Being transparent about my feelings of late

Therapy is hard.  

Sigh.

I've been going to therapy sessions over zoom for about six months.  I hadn't anticipated I would still be doing it but here I am, still talking, journaling, crying, processing.  

It's hard and heavy.  We talked today about if I wanted to keep going and the truth is no.  I don't.  I actually dread my sessions because I just feel broken and tired and sad and have so many thoughts and feelings to work through that knowing I have to open them all up each week is so unappealing.  I do want to heal and I want to work through my stuff. I knew the process would be hard but sometimes I feel so absolutely vulnerable and messed up that I can't help but think, "How did I get here?  Why have I let myself interpret experiences in such a way?  How have I let certain messages speak to me in a way that has damaged me like this?"  

Even writing this on a blog where I know a handful of people will read this makes me feel kind of embarrassed but I also want to be honest about where I am right now.  

I'm depressed and have been for a long time.  

I'm angry and that's kind of a new feeling for me.

The other day I was on a walk on a cold, but beautiful morning.  Suddenly my mind thought about Will leaving and then our family moving across the world back to America the same summer that Isaac leaves and I thought about all the stress and feelings that will come with these big events and I felt like my breath was being taken out of me and I said a silent prayer of, "God, how can I carry more sadness?  My heart doesn't have the capacity for it."  I was reminded that I don't have to carry it alone and that somehow, my heart will just expand more to carry more.  Usually I think of a heart expanding when it comes to love but maybe it has to expand in sadness too so that I can fully understand the love part of it.  I don't even know if that makes sense.  It doesn't fully make sense to me yet.  I want my children to grow, spread their wings, take on the world.  I'm so proud of them already and who they are and the choices they make.  I just prayed that God would help me feel all those feelings more than the sadness.  Maybe by then my ability to move through the sad will have increased and improved.  

I've wondered about Will leaving a lot though.  How similar will it feel to Laila dying? I tell myself that it won't even compare.  I'll hear from him, watch him grow, continue a relationship with him, albeit a different one.  I can't do that with Laila.  I have, however, dreaded this summer for so many years and I worry that some feelings from Laila's death will be triggered by Will leaving.  My goal is to look at it with curiosity and just let the experience be what it is, with all the excitement and sadness. 

Why am I so scared of change? I guess I don't actually need to ask myself that.  I know why.

I am not having a faith crisis like you'd think of when you hear "faith crisis" but I am definitely having a "faith journey".  Therapy has allowed me to bring my feelings about some experiences I've had to the Lord and with that talk to him in a way I haven't before.  I've shared my feelings of fear, sadness, and anger in a way that I haven't dared before.  I struggle with the idea that if I share my feelings with the Lord he will find me ungrateful and withhold blessings that I need and desire.  I have felt that heaven is listening but I also feel that either I'm not listening well enough or that heaven has been mostly silent.  I believe that there is something to learn in the silence but I am not sure what I'm learning. I am gradually getting more comfortable with the idea that God isn't actually afraid of my anger or my questions.  

Anyway, I've thought and prayed a lot about if it's time for depression medication.  I am truthfully nervous to go down that road.  I've seen the damage that choosing not to use medication can do to relationships but I also don't want to exchange one problem for another.  I've thought about the 25 years I was on mood stabilizers (these are not soft, easy medicines) to control seizures.  Of the list of mood stabilizers used for bipolar, I've been on at least half of them.  Now that I don't have seizures and the question of if I might have been misdiagnosed has been raised, I have a lot of questions about how those medications might have affected my emotions as a teen and early adult.  How does it affect someone who doesn't need them?  I feel trepidation about dipping my toe back into that world.  I don't have bipolar and the medications used for depression are different than those used for bipolar but I'm still anxious about it.  I don't want to go years and years not receiving help when help was available.  I've always just worked through my feelings and I'm a highly functioning person.  I actually wouldn't be surprised to discover that I have persistent depressive disorder, which is just high-functioning depression.  I haven't decided what I should do moving forward.  Each time I've broached this topic in my mind, which has been many times over the years, I've chosen to believe that it is all circumstantial and that it will get better and then well, here I am still going to therapy and not feeling any more happy.

I'm going to abruptly end this post because I don't know what else to say about it.  It's just complicated.