A Better Way

Not What I Expected - Written by Gina Morris

As a baby, I knew warm hugs and smiles,

not yet aware of life’s many trials.

My child mind began to understand what I could do,

the possibilities seemed limitless; this I now know is not true.

As a young adult, I started to feel the stress,

Having to learn life’s strategies, like a game of chess.

Here I come adulthood, completely unprepared.

No one told me the things of which I’d be scared.

It all seemed so cruel; the things people did.

I’d keep it bottled up, refusing to open the imaginary lid.

I mastered the happy face, day in and day out,

But deep in my soul, battling each depressive bout.

Life’s not been at all what I expected,

Feeling like one of God’s children that He has rejected.

So, here I stand at the crossroads, wondering which way to go,

Asking myself if I can find a way to stop sinking so low.

Chapter One: 1992

It was about 10am on, I believe a Friday morning. I walked into my office as a crumbling 22-year-old to try to work, teetering on the edge inside but putting on the “I’m okay, you’re okay” smile. As I started to perform my job duties, I received a phone call that brought more pain into my less than happy life. That was it, my breaking point. I don’t know if I even grabbed my bag, but I did at least grab the keys because I drove home, found a bottle of prescription pills that belonged to my roommate and proceeded to take about 50 of them. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor after I had managed to get all the pills down thinking that I wasn’t feeling very well. I read that last line now and chuckle to myself. Duh! Of course you didn’t feel well silly.

I woke up, in my conscious mind, about 4 days later in the hospital. I was extremely groggy and had no feeling in the outer half of my left arm from the elbow down through the fingers. Being left handed, that created an additional challenge. I vaguely recall that my family and my friend were there with me. They started piecing things together for me. Such as, the priest had been there to give me my last rites as the doctors thought I may not make it. No one had found me for 36 hours therefore pumping my stomach would have been a moot point since my body had already digested the drugs.

My family described my “road to recovery” with details such as, my face was bloated and I had blood in my eyes and ears; my tongue so swollen it could hardly fit in my mouth; and I sounded like I was speaking in tongues including the rambling of numbers. Fortunately for me I couldn’t remember any of it but I could see in their eyes that they would never forget. I hurt worse emotionally when I woke up than I ever had. To think I had even failed at that. I felt worse off than if I had succeeded in committing suicide. At least that’s what I thought at that time.

When I had gotten my strength back up and when I say “gotten my strength” I mean I could walk from the bed to the bathroom with assistance so I could get cleaned up and transferred me to another facility.

This was the single most horrific experience I had ever been through. When I arrived at the facility, the nurses walked me into my room, which had 3 beds in it, to share with 2 other girls. On the drive over there I was thinking to myself that I would be somewhere with other depressed people. I was WAY off base! The people that were there I thought were in much more of a crisis than I was. On the first day, my “roommate” came out of our room wearing my pajamas underneath her underwear. Needless to say, I didn’t ask for them back. I was deeply affected by one young patient who was a drug addict and boasted with delusional pride of using crack while pregnant. She was only 17. I wanted out of there immediately. I saw the attending psychiatrist the next morning, who after speaking with me understood that I was deeply depressed but not in an insanity crisis. He agreed to release me after the 72-hour period ended, but to my parent’s custody.

My head was still foggy, and I was not able to understand at the time that it was what was best for me. I refused to be released into their custody because I had my own place and a job, or at least I thought I did. I stormed out of the doctor’s office yelling and ran down the hall where I was greeted by a male nurse about 6’4” and extremely muscular. He picked me up and, escorted by 2 other female nurses carried me into “lockup”. Yes, it’s just like it sounds with solitary confinement thrown in; a square padded 8’ X 8’ room with a cot in the middle. They, not so gently, placed me face down on the cot, pulled down my pants and injected me in my rear end with a syringe of who knows what. The rest of that day is a blank.

Chapter Two

The next morning, I decided I needed to find a way to help myself out of there, so I thought if I play the game, they’ll let me go on my terms. That afternoon I went to a group therapy session with about 12 other people. Despite the poor choice I made that got me there, I’m not stupid, and so I realized you get out of it what you put into it. If I shutdown, then I would not receive help. If I listened, I might learn by other people’s experiences. If I participated in discussions, I might be embarrassed although it was a little late for discretion but maybe somehow, I could create hope.

