Therapy.

Therapy is hard.

Like really freakin' hard.

I got down to the nitty gritty of some of where my anxiety and depression stems from this week.

I wondered how I was different from other mothers, like Lindsay Clancy. Is it because I had anxiety and depression related to PTSD before I was even pregnant?

Did I already have plans in place so that I didn’t become another statistic of postpartum anxiety/depression?

I don’t know what it is that made my situation different from hers, but here’s what I do know…

I know what an out of body experience feels and looks like.

While many others do not... and for your sake, I hope you never have to experience anything like that.

To have a distorted reality where your body feels like it was hijacked; you don’t know what to do or how to feel because you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.

You can't make out what is happening around you because you're stuck in a dream state and everywhere you turn there are dark corners... and when you see something or feel something that you think might finally have a bright side to it, you don't get your hopes up because it could also be fake.

There's one piece of my dream state that I'll tell you about for now, because I'm not ready to talk about things that happened in my own distorted reality of 2020 quite yet.

When I was "being held" under "conscious" sedation, intubated, hands tied down for my own well-being, while life saving medication and practices being performed on me, I was paralyzed. I felt as if I could not move, could not escape, and had no one that I could trust.

I vividly remember this "evil" nurse (who does in fact have a real face and a name that I didn't find out actually existed until months later) making sure she gave me extra medication so that I wasn't able to move when my family came to visit and because I was tubed, I wasn't able to speak to my family and tell them exactly what was going on. Tell them that I wasn't safe. That she was hurting me. That I was being held against my will. Threatened. And being used for their own personal gain and pleasure.

I know this all sounds crazy, it still sounds crazy to me. Like I am making it all up. But this is what I believed was happening to me in my distorted reality. It's still hard to know what was actually real and what wasn't.

Was I being spoken to through the clock on the wall every time I tried to remove my hands from being tied to the bed?

Reminded that if I made one wrong move they would take me out with a sniper that I could see from the building across the way right through my window.

And I would try to escape, multiple times, and I would watch myself bleed out and hear that no one was coming to help me and then I would be drugged and given "another chance" and it would happen over and over and over again.

These manipulative and debilitating thoughts.

How long did this go on for?

Minutes?

Days?

Months?

I'm not really sure and I think that's one thing I'm never going to find out.

And this is just one instance of my "dream world."

It got so, so much worse.

But this was what I thought may be purgatory. Righting all my wrongs. Watching myself die over and over again.

Paralyzed. Incapacitated. Hijacked. Lucid. Time jumping. Death. Distorted.

Just a few of the words that come to mind when I think about this.

I have a whole new perspective on life, on death, on everything that happened.

Again, this is the journey I was chosen to take for one reason or another.

I feel as though this is why I have compassion for Lindsay or why I understand psychosis or why I am trying to understand it anyways.

Something as traumatizing as this puts life into perspective.

It gives you understanding for people who are dealing with mental health issues while you are still dealing with them yourself.

I DO NOT wish this on anyone. I hope you never have to know the suffering I went through or the pain that it still causes me on the regular.

I hope if you feel like you can't handle another minute, that you have someone to reach out to that will help you through whatever it is that you are going through.

While my story, or part of anyways, may not be related to postpartum psychosis, I do know the feeling of thinking that just maybe you are crazy and that what your head is telling you is all real...

Xo ✨