Catching My Bearings

Anytime I've traveled overseas or gone on a long vacation, I feel out of whack the first few days I'm back. I start unpacking the moment I get home, go shopping, and start nesting right away.  I will often comment to a roommate looking in on my queer and rather overly efficient behavior with, "I'm just trying to catch my bearings."  


I feel unsettled and I don't like it one bit.


So what do you do when your heart is trying to catch it's bearings and it can't?


That's how I felt last week.


Like all the things that normally kept it grounded and safe came undone.  I felt like a weary traveler trying to get back home yet finding herself wandering farther and farther away.


Two potential job doors were closed, a friendship felt tense, and financial strains seemed like they were never going to lift.  


Despair knocked.


Dread became my morning alarm clock.


And regardless of prayer, right thinking, and good friend pep talks my heart felt--sad.


It's a sadness that's familiar.  A sadness that's ebbed in and out of my 20s and 30s and become a familiar friend, or rather foe.  This isn't the kind of "good sadness" that beckons my heart home.  Nor the kind that invites out my grief to be more fully enveloped with love. Rather this is the kind that draws me inward--despair, anxiety, darkness, dread.


d e p r e s s i o n.


a n x i e t y.


They were back.  


Companions I had hoped were long gone.  Truth is they have ever so slowly been pushing their way back in the past few months.  You see it's not like I feel this way every day (which is why I second guess their presence) but last week they came visiting with a vengeance.


I prayed. I renounced. I excercised.


They stayed.


You see back in March, I decided it was a good time to begin tapering off my meds to see if my brain had rebalanced chemically and physiologically things were back in order.


Apparently not.


Now a lot of this is a mystery to me--how much is circumstances? how much is the battle of my mind? how much is warfare? how much is stress? how much is physiological?  


And quite frankly, I just don't know.


I only know my threshold when it's crossed and last week it was, which I now know from experience doesn't get better but only goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.


It's humbling.  Because I don't have all the answers.  I only know what I know up until this point.  I don't want to be the national spokesperson on anxiety & depression yet I feel as though staying quiet about it isn't the answer either.


So I'm going back on my meds.  I don't know for how long or where this new trail on the journey will lead, but I do know...


He still loves me.


p.s. If you feel like no matter what you do the darkness keeps getting darker and it's harder and harder to function and take hold of hope and you feel less and less like "yourself," please consider the physiological aspects to depression and call a doctor.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel and things will change.