I thought what the heck, a little effort at this point shouldn’t be out of the question. I listened and I talked but most importantly of all I learned. I learned that there are a lot of people who make “wrong” decisions. At that time in my young life, I thought that if I made the “wrong” choice or got manipulated by someone it made me less of a person. When people would pay me a compliment, it would make me feel horrible because the darkness inside would never allow a compliment. I truly believed the pain I was in would never go away.

It was all crap! I decided then and there that I wasn’t going to let my mind trick me like that anymore. Don’t misunderstand, the pain was real but the thoughts I was having were not. They were thoughts that were skewed by actions. For instance, if I was depressed and thought that nothing was ever going to work out for me, something as minor as my car breaking down would confirm in my mind that it’s a sign to reinforce how I felt. I was misinterpreting again. The car breaking down was just an occurrence that happened to me at a time when I was not emotionally equipped to handle the stress. I needed to find a way to live an emotionally healthy life.

I didn’t want to live my life like this anymore. So, in retrospect I had taken the first step, establishing a goal, however vague it may have seemed. It had been approximately a week, from start to finish, the day I left my job to the day I was discharged and able to go home. By the way, I did end up going home with Mom and Dad.

Chapter Three

When I stepped out the doors of that facility the world seemed different but in fact, it was me who was different. I felt scared of everything and as crazy as it may seem, things also looked different to me. My mind was still in a fog from the pills that I had taken. The irony of the pills I overdosed on is that they were designed for depression but prescribed for my roommate for seizures. Had I taken one or two I probably could’ve avoided all this.

As I was driving in the car back to their house (my parents were driving, I was staring at the “new world”), I was trying to figure out where to start. The reality was hitting me that I no longer had a job, my roommate would fear constantly for my safety and would not feel comfortable living with me any more so at that time in my life I had “nothing”. Yet “nothing” came with a big something. I had a new opportunity to change, but it finally occurred to me that without self-love there can be no growth.

As you might have guessed, as a child I was sexually abused by a close family “friend”. In addition, I was drugged in a bar, taken to another location and raped at twenty-one. Some form of abuse is unfortunately a common occurrence for people who suffer from some sort of mental illness, be it psychological or physiological. I had never dealt with the feelings those situations engrained in me. So, no matter how far I pushed them to the back of my mind it was always a factor in my decision making in my sub-conscious mind. I have since learned that those kinds of traumas cause a version of PTSD. But no matter what has happened in someone's past; the horrible things they have experienced or seen, I realized I could work through it and regain control of my life again.

The reality of life is that I couldn't control how others act. Even the people that claimed to love me could be hurtful and even toxic. I came to understand that reflected on them, not me! In the past I could never clear my head enough to see that and avoid making bad decisions. I not only felt worthless, but I also felt in constant pain. I tried to commit suicide because I just wanted the pain to stop!

A lot of other events that led up to this point were of my making also. Many of my choices were based on sub-conscious feelings but because I wasn’t being honest with myself, I hadn’t realized it before. Whatever my diagnosis, I knew that I had to be in charge of understanding MY decisions and find a way to make better choices. I had lived a life where instead of having memories, my memories were having me. In essence, my memories were controlling my actions instead of me controlling my actions.

Chapter Four

The next step back into the real world would be to incorporate therapy into my day-to-day life. I had suffered from bad decisions and what was viewed as a bad attitude early in my life so my mom had sought therapy for me previously. The problem with therapy is if you don’t know how to get something out of it you will be wasting your time. When I went to therapy previously, I didn’t know how to be truthful, or how to talk about the things that made me feel most vulnerable. I vowed to figure out how to get better, feel better and be better.

The road back was not easy. In fact, it was harder than hard, but I will tell you, many years later that it was totally worth it. I have a stable life now. I found a great therapist that I can talk to openly and freely.

I went through a lot of therapists prior to finding one to whom I could truly open up. Finding the right therapist was a lot like dating. I had to weed through the ones that were not a match for my personality before I could relax enough to be myself and be honest. Of course, finding a therapist that told me everything I wanted to hear was of no help either. Even if it made me feel good at that moment, they were not helping me find the tools to make a healthy progression in my life.

I still get depressed and make mistakes and bad things still happen occasionally but inside I am at peace with the person I am and although I still must manage my disease, yes depression is a disease, I am better mentally equipped to handle the things that life throws at me. Even to this day I suffer, although more infrequently, from severe bouts of depression but now I know how to get through them. The length of the episodes varies, so I have learned how to make adjustments during those times to keep myself safe. I have now become in tune with my mental state in general so I can usually feel these “moods” coming on. I now have tools to manage the “moods”.

