Chocolates abound, red hearts everywhere, stuffed bears and roses at every corner. Yeah it’s that time of year again. As a divorcé I’ve come to develop a very mixed relationship with this time of year. I enjoy seeing my married/dating friends happy, but it’s something that I feel somewhat separate from. Not because I’m unattached but because the idea of romance is so far out of my head that it almost feels alien.
I’m approaching V-Day 2020 a little differently this year. In years past I’ve generally just walled up and tried to simply get other work done. This year I’m debating doing some range time, either a competition primer or just a range practice day. I hope to bake, motivation willing but I don’t want to isolate as much as years past. The most painful parts of my divorce are done and I realize I have to start taking those baby steps forward.
One aspect of Valentines that’s always hard for me with my depression is similar to what pains me about Christmas. It has become almost competitive as a social standing. With social media I’ve always felt like Valentines day is a game of one-upmanship where each couple is looking to top the next one they see. “Your bf got you roses, mine got me roses chocolates” “oh yeah, mine got me gold roses and imported chocolate” and on and one. The extent to which this judgement is pushed, marketed and sometimes used to shame others has gotten unbearable for me. If you love someone shouldn’t you be showing that just about any day? Sure maybe you can make a different date plan but it should be intimate, not spread-eagle for the world to gawk at.
If I had a singular hope for those people struggling with mental health issues around this time of year it’s that I wish any one with depression, anxiety or any other condition to have a partner that knows that it’s the isolated, intimate moment that makes a day like Valentines potentially special. Sometimes it isn’t the grand gesture or showing off about town. Sometimes it’s just as simple as heart shaped pancakes and being able to Netflix and chill with someone that gets you. The world doesn’t have to know your love, long as your love knows they are the world to you.
An ex-gf of mine really loved Four Weddings and a Funeral and to be fair it was a good film. Aside from borrowing the title a bit though my blog post has nothing to do w/the British comedy. Instead it has to be with an actual wedding and an actual funeral. I haven’t posted much, due in no small part to well just nothing really happening that I felt merited a blog. I’ve had some time to process a few things however and thought I’d share some experiences I’ve had at late and how I had to work through them. I apologize for the length of this blog post in advance.
First up, loss and where the funeral part of this blog comes into play. In the last year, year and a half or so, I found what is clearly a dangerous but effective activity for me *hand waving again this works for me I don’t recommend it for everyone*. Target shooting, and competitive shooting has strangely been something I’ve been able to sink my teeth into. It’s gotten me back into communicating with others and out of the house more. One of the individuals I met was a member of law enforcement and a very good shooter. I’ll call him J for the sake of this blog. At the age of twenty-six J’s life was cut short, just a few weeks before we were to resume our local league night. I’m no stranger to loss, through my employer I was connected to one of the largest work place shootings in the US. It changed how workplace security was looked at and made me doubly nervous as I got back into hunting and target shooting. While I had only known J through our mutual interest in competitive shooting he was always full of energy, smiles and laughter. I came to find out that a coworker of mine was very close with J’s family and together we attended his services. It was surreal to be there. Seeing him and saying my goodbyes I thought back to when I was twenty six still trying to figure things out. Knowing my own depression I had to be increasingly vigilant to monitor myself and take care of myself. I cut out any form of drinking and tried eating as healthy as I could. Very little sugar, reduced starch, things that would be escapes and comfort foods to make sure that I wasn’t starting on a downward spiral. Eventually after making my peace with it, I found myself back on the shooting line, a photo of J placed in memoriam watching over us. Our first league night was dedicated to his memory and as part of that I wanted to do as well as I could to honor both a LEO and fellow competitor.
