Tag Archives: overcoming depression

Hope Opens Doors

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I’ve never suffered from depression, but very recently, I found myself teetering on the edge and I wanted to share this story because lots of people suffer from depression. You see, two years ago, I had surgery on my ankle to repair a shredded posterior tibialis tendon (the tendon that goes under your arch and up the inside of your leg). It was a traumatic experience and the recovery has been long and painful.

A few weeks ago, I went back to see my doctor because I still have pain and swelling in my ankle. She told me that the surgery had obviously not accomplished what we had hoped, and asked how I felt about having more surgery, the procedure we should have done the first time, but because it was even more extensive with twice the recovery time, I opted for the less invasive one. It was now apparent that I had made the wrong choice.

Sitting there in the doctor’s office with my swollen, bare foot dangling off the edge of the table, the thought of having to undergo more surgery instantly plunged me into a suffocating darkness. I’ve had surgeries before, and my body does not take kindly to being cut on and stitched back together. It’s always a traumatic experience for me. Besides, there were no guarantees that the more extensive surgery would correct the problem either.

Returning home from my appointment, the crawling, bleeding, agonizing darkness sunk even deeper into me like thick black tar invading my soul. For days, I cried. I drank too much. I slept too much. I ate all the bad food I could get my hands on. I became lethargic. I couldn’t think. I felt very, very sorry for myself. I just knew that I was destined to be a cripple for the rest of my life. All I wanted to do was divorce myself from this rotten, messed-up body that keeps failing me. On the other hand, I had enough foresight to realize that if I didn’t watch it, I could slip into a bonafide clinical depression and I could see how easy it would be to go there, because the bad news was just one more addition to an already long list of negative and serious issues I’d been dealing with, so this new information didn’t just cause me to focus on foot surgery, it caused me to view my entire life through a lens of how terrible everything was. And I teach workshops on how to live the life of your dreams! How could I be an effective teacher if I was seeing nothing but the things that were wrong with me and my life?

But I was so down, I couldn’t see any way to pull myself out of the darkness, plus all those thoughts about not being an effective teacher only made me feel worse about myself. I needed to get my shit together somehow because I was sinking. Fast.

A friend then recommended a physical therapist in Boulder who specializes in foot and ankle issues as well as scoliosis. I knew I had scoliosis, and I wondered if perhaps that could be exacerbating my foot issues. My foot doctor concurred.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Yesterday I went to see the new PT. She looked at the x-rays of my spine—curved in two places—nice. She checked my flexibility and told me that my foot issues were likely caused by my scoliosis, and even if I were to have more surgery on my foot, it probably wouldn’t solve the problem. She said that we needed to treat the whole body–not just one area, and very likely the foot issues would resolve themselves in the process. Wait.  Seriously? A small light went on inside my heart. Was she saying there was hope?

She told me that my tendon was good and strong, which was encouraging because my initial thoughts had been that the surgery had all been for nothing–a total waste of time, money and pain. But the surgery didn’t go so far as to determine the cause, which was now becoming obvious—scoliosis was causing me to put pressure on the arch of my foot, hence the pain and swelling. Ah ha! An explanation that made sense!

The PT gave me a few suggestions to try in dealing with my posture and they helped instantly. She told me that she was optimistic that their unique program for scoliosis patients could help me live a normal life again because it had helped lots of people from all over the world. It helped my friend.

I felt hope rise inside of me like a gentle kiss of summer rain—a kind of hope that had previously seemed unlikely at best. Suddenly, the world looked brighter and all my problems, not just my foot issues, but all my problems and fears seemed manageable. Tears ran from my eyes—tears of hope that I could be pain-free again. Oh my gosh! What pure joy that would be!

Hope. Opens. Doors. Hope gives us the tools to keep going when all seems lost.

I can’t remember when I haven’t had pain, and just to have hope that that day is coming, for real this time… I can’t even begin to tell you how much this means to me, especially when I saw myself spiraling down into the quicksand of depression and all because I didn’t realize there was another option besides more excruciating surgery.

Sure, it’s easy to think positive when things are going fairly well; it’s a lot harder when suddenly the ground gets pulled out from beneath you due to the unexpected death of a loved one, a serious health issue, or any number of other things. Hope moves mountains. It gives us the strength to take another step.

Please know that no matter how terrible or dark things may seem, there’s always another option, and that’s the reason I wanted to share my story. Because although it may not always be apparent, if we keep looking and don’t give up, we will find the perfect solution, maybe something even better than we ever could have imagined and perhaps in a place we never thought to look.

There’s hope for everyone. There’s love for everyone. There are good things for everyone because there’s enough for all of us; the Universe (and our minds) are only limited by our thoughts. Please don’t ever give up.

 

Realizing I Have a Choice Even When It Doesn’t Seem Like It

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This time of year is difficult for a lot of people, including me. Several years ago, my dear father passed away right before Christmas, and 51 days later, so did my mom. So after the hustle of the holidays is over and I’ve taken down all the decorations and packed them in boxes for next year, pawned off left-over cookies on my visiting sons and anyone else who will take them off my hands before I eat them all (I was raised to believe that wasting food when people were starving in the world was simply unacceptable), like many others, the starkness of winter often hits me like a slab of icy concrete.