In my opinion, medication can be necessary, and it does help a lot of people, including myself. However, there were still underlying issues that need to be addressed even with the assistance of medications. It’s not a coincidence that a huge percentage of the people who suffer from these diseases are afflicted with past trauma? But I’m not a doctor nor a scientist so I can’t tell you what the relationship is, only that there is one. I have spent too much time examining feelings, reactions, thoughts and emotions not to realize the importance of that correlation.

Chapter 5

No one has ever been as critical of me as me. Funny how that is, but I truly was my own worst enemy. I could rationalize all my mistakes but no matter how I spun them I could never just let them go and move on. I allowed the mistakes I made to dictate who I thought I was. I needed to figure out a way to forgive myself. It was the most difficult of all the steps I took because I couldn’t lie to myself. Truly forgiving myself and allowing myself to feel the forgiveness was key.

I had to confront all the things I held against myself. The mistakes I made, no matter how justified they seemed at the time, still hurt me as a person. It seemed like the list went on and on but I had to take baby steps because I had years of them to go through. I’m sure my process was different from others, but I’ll tell you the process I went through. I recalled each mistake I could still feel buried inside, holding onto the pain and admitted to myself, “yes, I did that, but it’s over and done with and I will remember it, learn from it and do better next time”. Seems easy, right? No, not at all. But it was a way to get the ball rolling.

It gave me a beginning point when I started in individual therapy after my suicide attempt, because by then I had already admitted and accepted responsibility for the mistakes I had made and since denial is a primary stage of most “terminal” diseases (which at this point it felt like it was), I was somewhat ahead of the game. It was extremely difficult to forgive myself for hurting the people I truly cared about. Some friendships I lost and some, although we remained friends, were damaged by my behavior. The hardest part for me was to come to the realization that some people had put their trust in me and I betrayed that trust. I didn’t want my life to end that way, so I had to create something positive out of those very painful occurrences by learning a lesson of how to behave in the future.

Now to the flip side of the forgiveness issue. What about the people that had hurt me? I had let the anger eat at me inside for years. Was it really possible to let it go? Of course! It was a choice to be angry, to feel hate towards those that hurt me and towards myself for believing I deserved the pain. So now I could make the choice to let it go. It wasn’t instantaneous, of course. Like everything else it was a process.

Before I move on, I want to tell you a discovery lesson. When I was in my mid-teens, I had a friend who betrayed me in an emotionally painful way. Do you know the first place I went to, emotionally speaking? To the traumatic events that had happened to me as a child. That event left me feeling alone and confused and was similar to the feelings that I was having at the situation with my “friend”. There was a certain perverse comfort in going back to the first event in my life that had truly hurt and damaged me, not only on a physical level but more importantly on an emotional level.

Looking back, I see that when I was hurt, I would always go back to that place. Maybe I was giving myself an excuse for the bad behavior I exhibited but the ironic thing was that my bad behavior hurt me more than anyone else could. I was punishing myself. When I was hurt, I immediately felt like I deserved to feel hurt so I did everything I could to become a self-fulfilling prophet.

Chapter 6

I didn’t tell anyone about what had happened to me when I was nine until I was 19 years old. It wasn’t that well received by the person I told at that time either so initially it gave me even more issues to deal with. But after I got it out the first time it became easier to talk about, then I was able to begin the process of healing. I hear so many people talk negatively of therapy but most of the negativity comes from the fear of not understanding what it’s truly like. I can honestly say therapy saved my life, many times over. I will always be an advocate for therapy. Depression is not usually something a person experiences once; it’s a recurring part of life. Therapy didn’t “cure” me of never feeling depressed again, it gave me tools so I could recognize the triggers and plan to deal with feelings brought about by those triggers.

I’d like to say that those triggers don’t exist anymore but that would be counterproductive to healing because it would be a lie. The most valuable lesson I have learned in therapy is honesty. I couldn’t address any of the issues holding me down until I admitted I had them. Of course, I had to admit the issues to myself before admitting them to anyone else. If I couldn’t see the truth about my feelings and behavior, I wouldn’t be able to move forward no matter what anyone else tried to tell me or do for me. During one of my therapy sessions, I was given a book and in it there was a poem that to me felt like it was about realization, progress and achievement. Basically the poem talked about falling in the same pothole again and again. It was like a switch in my brain that had been flicked on and I finally realized where I was and where I wanted to go.

