Rise.. Rise... Along with Mental Illness

Well here we are, I finally posted my old drafts. One of them literally says Well.  haha Never have I ever thought I was not original.  :)

The two year update was probably something like "OMG.. I live in California now! MSH who is now MDH finished his residency and here we are! We thought we'd get to stay but circumstances beyond our control brought us here!  Etc... etc."

There are so many things I want to do.. And as a former Business Systems Analyst I seem to have developed a perpetual case of Analysis Paralysis... it's something like Medical Student Syndrome where med students think they have every disease they learn about.

So, onto mental illness... so having lived with some sort or other of depression my entire adult life, I finally decided to do something drastic about it and give Ayahuasca a try.  It's this earthy-muddy, sour, tangy brew that I drank with a few others in the jungle in Peru.  And boy did I feel different... I no longer felt depressed and thought I had found the path to recovery.  Along comes the hardest year of my life... and sits me down to tell me what's what.  The hardest part for me has been the pain it's caused my family.  My husband who has to watch as I slowly fall apart instead of thriving after working hard to achieve our dreams and the guilt I imagine he cannot allow himself to feel for moving us out to California (I was not initially completely on board with moving out here).  Worse yet, the effect on my children has broken my heart more times than I care to count.  My son and daughter who are bright and want nothing but to be accepted and make friends and do good for themselves and others in turn are struggling.  So, what I thought was going to be a bumpy yet mostly smooth (I'm allowed to contradict myself if I'm talking about pain because it's multi-faceted like life! :)) change has turned out to be a lonely, dark journey that doesn't yet seem to be at an end.  

All this alongside our belief that mental illness is something that's passed on/triggered by negative circumstances and without the emotional support necessary for children to deal with change.  So, we are trying to rise and rise and help our children to do the same.  To be a positive force of change and to model behaviour for them that they may one day want to emulate and do better with themselves.