All the time, every week I see how much progress I am making. And it’s awesome. Lately, I’ve been trying to pay attnetion to my emotions and learn what is ‘normal’.
I’ve been struggling with my depression and anxiety for such a long time, I don’t really know what a person with a normal baseline feels on a daily basis. Sure, I understand that everyone has ups and downs, everyone feels happy or stressed or overwhelmed or excited.
However, because I have these mental illnesses, it’s hard to pull away from thinking every single bad mood or thought I have is because of these diseases.
The easiest for me to pay attention to and to start learning from is because I’m a mother. I tend to get anxious and overwhelmed by about 4:30pm every week day. For a while, I just thought it was how my anxiety worked, it just spiked at that time of the day for some reason.
But nope, it has more to do with the fact that I’m a mother, a stay at home mother and it’s the end of the day, and I’m ready for my husband to come home and play with the kid instead of me!
It’s normal mother overwhelmed from a long day, it has nothing to do with my mental illnesses but for the longest time that’s what I’ve seen because I was stuck in that thought pattern, in that bubble of thinking every single thing had to do with my depression or anxiety.
So now I’m working on learning and separating my healthy emotions. Last Friday, I was feeling so overwhelmed and just DONE by about 5 pm. I even texted my husband say, “I’m not going to make it.” Dramatic of me, I know.
I thought I was just feeling anxious but when I took a moment to take a step back in my mind, I realized it was just normal overwhelm from being a mother to a toddler. I grabbed the kid and we rolled around in bed, giggled and laughing and tickling each other for about a half hour instead of me sitting and yelling at him or closing off and trying to get him to sit calmly.
After looking back at how far I’ve come in just a year recently, I’m continually amazed when I realize I’m at this point in my journey. I’m ready to feel NORMAL responses to life and not be bogged down with my mental illnesses. It’s possible, it just takes a lot of work and a lot of time but you can get here too, I promise.
Share: Are you at the point in your healing journey that it’s time to figure out your emotions separately from your mental illness? How do you do it?
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