Chapter Seven

Therapy helped me more than I could ever express, but I had to work at it and allow it to help.

I had to give myself some personal guidelines and permissions in order for therapy to be successful. I had to realize that I didn't have to spill my guts on my very first session. I also had to remember that it was okay if I didn't feel comfortable with a therapist. It truly was like dating. I needed to find someone that spoke my same language.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean by “speaking the same language”. When I was speaking with a therapist I finally felt comfortable with about how much I enjoyed working with technology (a harmless subject, by the way), he remembered that fact months later and when we were speaking about when I was feeling overwhelmed, he told me to imagine everything that was on my mind as windows on my computer monitor. You know how you often have multiple windows open and flip between windows on your computer? He advised me to imagine my problems were on those windows. He said to close the windows AKA problems to the ones that were long-term goals and minimize the ones I wanted to address soon but not immediately. Before I knew it, I felt less overwhelmed. That amazed me about therapists. They could use seemingly harmless information to make suggestions back to me, basically giving me a way to communicate effectively with myself.

If I wanted to change the subject, I did. I dictated what happened in therapy. BUT I knew that the whole purpose of going to therapy was to eventually open up about the things that had me stepping into those same potholes in my life. So, it was okay to take my time but I had to keep working with that goal in mind. The most important thing I had to remember was to BE MYSELF. Therapy wasn't the place to put on my happy face or pretend I didn't feel something I did feel. If I was asked a question I didn't feel comfortable answering, then I would just say that and not lie. Otherwise, one lie would lead to another and another, etc... It was counterproductive to therapy. I had to make the choice to be me. Even if I wasn't happy with who I was yet, that was the whole point. It was a step to learning how to be a better me. Yes, it was scary and difficult, but I suspect taking back control of my life was supposed to be.

Chapter Eight

Before I accepted that my depression was a symptom of a disease, I often felt ashamed of my “weakness” and just wanted to be “normal”. First, let me tell you that normal doesn’t exist. What I came to realize is that to me “normal” actually meant emotionally healthy. It was so hard to want good for myself. Well, let me rephrase that; it was so hard to believe I deserved good. I wanted good feelings, good people and good things for myself, but I had learned to accept that it just wasn’t something I would ever have. I had become a self-fulfilling prophet. I believed certain things to be true about my future and subconsciously I would make sure those things came true. For instance, since I believed I would never be happy, I would befriend someone who wasn’t good for me to be around so that I would ensure my life would continue to be chaotic and I would continue to feel strife.

There are so many facets to life, I couldn’t possibly be aware of them every moment of every day, that’s why I needed to learn some basic, healthy, fundamental thinking.

Number one; I threw out the belief that there are perfect people! I came to realize that everyone must make mistakes. It’s what has to happen to help me learn and grow. I made the decision to look at my mistakes as a blessing. That doesn’t mean initially it felt good to make mistakes, it just means I didn’t brow beat myself for making them and I realized that I could learn to be a better person by my mistakes.

My sister used to ask me, “Why can’t you be as kind to yourself as you are to other people?”. The reason why was because I valued other people more than myself. I didn’t think I deserved to be kind to myself. But of course, now I know that isn’t true. I had the right, privilege and opportunity to start over. No one was going to hand me anything, but I had the power to be my best self. It was an opportunity I finally believed I could handle and control and from my efforts reap the rewards.

Below are a couple of things that I do now to help me manage my moods.

• If my life feels like too many things are getting out of control, I look for something to clean or organize. I know it may sound strange, but it helps feed that sense of control, squelch the internal chaos I am feeling and calm me down enough to look at things more clearly.

• If I need advice on how to handle a situation and no one is around, I try to think about my problem as if a friend has the problem and how I would advise them to handle it. Sometimes I get my personal obstacles stuck in “analysis paralysis” mode but when a friend asks me for advice, I seem to always have advice ready for them.

• The other thing I do is remember to, “say what I mean” and “mean what I say”. Remembering those things allows me to take a few extra seconds before I speak so I don’t say something or act out of anger or frustration.

• Lastly, it is not only okay, but it can also be empowering to say “no”. So I don't do something for someone I know is physically or emotionally hurtful just because THEY want me to.

My life is full of hope and opportunity now. To this day, it still amazes me how much I came to realize I am capable of when I came out of the darkness. I finally found A Better Way!