A close friend and fellow blogger who attended my wedding so many years ago announced she was engaged. She was set to marry in April, ironically right around the time that marked the anniversary of my divorce. We’ll just call her C. C was mutual friends with both my ex-wife and the guy she left me for. Both would be in attendance at her wedding. My knee jerk reaction was to graciously decline the invite to attend but C had remained my friend amid my divorce and knowing both her and her fiancé I wanted to do what I could. By the time the invitations came out I knew that while I wanted to attend the ceremony the prospect of seeing my ex and her new boyfriend wasn’t something I felt I was going to be able to handle well. A bit of back and forth and I let C know that while I felt tremendously honored to be invited that I wouldn’t be there for the reception. In the back of my head I could hear depression, anxiety and doubt saying all the things I expected them to. Coward, loser, why even go if you won’t stay for the celebration? I had to look in the mirror and really gauge where my balance point was. I was truly so very happy for C and her fiancé but I also knew that I was in no mental shape to try and fake a smile amid old friends, strangers and my ex. It was a compromise to be sure. Between my own mental health and my desire to wish only the best for a friend who had stood by me. Attend I did, arriving early to scope the scene. While I had hoped to be in better shape, I at least felt OK in how I appeared. Going in I knew I’d have to see old former friends and strangers. I greeted those I knew, a few opted not to greet me or acknowledge me. I expected that. As my ex, her new boyfriend and the guy she left me for (man is there a better word for that?) arrived I gave them all a wide berth. I could make out a look of ‘oh great he’s here’ as my ex neared the ceremony site and caught wind of me. As I was amid a group of our mutual friends I stepped away, silently. I let her say her hellos and I positioned myself on the edges of the observing crowd. It was a beautiful ceremony, one that definitely showcased both of them. As the ceremony concluded and we were ushered to the reception space I knew it was my time to go. I bumped into a few of the mutual friends and said my goodbyes. I think a few them understood why I couldn’t be there, others were more shocked that I’d be there only to leave before the real celebration even began. It was a conscious choice. I’ve never really been the partying type and with my ex and various other folks in attendance, there was no way I would be anything close to agreeable. It’s my baggage to deal with. I doubt my presence affected my ex in way other than initial annoyance. It was C’s day, their big moment. I wasn’t about to cast a shadow over things. As I drove home from the venue I assured myself I had made a choice that was best for me. I messaged the new bride my well wishes and sent a few notes to the overlapping friends that I had to depart.
In both cases, J’s funeral, C’s wedding I was painfully reminded of how depression affects your perception of social interaction. At the funeral I felt like there was so much I should have been able to say but couldn’t. I was a stranger among a sea of strangers. At the wedding I felt I had nothing to say. Nothing to say to past friends, nothing to say to my ex and only a few fleeting words to say to the bride and groom. In the end I was glad to have attended both events, but I felt almost eerily disconnected from them. I was tremendously happy for C and her husband even if I couldn’t be happy with them in celebration. Depression takes away so many things from us, anxiety strips away the joy and anticipation about meeting people. Struggling with both to me has become a balancing act. Finding the motivation to push through my anxiety to keep contact with friends and family while tempering it with not being insincere or trying to act purely for the benefit of others. I try to remain honest with my mood and expressions, good or bad. If you find yourself in similar situations remember that while trying is definitely a huge first step, watch for yourself as well. Do not sacrifice your mental health to try and appease anyone else. Friends, true ones, will understand the effort and respect your choices. Should you happen upon this C, thank you for everything.
Even amid my own anxiety and holding back depression I managed to at least find something interesting a mother and her duckling.
Not going to sugar coat this one, Valentine’s as a divorced guy is not my favorite time of year. Add to that my allergy to chocolate and well Feb 15th isn’t exactly something to look forward to either.
I think for a lot of folks there’s a difficulty in understanding what those suffering from anxiety and depression go through during holidays meant to celebrate togetherness. One thing keeps popping back up into my mind which is that love is something that you need to have for yourself in order to be able to share it. It sounds horribly cliche but I understand the concept. I’m not there to be honest and that’s tempered how I view relationships and the future quite a bit. Still, I look at Valentine’s as a time to look at who I am, where I’ve come and where I still need to improve and try to be happy with the me that I see in the mirror.
If you’re having a hard time this Valentine’s, coming off a break up, there’s also this very pointed vlog from Anna Akana about dealing with breakups. Despite my divorce being nearly two years old now, I still found her post to be a good remind of the things you need to do to process things.
No matter what situation you are in relationship wise, if you’re dealing with any form of mental illness and find this particular holiday season difficult, reach out, get in touch with people in your support network or even other mental health communities. Take that step to communicate about what you’re dealing. Stay safe folks.
