There are so many things that I struggle with right now, that it is very easy to overlook or forget for a moment all that I am blessed with. When worries of how I am going to pay all of the bills this month come up, I forget how blessed I am to even have a disability paycheck because I am unable to work. What if that paycheck were not there? What if I was unable to work, but nobody ever taught me that there was an option for disability? What if disability didn’t exist? I would be homeless, hungry, and cold! When it is hot or cold outside and I have to walk to the store because I don’t have a car, sometimes I grumble and complain because it is so hot/cold and I have to walk to the store, forgetting for a moment how blessed I am that the store is as close as it is, forgetting how blessed that I am to have money to go to the store with, and forgetting how blessed I am that I have legs with which I can use to walk to the store.
When my twins are screaming, hollering and fighting with each other, it is SO easy to forget how blessed I am that God gave me the two more babies that I begged him for, exactly when I was ready for them and not a moment sooner.

I am blessed in so many ways. I have four beautiful kids here on Earth. I have a beautiful baby boy waiting for me in Heaven. I have four grandkids who I love more than anything on this earth (and I am so lucky that they love me just as much). I have a home, I have heat/air/water/sewer/trash. I have a Lord, a God who never gives up on me, a God I can cry to, laugh to, talk to or just pray to. I have everything in the world and I am SO very thankful.

So next time I am stressing, worrying, complaining, I am going to try to remember to visit this blog post and remember just how much I have, especially at a time in life when so many others have nothing at all. Some people have much more than me, but some people have much, much less and that is OK. I need to be OK with what I have and learn to be grateful for whatever is the present and not what I think I need in that moment.

Thank you Lord for all I have. That’s all.

My mental health journey started when I was a child, just as my children’s mental health journey is starting in their childhood, except my childhood was much, MUCH different.
My mental health story starts when I was just as little as I can remember. I watched my dad beat the crap out of my mom “on the daily” as my kids would say. My dad would make us watch, actually forbidding us to leave the room while he tortured my mother. My father would go out drinking, only to come home and unleash on my mother. I always knew when it was getting close to time for Dad to get home because the air would get thick with tension and stress. I can remember my Mom starting to prepare us. She would start to shush us, let us know Dad was on his way. Beg us to be good. I know that she worried about us. If we had done something that day that Dad was going to find out about, she would apologize in advance for the beating that we would take. Once, we were at a park, my brother fell off of one of those tall metal *death* slides that they had in parks back in the day and my brother broke his leg. Now my father had to have known his leg was broke, but he told my brother to stop being a “sissy” and get up and walk. My brother was three. After my brother was casted for the break, I can remember my Mom bringing my brother out to the backyard and asking me to teach him to walk on his cast. I still to this day don’t know if she did that to keep us busy while Dad beat her or if Dad wanted his “sissy” son to walk on his broken leg.
There are so many more stories, so many memories that come up when I stop and remember. The memories are not there all the time, but they sit in the back of my brain gathering dust for when I have time to stop and think about them. And let me tell you, that shit fucked me up. I am not saying that is what gave me mental illness because I truly believe mental illness is a chemical imbalance in the brain, but I do believe that all of what I seen and all of what I went through led to some post traumatic stress of some type.
Much later after my dad left is when the first signs of my mental illness began to come forth. At first I am sure that my Mom thought that I was going through some type of emotional trauma about the divorce (which I did not, I was happy about it), or maybe she might have thought I was just a troubled kid, or that I was just a brat. I can’t be sure what my mother thought was going on, but I do know that she tried her best with me. Heck, how she managed as a single Mom with 5 kids is beyond my wildest imagination because I am struggling to do the single Mom bit with just the twins still at home with me. Anyway, my behaviors were bad.

It began with *fits*. I remember just getting so mad that I would just start screaming, crying, hitting, kicking, hurting myself and I wouldn’t know why I was doing it. I remember times when I was so happy I could barely contain myself, but more often I remember laying in bed wondering why I was so worthless and why everybody hated me. I was only around 12 at this time and looking back I wish I had told my Mom how I was feeling because she might have been able to get me much needed help when I was much younger than when I finally began to go to counseling.
I think when I began counseling I was around 14 or 15, probably when my mother just couldn’t take anymore and just didn’t know what else to do. Unfortunately, mental health care back then isn’t what it is today and I was pretty much just labeled a troubled child as far as I know. I don’t know for sure because I never heard a “name” for what I was going through.

Finally in my twenties I happened upon a woman named Amy who was very similar in the way she felt with the highs and lows of moods and suggested I look into seeing a mental health doctor again now that I was in my adult years. I did, and that is where I got the diagnosis’ that I still have to this very day. Bipolar Disorder, Extreme Anxiety, and OCD.