The other day I had a particularly tough day. I was scheduled for a radio interview, was all hyped-up and ready, but for some reason, at the last minute, it didn’t work out; we had to reschedule.

Things went downhill from there. It wasn’t any one thing that seemed to contribute to my bad day, it was a combination of a lot of small things.

I felt as if my brain was in a fog and my body slowly sinking in a very deep sea. I tried really hard to make myself accomplish something because sitting around doing nothing is not something I take kindly to. Besides, I already had my day planned out—I would organize the papers in my office—make folders for all my book files, get the laundry done, catch up on the bills and bank accounts, ship a copy of my book to my aunt and finish the grocery shopping. These are not difficult tasks, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t put my body or my brain into motion. Plus, I’d been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage”, her follow-up to her #1 best-seller “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Committed” made me ponder all sorts of things, like my identity for instance. But that’s another post.

I was also pondering things like, What else should I do to help promote my book? and I wonder if we can afford for me to go to the dentist this month and Why the hell has my arm been hurting so bad for two weeks now? All rather trivial things, to be sure. None of them are major stressors like losing one’s job and not being able to pay the rent, or finding out one’s teenage daughter is pregnant.

Nevertheless, my mood darkened by the second, until I found myself no longer treading water; now I was going under. That was when, by some miraculous visage of strength from the back of my brain, I told myself I had a choice: I didn’t have to let those negative feelings overtake me. And I knew this, but I kept sliding into that dark abyss anyhow, and the further I slid, the less I felt able to grasp that knowledge—that I truly did have a choice. I also realized that there were thousands of people in the world suffering from full-blown depressions and all sorts of similar conditions and I was beginning to see how that could easily take root in one’s psyche when one felt like that. Perhaps, just like what was happening to me, it started with the little things and before long, those little things overpowered you like a swarm of piranhas. And as I was thinking all these thoughts, through some remaining shred of logic, I wondered—what can I do to pull myself out of this?

A very big part of me said to tough it out, to push forward because after all, you’re damn lucky to be where you are right now; you have so much more than a lot of people—a house to live in, food in your belly, clothes to wear… How dare you feel so sorry for yourself! Of course those thoughts didn’t offer any solace; they just made me feel worse, because then I felt guilty for feeling down when I had so much to be thankful for.

Right about that time then, guilt, which needs only the tiniest fissure in which to creep in and wrap itself around me like a familiar coat (or a boa constrictor—whichever image you prefer) took a firm hold of me and made things even worse: I should be accomplishing something today. I shouldn’t feel this way. What’s the matter with me? Why am I such an ingrate?

It was at that moment that some semblance of self-empowerment took over. I can’t rightly say where it came from, but somehow I managed to step back from my insistent ego-mind to remind myself all over again, that I had a choice. I could let the darkness sabotage me, drag me down further, maybe even into a full-fledged depression, or I could listen to what my body and spirit were trying to tell me, even though I kept dismissing them for all those reasons of guilt. So I leaned back in my chair and asked my body and spirit what they needed.

And this is what they said, “We’re exhausted.”

“What? That’s ridiculous! I slept just fine lastnight; how could I be so wiped out?” It was my ego-brain attempting to rationalize things again.

I decided to listen to my body and spirit. I took a nap. And when I got up, I popped a bag of popcorn in the microwave and got myself a real Pepsi, not the diet version I usually have, but a real one—loaded with sugar—and proceeded to polish them both off, even though my ego-mind was jumping up and down in the back of my brain like a bratty kid and telling me that it was almost time to fix dinner; if I ate all that stuff, I wouldn’t be hungry for dinner. Besides, sugar wasn’t good for me.

After that, I went upstairs and sat in front of my computer, and as I glanced out the window, I realized that the sun was going down behind the mountains, but I also realized something else: those last few rays were shining on my face and they felt warm. They felt like love.

My darkness melted.

We all have days like this once in a while, but this experience showed me how even small negative thoughts can easily turn into HUGE negative thoughts. Negative attracts negative just as positive attracts positive. But sometimes it seems easier to wallow in the negative, to let those thoughts pull us down rather than to search for the energy to claw our way out of the pit and into the light again. So what can we do?

I’m sure medical experts would say that I shouldn’t have had the sugar, but according to a recent article about the wintertime blues, for the most part, I did a few things right, which is perhaps the reason my bad mood didn’t swallow me whole. For one, I saw that I had a choice, and for another, I exposed my face to sunshine. I also sat back and tried to determine the cause of my bad feelings: I listened to what my body and spirit had to say, even when my ego mind told me there was no reason I should have felt that way. And when I listened, my body and spirit knew exactly what they needed.

Shamanism taught me to use this technique in other aspects of my life as well. If I’m pondering what to do in a given situation, I ask my body and spirit and notice how they react. Sometimes the reactions are so slight that I can’t detect them and sometimes they’re blatantly obvious. But the more I listen to my Higher Self, the more in tune I become with my own sense of what it is I really need, and that is one of the keys to true happiness.

I always have a choice.