When you say you are getting healthy, you aren't just talking about your body, even if that's the only thing you're thinking about.  When you think about "getting healthy" you think about eating the right types of foods, and getting the right amounts of exercise, and lifting weights, and sometimes even getting the right amount of sleep so your body is rested and you can get up and do it all over again the next day.

What you're not looking at though, is the WHOLE picture.  There is a whole lot up above that body that you're not even taking into consideration when you're thinking about all things healthy.  Probably the most important piece of all that needs to fall into place before any of the rest of it really can or will start matching up and making ends meet.  Your mind has to be healthy.  Or at least more healthy than not.

Over the last year and a half, I have had a very NOT healthy mind.  I'd say it was right around the time my grand mother died.  It wasn't her death that caused it, it was all of the crap that followed.  Finding my boyfriend's "secret" blog to his dead ex-wife where he told her he liked me but he wasn't really sure if he loved me and he knew I loved his boys and I was great with them and yadda yadda yadda.... I had had doubts about him before finding that little piece of information, I was pretty sure he had been talking to other women, but always too afraid to call him on it, afraid that I would have been called the snoop and then, once again, everything would have been turned back on me.  So my mind started slipping.

I started dating J, a man I had loved for as long as I could have remembered loving anyone, and it was wonderful and real, and easy.  I didn't even have to think about it.  It was like sinking into a warm bath, something I had done a hundred times before, something I didn't need to relearn.  Comfortable.  An old sweatshirt.  Even after I had lost him, I still had him.  For another few months at least.

And then the walls came crashing down around me.

This is what my shrink refers to as the catechism.  The point at which all points after this now revolve.  the hole through the floor of my world through which I would eventually sink so low that I would eventually fall through, but only if I were lucky enough.  Slime.

My defining moment flashes back to chipped beef and cream cheese, blue fuzzy slippers, dill pickle chips, "women for Obama stickers" and sea weed green sterile surgical scrubs.  The thought of any of these things and I want to vomit.  I have the same reaction to them that a pregnant woman would have to the smell of chicken cooking on an open stove.  I ate a lot of waffle cone ice cream.  I chased a lot of that ice cream with vodka and sleeping pills.  I wore a hole in my couch in the shape of my body.  I didn't answer my phone.  And no one knew how bad I was because I was so good at pretending that I was alive and not really dead.  I put on a smile, and I talked really fast, all the while thinking of ways to get Aiden out of the house so that I could kill myself.

We put the Christmas tree up a week before Thanksgiving.  I knew with the Christmas tree up, I could keep the tree lit all the time.  With the lights lit all of the time, I wouldn't kill myself.  The lights make me happy.  I wouldn't make my child an orphan before his birthday or Christmas this year.  We had no money.  I ate ice cream, and I chased it with vodka that I said was soda which was actually vodka, and ambian.  and I slept in a hole on the couch shaped like me.

This was just like a bad breakup.  I just needed a few weeks to get my shit together.  Just a few weeks, and everything would be back to normal, back to a routine.. a few weeks turned into six, I didn't shower.  I smelled.  I smiled.  I finally got a routine back.  A job.  A boy.  I fell in love and suddenly everything was better.  I was better.  OMG this was so great how did everything suddenly get all better?

This guy wants to spend time with me, he wants to be with me? he doesn't see what a screwed up mess I am, or he does and he doesn't care.  I can tell him what a screwed up mess I am and he doesn't care, and he still comes back.  He's a screwed up mess too, but I don't care because he's here, and he's mine, and he wants me, and I love that, and I love him, and YES finally someone who can love and want me in the way I need and deserve to be loved and wanted!

Crash.

When you start to base your entire world around someone, instead of really facing the reality of what you're going through mentally, it is a recipe for disaster.  I was dating a man who would proclaim loudly at the bar that there were only three things that mattered in his life.  His son, his work, and darts.  All while I'm standing there next to him, holding his next drink.  There was uncontrolled crying, and suddenly a warm bed was empty, and I had no idea where I was going to go to next.

The sun and the summer were able to hide some of it.  An excuse to get outside, lay in the sun and bake my skin, and bake my brain, and then I didn't have to think about how lonely I was, or how messed up everything was.  I hated my job, I hated my friends, I hated my clothes and my hair and the color orange.  I didn't write nearly as much as I wanted to since I couldn't form coherent words.  Aiden flourished, I kept better care of him than I took care of myself.

Then darkness.

Around a four week period of time when I drifted in an out of an insomniacs world.  I don't remember much.  I slept, I worked, I studied.  Finally, after my CLC certification, I realized that what I was feeling was not ok, and that this had gone on for long enough.  I finally reached out for help.

I was me again.  My sense of humor was back.  I still carry around this huge PTSD hole inside of me, that rears its ugly monster head from time to time, never know what it going to trigger it, but just being aware that it is there, helps me to keep that monster at bay. 

"I tried to be more than me, and I gave until it all went away."

I guess all that is left now, is for me to just keep swimming.