The Bipolar is about 50 percent under control and still remains the most troublesome of the diagnosis’ because it is the hardest to control. Even with medication treatment, my moods still sway slightly which makes life hard to handle sometimes. Especially now that I am a single Mom with only my adult daughter to help me to trudge through it all (GOSH she is a blessing). There are days when I can clean the house like a maniac and get it all done in a day. Then there are days that the house is a mess for three or four days while I ride the depression like a wave that will eventually recede. I have been hospitalized twice over this last year, but only after the separation between me and the twins father (more on that in another post). My last hospitalization before that was over 20 years prior! I take pride in that.

My anxiety is bad, but it is controlled by medication. It still comes on strong, but I can take my medication and while I wait for it to take effect I practice breathing and self soothing methods for helping the panic attack or simple anxiety to pass.

My OCD is doing ok with medication therapy. My fingers don’t bleed from overwashing anymore. I can eat food without worry that I am going to die of a foodborne illness, which is probably why I now have obesity to worry about too! Haha

So overall things are OK. Not great, not horrible, but in the middle. I just try to get through each day, with a new meme and remember that I have made it through some pretty heavy shit and I am still alive.

I think my next blog post will be about what I am blessed with before moving onto my health issues.

Funny how God works in my life, a few short hours after writing this blog post, I came across this article. If I ever do post this blog publicly and you are reading this and want to know more about what Bipolar looks like in childhood, take a look at this article by The Mighty:
16 Signs you great up with Bipolar

I am Shawna. I am Mom to Ryan (27), Brittany (25), Baby Drake in Heaven (Forever an infant), and Twins Jacob and Brandon (12). I am Nana to Ricky (5), Braylyn (3), Payton (2) and Kacen (cooking in the oven) as of this writing. But there are a ton of birthdays on the way! Haha.

I have four cats. I love Smokey. He is an emotional support cat, not by training, but by personality. Max is the Momma cat, not by blood, but again, by personality. We rescued Peppers, I hate him because he is kind of annoying, but he loves me so I tolerate him. We also rescued Lucky who I ADORE. She is my favorite. I don’t know why, because when she first got here she bit the shit out of me for the first week. She avoided me for the first month, and only recently tolerates me. But I LOVE that freaking cat Haha. Go figure.

I am 45 years old. I have Bipolar Disorder, OCD, Severe Anxiety. I suffer from Chronic Migraines, Psoriatic Arthritis, Obesity, Issues with the arteries in my heart. I believe that I have undiagnosed Autism, but I refuse to investigate into that (My twin boys also suffer from Autism, Mood Disorders, OCD, and Anxiety making me wonder if I have a touch of the Autism bug too). I was sexually molested as a child and as an adult. I watched my Mom suffer from physical abuse during my childhood, and I got abused as an adult. The vicious cycle right?

In my 20’s I abused drugs and alcohol and was addicted to both. Coke was my choice of drug. Jack Daniel’s was my drink. As a young adult I got a drunk driving, A REALLY drunk driving and after that night I BEGGED God to change my life and He did.

Fast forward to today, I am VERY thankful for my God and all that he has done for me and I am very spiritual. I try to get to church as often as I can but because I don’t have a car right now, it is not every week that I get to go. I wish I could because it makes me feel so good.

Today I am feeling aggravated because I am dieting. I am hungry and therefore cranky. Today I just want to lay in bed and nap. But I have to adult today therefore I will be closing this introduction to me and go back about my day. My next post will be an introduction into my mental illness, I mean in all honestly that is the most interesting part of me anyway!

Until next time.

I have a lot going on right now. I have family issues, I have mental health issues, I have health issues, and I have weight issues. I am alone here in Kansas right now except for my daughter Britt who is very busy with her own family and her own problems. I do not have any friends because of anxiety issues that I deal with. I just need to get some of this off of my chest, and this seems to be the only solution that I can come up with.

I do not plan on publishing my blog, rather use it as a space to write down my thoughts. If ever I came across somebody who really needs to hear that they are not alone, I might consider making this public in the future, so I will not leave out any details about me so that they are recorded in the event that I change my mind about publishing the blog. I will do separate introductory posts about each area that I am struggling with instead of trying to sit down and write all of the trouble areas down in one long post. Believe me, that would be a LONG post, so I will just keep this post short and to the point about WHY I want to start a blog. Basically I need an online diary that I can type instead of write in due to the pain of my arthritis which will be addressed in another post.

I will certainly be back to write the next post later tonight. Right now I am just filling this in really quickly to get it up and going. My second post I will address a little bit about who I am and what I am about.