I can't please everyone! I'm sorry to the people out there that do not agree with my activities while I am on disability. Maybe it isn't that they do not agree, they just do not understand everything about why I am on disability.
My happiness & my mental health are my top priorities right now. Everything I am doing while off work is for the betterment of my mental health & happiness. I love to write my blog as it gives me an opportunity to work on my focus, that is extremely lacking when depressed. Writing makes me happy, and is very therapeutic for me. I am not going to stop writing just because others do not agree with the activity or what I am writing about.
Out of habit, when anyone questions the way I am, or what I do, or what I'm not doing, I automatically resort to feeling, not good enough. A big part of my therapy has been to work on the damage my mother has done to my way of thinking. With her, I was never good enough, and with this last incident with her, it all came down to not being good enough in her eyes.
It is a tough habit to break, when you have been doing it your entire life. It is a process. I have to stop my knee jerk reaction to want to defend myself. Why do I HAVE to defend myself? I don't. I'm not doing anything wrong. Everything I am doing, I am doing by instruction from my therapist. If I had my way, I would isolate myself for the entire 8 months & do nothing, but that would have been detrimental to my mental health.
People do not seem to understand how hard it is to even do the day to day bare necessities when you are depressed. You have good days & you have bad days. If my therapist didn't tell me to try to get out or have friends over, I would have just drowned in the painful depression I was dealing with, and may never have returned.
It is still hard for me to get out. I'm still isolating myself because it is still hard. I do get out for a daily walk & try to focus on one activity (blog, twitter) for a period of time, but my friends would tell you, I have not been on twitter a lot lately & a lot of my blogs are just shared information, not my personal writing. I try to work on my creativity with little projects, but these projects, that would usually take me 2 days, are taking me almost 2 weeks.
I know being on disability means different things to different people, but being on disability isn't fun at all. Actually, being on disability adds more grief to the already difficult, situation. I know my disability is invisible to everyone & is probably the main reason it is so hard for people to understand what I have been doing for the last 8 months.
I really cannot worry about what other people think anymore, it does me no good at all. My entire life I made choices to please others, it was all about what other people thought of me, mainly my mother. I'm done with this habit. The only person I have to prove anything to is myself. The only person I have to make happy from now on is myself. I will not allow anyone to make me feel guilty for my recent journey. All I would ask for is a little bit of compassion & understanding, even if you don't completely understand. I would do the same for you.
I have made a lot of progress in the last 8 months & I am excited to be finally getting back into the swing of things. I don't want people to worry about me, you know, think I'm fragile or anything. I've learned a lot about myself lately, and have gained a lot of strength through all of this. No one needs to walk on egg shells around me, I am not going to break, I promise.
I'm slowly finding myself again, and I missed me/her as much as, I'm sure, some of you have. Things aren't going to be back to normal, they are going to be back to BETTER than normal. Next step, back to work I go.
