friends, new boyfriends and girlfriends, new careers.  I wonder if sometimes Sally comes back to visit her parents in her home town and she drives under the bridge and looks up at the words written so many years ago and she has to pull over her car and cry for a minute before continuing on her way.  She thinks back to Craig, her first love, the man she lost her virginity to, and remembers when life was carefree.  Before the career and the kids and the mortgage and her husbands parents and car insurance.  I wonder how much she misses Craig and if Craig ever misses her.

Life is funny like that.  The people you think will be around forever are never around for as long as you thought and the people you thought were going to be just passing through end up staying in your life for a lot longer than you thought.