Frustration

Throughout this whole ordeal I am learning to be patient with myself and others. I have lost relationships along this journey of life and I hope not to loose any more. It is extremely difficult for me to keep it together for my son let alone my husband sometimes. I don't want to be negative or make others unhappy but when I feel like I'm going down that deep dark tunnel, it's a blessing that I have a husband who understands and is there to support me in any way possible. He does get irritated because he can't "Fix" me. I am not the same person he met 8 years ago. I have always been depressed but the degree of depression has increased seven-fold. I put on facade for him because I wanted him to think that I had it all together and I didn't but the depression wasn't like it is now out of control. I am on medication thank the good Lord but medication can only do so much so I am in therapy and it has taken me a lot of courage to be at the state that I'm in right now.

Moving On To The Present- A Christian dealing with mental illness.

The reason why I have decided to move forward with my past is because there is so much of it that has happened to me that it would take FOREVER for me to reach this point. Well I am officially diagnosed with  having Bi-Polar II, OCD, PTSD, ADHD,and GAD. I'm a mess right? To be honest I do feel like a mess most of the time. I have a 3 year old that I love very much see me break down and cry when my OCD is out of control. I am embarrassed to even say that I'm officially a "cutter". This means that I cut myself when the voices in my head get TOO overwhelming and when I cut myself, mentally I feel like the evil inside of me is drawn out. Yes I hear two voices in my head most of the times. I am NOT schizochophrenic in any way because I don't hear different voices and I don't experience paranoia from the voices. I hear two distinct voices but they are my own voices. One of the voices which I feel is the Holy Spirit talks to me when I've done something bad and takes me back to center and says, "Relax God is not mad at you", but the other voice makes me feel like God is mad at me and that he wants to kill me because I watched a movie that haD profanity in it so I feel this inward struggle that makes me want to not only cut myself but do drugs as well. I look at all of these people on the show, "Intervention" that smoke crack, do heroin all because their parents divorced! C'mon my parents were not only divorced at one time but there were countless times that my mom threw our dad out of the house and yet by the GRACE of God I managed to go to school, graduate from college making the Dean's List, and going to get my paralegal certificate while also making the Dean's List for my academic achievements. I am not saying that I'm better than those people but I'm saying that it goes to show you that a traumatic experience to someone may not be traumatic to someone else. The trauma that I experienced in my life has caused me to have be in constant worry that I'm going to die young like my dad, insomnia, homicidal/suicidal thoughts that also contribute to me cutting myself, most importantly I can not watch televsion before I have read the Bible because my anxiety is SOO bad that I think that God is mad at me and thinking that I chose to watch TV than to fellowship with Him by reading the Bible. I read the bible everyday and there are passages that I know by heart however I am scared to have God love me and be close to me because my dad was close to God and God took him from me. I don't have control and I want it. I want to kill myself sometimes yet I don't want God to take me from my son at such a young age. I feel horrible all of the time. I can't tell you how many times that I've wanted to try heroin because it's an opiate because I don't want to FEEL anything at all! I go to a psychiatrist who is very good with my meds but I take a lot of meds just to function because of my OCD/Bi- Polar/ Insomnia I have to take two mood stabilizers because if I don't I feel these intrusive thoughts to hurt someone, specifically my child. I haven't been able to share this with anyone so there are only a selected few that I will allow to take part in this journey. My goal in doing this process to let you know that even though you're a Christian and have a mental disability don't get down on yourself.

Continuation- A Christian dealing with mental illness- I hear the steam can someone take the pot off of the fire please?

When my dad died my mother did not seek counseling for herself, my brother and I. Instead she took us to Hawaii for ten days and when you're 13 years old Hawaii didn't seem like a bad idea. While in Hawaii I didn't focus on my dad's death just enjoying the view and the many things that Hawaii offered. One day while on the trip, my mother left my brother and I to do what we wanted to do but we had to stay near the hotel so we decided to order some "virgin" pina coladas and enjoy the beautiful weather. We did a lot of things when we were in Hawaii. We saw Pearl Harbor, went to a Luau, the beach and the Dole pineapple factory. I didn't know how good pineapples were when they first came off the tree. You'd think that the grief wouldn't be too intense when we got back home but that was the opposite. When I returned back to school everyone knew that my dad had died and I felt like a celebrity telling the same story over and over. To me Hawaii only was a mask to temporarily forget the extreme loss of losing a parent. The pain came back to me with a vengeance. I felt a huge hole in my heart that would eventually become hard that I didn't think that anything could fix it and my longing for death began. My mom decided that we needed a new change in scenery so we moved after my 7th grade year to Glendale. I was so nervous to start a new school let alone an "all white" school. I wasn't prejudiced or anything just scared because I didn't know if they would accept me because of my color. My fears didn't last for long because I did make some friends but I also felt like the black sheep because there were only two black people in the entire 8th grade class! God had given me a gift to be able to sing and sing well. I joined the choir along with one of my best friends and we went to different competitions in which we had to sing a piece that we learned in front of different judges for a for an award. My friend and I got some awards and we were happy. I remember when my 8th class first heard me sing. I was in "home room" and were allowed to do anything but homework and the movie, "The Bodyguard" had just came out starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. Whitney Houston was the "ying" to my "yang". I wanted to sing like her because her voice was like no other I had ever heard. I had brought the movie soundtrack with me and there was a song called, "I Will Always Love You". Well I started singing that song quietly to myself and one of my friends heard me sing and asked me if that was me singing and I told him no. I started quietly singing again and he turned and asked me if I was singing and I said no the second time. Finally he caught right in the middle of the hook of the song and yelled, " Tasha can sing!" I wanted to strangle him because my voice was my little secret and I wasn't ready to share that secret with the entire 8th grade! My teacher asked me if I would sing that song to the class and I was reluctant at first but the begging became too much so I did and then the crying came and the cheers. What had I done? From that moment on I never felt nor was treated the same.