I’ve been pretty quiet the last few days. Between work and wrapping up real estate matters for my divorce it hasn’t been the best few days. Selling off a timeshare that my ex-wife and I had purchased when we were engaged has been a painful trip down memory lane.
I still have a few scant happy memories relating to our stay-cations there, but I also have painful memories just prior to us filing for divorce. It’s always a little weird having memories creep up from the last eight years. They don’t feel real for me anymore to be honest. More like that hazy feeling you get right after waking up and trying to remember a dream. I can’t picture the face of my ex-wife anymore, it’s always just a silhouette that I see, and there’s no voice, just murmur. I remember the sounds of water and kids playing, the smell of grilled steaks. That’s about it.
I shouldn’t really complain, the sale of our timeshare thus far has been fairly pain free but knowing that at one time we viewed it as an investment and something we would want to take our kids to makes everything very bittersweet.
While it sounds harsh, I admit, I do understand the logic in having a prenuptial agreement these days. Divorce can become a tangle of contention and he-said/she-said. To me nobody really wins in a divorce you just sort of go into the middle of the ring, throw punches at each other and retire to your corners until someone calls time.
I’ll be happy when the process is over, it will be on less thing tying us together. There’s still one large piece of real estate to be addressed but I don’t know how long that will take. The depression has been particularly strong in the last three weeks. To try and cope I’ve taken to upping my supplements, increasing my exercise (which I’ll be honest I was doing terrible at to begin with). Knowing the feeling of a depressive episode starting has been the principle gain from my time in therapy. “Solving” the issue isn’t quite there, I feel more like I’m muddling through. In truth, coping with clinical depression for me feels like a matter of survival. The rational side of me understands there’s underlying chemical reactions, behavioral patterns and learned responses all at work, but none of that knowledge makes dealing w/the weight, the anhedonia or the sadness any easier.
If you’re going through a similar in challenge in life find the small things with quickly attainable results, even if that thing is simple like “I want to take out the trash” as a goal. Achieving any degree of movement sometimes feels like enough victory to get you going to the next thing. I hope that as this timeshare sale closes, that will be another goal I’ll have achieved and one more step forward.
When my grandfather’s mental state diminished I remember seeing the pain my family felt as his advancing Alzheimer’s and dementia took away who he was. My greatest fears include the loss my sight, death in general, and death of self, particularly in the form of memory loss.
Following my divorce I had to come face to face with a side effect of depression that sometimes feels just as painful as the anhedonia. The seven years I spent with my ex-wife started to fade after the first six month I left what was our home. Little by little, consciously or subconsciously I started to push the memories down or forget them outright. It’s been over a year since that process started and now I find I can barely see her face.
Depression has an impact on memory and sometimes the unsettling randomized loss or gaps I experience scare me half to death. Feeling like seven years of your life are simply gone is painful. The suppression in my case is very specific, isolated to those things relating to my ex and the marriage. The residual emotional currents are still there, sometimes I feel them as I wake up, like waking from a walking nightmare or a dream I can’t visualize. It’s weird to think that for me, I want nothing more than those echos to be gone so that I have no connection to those seven years.
Depression takes a lot away from you, sometimes because you need to protect yourself, sometimes because part of you is running from something. Figuring out what I can still hold onto and what has to go has been one of the most difficult choices I’ve had to make.
I thought this was a really interesting article as I’m a child of divorce myself. My folks separated in my teens and divorced right around my HS years. Their divorce wasn’t pleasant at all and honestly I can say that I don’t really have a relationship with my father. Seeing how this couple has tried to keep something of a family structure for their son was heart warming.
There’s a fairly common saying that you divorce spouses not children. Thankfully for me my ex and I didn’t conceive. Honest truth is I doubt I’d have been able to survive to even make it to therapy if we had children. One thing to lose a spouse, quite another to lose a spouse and children. I understand a bit better the extent to which my father likely experienced his own depression but I also realize that like my mother he made choices too.
I think it would be great if other divorced families tried to be as civil as the couple in the article. Even amid divorce you have to understand the need to prioritize things. The truth is divorce is a loss it isn’t a clean cut, there’s pain, there’s resentment that can creep into every word, every image. It isn’t easy but you have to work past it and focus on the the things you need to do over the things you want to do sometimes. Legal separation of assets, finances, liability, all those things are critical, but you must also not lose sense of things like insuring your kids aren’t caught in the cross fire.
