It's Mines

As I stated in last week’s column, I have gone a period of time in which I found what it was to tap into the happiness we can only find within ourselves, true happiness, before my Mom became terminally ill.

The combination between the people who entered my life and after years of running from it I armed myself with education about depression and the manic phases that follow.

Yes, I had been told before it is important to know what each is and it is important to understand who I was so I could see the signs when either approached, but I was also told to rely on others to spot it as well.

It is easy to run from things and only kind of educate yourself, especially when it comes to education about one’s self – after all we all already know who we are don’t we?

At least that is what I thought, until I really stopped and was faced with understanding my own thinking.

It wasn’t the surface thoughts that I didn’t mind sharing with others, it was the thoughts and feelings I kept well hidden from anyone because surely if I shared those thoughts with anyone, people would think I was crazy or ungrateful.

To read that now, knowing it was very true for the time, I know neither is true and I spent a lot of time allowing for who I am to be ignored, by me.

The first step for me in the process was to stop running from my diagnosis and do whatever I had to, to gain a clear thinking mind.

I had been told years prior to this that I would be on some sort of psychotropic medication for the whole of my life to control the depressions and the mania that can follow and needless to say that did not set well with me and it is there my fight to prove them wrong began.

But in my first true moment of clarity after the diagnosis and I stopped running away from me for long enough to have one, I realized I would have to get on the medications to begin to put the shattered pieces of me back together.

And I started there, though today the most I am ever on is antidepressants, I have a program of sorts that has truly worked for me for better than six years and doesn’t have me on a pill regimen – but that isn’t the norm for most people.

Despite this epiphany my transformation (I call it that because it is the best word I can think to use) didn’t start to take serious positive turns until I was smacked in the face with yet another loss of someone I love so whole heartedly.

Or maybe I should say it was only then I could be hit with a moment of clarity so powerful I realized running had only dug my hole deeper and really turned me into someone I didn’t even recognize when I looked in the mirror.

(I say this because even after all the leaps and bounds I had made prior to my Mom’s hospitalization I was only a hundredth of the way there (if that!) and had such a free fall backwards I often wonder if that was an illusion- the happiness I had found for a short time.)

I didn’t actually know who I was; the eyes staring back at me were those of a stranger; a sad, lonely, scared stranger.

I knew me as a Mom, of which wasn’t too bad I took (take) very good care of my kids and managed to keep the craziness of my life at that time away from them, all the while making sure they were 110 percent taken care of in every way a child could need and that they feel and knew how much they are loved.

So I knew I was a good mom, a mom who made mistakes, but also loves her children so much it hurts – in a good way.

I also knew who I was as a wife, of which, well I could have been a whole lot better, but quite honestly I think we all could when it comes to our spouses, maybe more of us would have only one marriage for a lifetime.

But I was upholding my agreement with our family to my husband, which was to take care of the kids, him, the house, the bills and to get a job when our finances depended upon it.

I knew who I was as a family member within my family (my origin) it was a role I had played for so long I would have had to of been brain dead not to know.

I knew who I was as a friend; I made all my actual friends my family and my acquaintances what people would and do call friends.

That is a bit complicated to understand in the aspect where I define both but that is for another time, maybe.

But when it came to who I was to me or who I really was outside of the “roles” I played I might as well have been a stranger, because that is who and what stared back at me.

It is strange to strip yourself down to the bare of who you are, because many times in our lives we think we have done just that, only to realize or someday end up in front of that mirror staring back at a perfect stranger.

To say I didn’t recognize myself is an understatement – and none of it had anything to do with drugs or alcohol or anything like that as so often happens, it was because for the first time in my life I realized I had to find out if I knew who I was and the first step for me was to stare into a mirror as I never had before really searching out my own eyes.

I had been told many times over several years, by someone I once held very close to my heart, that sadness was what he saw when he really looked into my eyes, that the glimmer of happy they had when he first met me was gone, even on days when I appeared to be happy.

He was right because I hadn’t actually begun to know myself – the true inner me that no one else can or would ever know better than me, and that would be the biggest step I would take to becoming…..

I am going to end here this week, so as always, may your week be wonderful and full of smiles and laughter.

Contact Tina Mines at [email protected].