….Anxiety….

This is a picture of myself, my daughter & my step daughter. I want to be a strong, solid, good ethical role model for them. But, some days I find myself crumbling under the weight of life. I fight tears for days at a time for no particular reason. Living with depression and anxiety make it very difficult to think straight sometimes. The only time in my life when I am 100% confident is when I am at work, taking care of sick people. There is something about the chaos and challenge of saving lives that makes my brain work at maximum capacity. That is my wheelhouse. I have never been confident in my mothering skills, my daughtering skills, my wife skills. I’m a terrible house keeper.

Anxiety sometimes completely jams up my life. This has happened to me multiple times in my life, periodically, and I can’t really line it up with anything in particular. The last two weeks, anxiety has been crippling me. I’m pretty much always at max capacity for stress, so it’s not like things get MORE stressful for me….just sometimes I feel like I am sinking into a hole that I can’t get out of…this makes me difficult to deal with. It makes me insecure, which is a very unattractive quality to a mate. It makes me have doubt, which I do not generally have.

A life partner is supposed to support you through good times and bad. I think sometimes partners take turns sinking, then building each other up. When I sit back and think it through, I wonder: How much support should a partner be expected to provide when you are struggling? There is only so much difficulty you can throw at a person before it becomes abusive and unfair. I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a question I am not sure can be answered as I suppose it is up to the individual. While I do appreciate the vow that people take when they get married, I also think that there are deal breakers (obviously, I’m divorced).

I am not posing these thoughts because I am not being supported. Matt absolutely supports me, he has become my best friend & homey.   This is just something I think about sometimes.

Depression and anxiety are silent, they make you feel weak, so you fake it. You fake smiles & happy texts. Sometimes you wake up in the morning & you can’t wait to go back to sleep that night. That really sucks, because it makes it impossible to enjoy your day. So you try to busy yourself (at least I do) with tasks…because I am good at tasks.

This is one of my challenges. 🙂