There’s some anniversaries you look forward to, then there are those you dread. Next month will make a full year since my divorce was finalized. To say I was in a low place during the process would be an understatement and while I’m not out of the woods by any stretch I think I’m better prepared to deal with the things that need to happen to get better these days.
The last few days I felt the onset of a depressive episode forming and tried to cut it off at the pass so to speak. I dropped my sugar and red meat intake, I began eating more oatmeal and fruit. In a previous post I likened depression to seeing an oncoming train. The metaphor has a bit of another layer that I thought about recently. While you might be able to side-step the tracks, there’s still the force of the train going past (wind, noise etc) that you still have to deal with. The same can be said (at least for me) to what happens when an episode hits. I may not be able to avoid all the affects but I’m able to keep myself from sinking too far and lessening the symptoms.
During a conversation with a friend we discussed the somewhat rough feeling of the extra burden of knowing when an episode is coming and the cognitive processes and work effort to not let it harm you. While most folks only periodically need to reflect as much, those of us prone to depression/anxiety are on almost constant watch. There’s a mental drain that comes from that vigilance that I’m still trying to reconcile.
Be it S.A.D. or other things that are triggering an episode for you, don’t lose heart, don’t give in. Every bit of fighting it helps.
A lot changed for me from 2015 to 2016. My marriage was over, my ex-wife and I filed for divorce and any drive I had to pick up my camera died off. In part because I met my ex through art and because in some ways I lost her to it too.
Most of my footage was to help others, rarely for myself in the last few years of my marriage. I went from capturing anywhere from 500GBs of data through 2015 to less than 8GB for all of 2016.
I don’t photograph people anymore, it’s a little hard to get people to smile when you don’t. This isn’t the first time I’ve sunken this far and I doubt it will be the last time. Though my photography has been a source of decompression and therapy, it is done with a laser focus and purpose. Gone are the days of photographing for happiness’ sake. There are small projects in my head, darker ones that I want to express but haven’t found the full extent of what I want to say. In some ways the death of one art can be the birth of another. The journey to get there however isn’t always a pleasant one.
As my therapy sessions are now more spread out I’ve continued to try to find books and other resources to help me maintain perspective and find ways to cope with my depression, divorce and all the small nuances in between.
One of the small aspects that I’ve found somewhat vexing lies in the approaches of both types of texts at times. Here’s the thing that I feel a lot of text misses. There’s depression and clinical depression. Everyone’s felt depressed, usually that’s situational with very specific events that trigger it. Divorce obviously being a big one. Clinical depression however isn’t simply triggered by any one thing at times. I find a lot of divorce books sort of gloss this over and the tone and approaches they maintain sometimes just feed into the negative loop of depression. On the other hand most texts about battling clinical depression don’t overlap with coping with major trigger events like divorce. So you’re sort of left with one book in your right hand, and another in your left.
Most texts about coping with depression share common tools with those that talk about recovering from divorce. Therapy, communication, meditation, exercise are all common tools. Most books on divorce don’t discuss neurochemistry or other dietary changes to help cope they just gloss over avoiding “bad foods”.
I’m not trying to say that self-help books are useless. There’s valuable wisdom and insight now and then but you have to take it with a grain of salt. Books can’t pin point anything specific to you, it’s broad strokes. I try to remind myself of for everything I read. Much like those books, I feel my blog may verbalize my own pain and my own trials and I hope that if anyone chances upon it that they understand that there are people out there struggling too. Hopefully some of the tools I’ve listed help others.
I had started September fairly flat emotionally but as the first few days passed I found my depression getting pretty heavy. It took a day or so for me to realize what was weighing on me. The tail end of the month would have marked our five year wedding anniversary.
This year it just represents a day on a calendar. It’s sobering as milestones come and go. First birthday without the spouse, first Christmas, first Valentines. It puts things in perspective. For most folks holidays are a time to be around friends but as I am these days I feel too prickly and too sensitive to be around large groups of friends. Those circles I do still keep in touch with I’d rather just have a nice short conversation with on the day of. Eventually I’ll find ways to get myself to engage w/my friends more but for now there’s a lot of reworking of my own mental state first.
