Walls can be good, but they need doors.
Living with post-partum depression for ten or eleven years, you (or at least, I) put up a wall to protect your comfort zone. It's much stronger than any blanket fort, unless the blankets cover up granite blocks three feet thick and reinforced with steel girders. And the longer you're in there, the bigger the wall gets. Only it doesn't grow outward, pushing the scary things further away. It grows inward, making your comfort zone smaller, and smaller, until you can barely do anything, because there isn't room for anything but you and the depression.
I'm pretty sure the PPD has been gone for about a year. It doesn't go away all at once, but it's not exactly gradual, either. It's more like it's gone, and you notice it and think "Thank goodness!" And then a few days later, or a couple of weeks, it bodyslams you, and you curse the cruelty of life for the brief reprieve that makes the return that much worse. But I'm pretty sure that it's been long enough since the last episode that it's over for good.
Which has left me alone inside that wall. I have a little room to move, and I'm trying to use it to chink away at the bricks, but I think I've atrophied. I have to relearn how to do things, simple things, and when I fail at them, I tend to rush back inside where the wall had been, convinced for a while that I'll never get better.
But I am getting better. I've almost re-mastered taking care of all the dishes every day. Maybe "almost" is too strong of a word, but I'm getting there. I do clean the cat boxes every day, with only rare exceptions, and those aren't just because I don't feel like it. I cook dinner most nights (or I did, before starting all this dental work), instead of telling the kids to make themselves sandwiches yet again.
So this is another chink. I started writing it on Facebook, then deleted that and came here, didn't even log in and went back to FB, deleted it again, and now I'm almost ready to actually hit "post."
Even though it's lonely inside that wall, it's easy. It's not really comfortable, but once you've gotten used to it, it seems like it is. Breaking it down is hard, and it's scary. And when you've been sitting in one place for a long time, it hurts to get up again.
But I'm trying.
Thanks to Beth at Little Red Tarot, for her post on Exploring the Edgelands which gave me the final push I needed to finally write this.
I'm pretty sure the PPD has been gone for about a year. It doesn't go away all at once, but it's not exactly gradual, either. It's more like it's gone, and you notice it and think "Thank goodness!" And then a few days later, or a couple of weeks, it bodyslams you, and you curse the cruelty of life for the brief reprieve that makes the return that much worse. But I'm pretty sure that it's been long enough since the last episode that it's over for good.
Which has left me alone inside that wall. I have a little room to move, and I'm trying to use it to chink away at the bricks, but I think I've atrophied. I have to relearn how to do things, simple things, and when I fail at them, I tend to rush back inside where the wall had been, convinced for a while that I'll never get better.
But I am getting better. I've almost re-mastered taking care of all the dishes every day. Maybe "almost" is too strong of a word, but I'm getting there. I do clean the cat boxes every day, with only rare exceptions, and those aren't just because I don't feel like it. I cook dinner most nights (or I did, before starting all this dental work), instead of telling the kids to make themselves sandwiches yet again.
So this is another chink. I started writing it on Facebook, then deleted that and came here, didn't even log in and went back to FB, deleted it again, and now I'm almost ready to actually hit "post."
Even though it's lonely inside that wall, it's easy. It's not really comfortable, but once you've gotten used to it, it seems like it is. Breaking it down is hard, and it's scary. And when you've been sitting in one place for a long time, it hurts to get up again.
But I'm trying.
Thanks to Beth at Little Red Tarot, for her post on Exploring the Edgelands which gave me the final push I needed to finally write this.