Continuation: A Christian dealing with mental illness- How long will it take before the pot boils over?

The very part of sanity for myself found it's way in guys that used me for other purposes, alcohol, really dark poetry. Poetry was my voice and my demise. I expressed myself and my feelings through poetry but that was all that I used to express my feelings. I had no voice it seemed because I had no confidence. I believe and still do believe that my feelings are not worth talking about because either I take things too seriously, or I think that the person whom I am speaking to won't validate my feelings. Why should it matter right? The very air that I breathe has to do with acceptance. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but I have a deep desire to try to please everyone because I wanted people to like me. I have carried this burden since the day after my dad's death. I tried so hard to find acceptance, I mean "true" acceptance from my mother but she never could give that back to me because she did not receive acceptance from her father. The cycle abuse does can duplicate itself throughout generations. Part of me feels sorry for my mother while the other part of me wishes that she wasn't my mother at all. We're told to accept our parent's mistakes because they "did the best that they could" well I believe that that saying is not exactly "easy" to do. My mom says that she did the best that she could but did she? She told me that she never wanted children and that I was her so-called, "Trojan Baby." What the hell is a "Trojan Baby?" I asked her what that meant and she later told me that she named me that because she used a Trojan condom and I still managed to be conceived. And you wonder why I feel like I don't belong here.Sadly after my dad died I felt a deep longing to leave with him because I didn't know who I was without him. My dad was sweet, lovable, and stern when he had to be; a people person that loved his family and most of all loved the Lord. He helped reinforce Christ in my life by not only his words but his actions as well. I remember him telling me this: "I don't think that I am going to be here too much longer but whatever you do always put God first in your life." and three days later he was gone. Everyone in this world has experienced some type of loss- more frequent than others but the degree of losing my dad was the catalyst of this catastrophic illness.

Day Two: A Christian dealing with mental illness- The Boiling Pot

Today I am happy to say that I received a comment from one of my dear friends and that makes my heart happy. My goal in blogging is not to gain sympothy but to let people know that even though you are a Christian or believe in God doesn't mean that you can't have a mental illness. Just like diabetes or any other illness, mental illness is just as important and needs to be treated with therapy and medication. Not everyone that is depressed has a mental illness. I was diagnosed with being manic depressive or "clinically depressed" and I didn't realize that having no treatment would later end up making me even more sick. Subsequently, after I tried to commit suicide I was told by a social worker that I had to either get outpatient therapy or that I would be admitted into a behavioral health facility so I chose to go with seeing a therapist. Although I found a therapist to go to I didn't like the feeling of exposing myself to that person. I had a great fear that opening up the pot of boiling water would later burn me in the end and I would become even more depressed so what I did was shut down. I would talk to the therapist about ordinary subjects like when did the depression start and so on. I was attending ASU at the time and something happened that made the pot boil even more. A friend of mine had passed away prematurely and right then I had wished it was me who died and not her. I was so distraught and absolutely out of my mind that I stopped seeing the therapist that I was going to and tried another which didn't help me either way. At this point in time I was given no medication to take and didn't know that I would need to. Has anyone felt that their life experiences were kept in a boiling pot ready to pop at anytime?

Day One- The Beginning- When the illness began

I was brought up in a Christian home and taught to believe in a God that loves us unconditionally. Although that I knew this I no recollection that I was sexually abused until some years after I lost my dad at an early age. I have been depressed most of my adolescent life. I never knew what depression really was because I felt unhappy ALL of the time and didn't know why. After my dad died something inside of me died and the remembrance of my sexual abuse became real and that is when everything went downhill. At 15 I was diagnosed with being clinically depressed and having a chemical imbalance. I had no idea what "clinically depressed" meant. I was told that I had a low level of "serotonin". I tried to commit suicide when I was 19 years old because I had enough of being lectured by my mother and feeling that no one loved me. My mother made no real attempts to pull me out of my self loathing so the depression grew to extraordinary lengths.I had no idea how greatly this disease would affect my future.