repost from elsewhere

It seems that when I find that I am beginning to make progress and get all my ducks in a row, something just comes along to throw me off. I'm sure that y'all have days (weeks, months, years???) like this. I've had a short string of 'em and I'm just going to take a moment to vent a little bit. Please, forgive me and the fact that this isn't exactly cheerful at the moment. I'm having a little difficulty with some of this and I'm still not entirely sure how to approach it all. Who knows, maybe some one has some advice that can help me puzzle it out!

First off, the holiday season went fairly well for my family and I. It is a thing that I am most thankful for. If it hadn't, I think the last few weeks would have been impossibly hard to bear. My youngest brother is in the Army Reserves and he just shipped out for Afghanistan last week. My whole family is in a tizzy over this, especially with him talking about re-enlisting into the Marine Corps. His wife is not exactly happy but there's been some problems within their marriage, and she's hoping that this tour will scare him into acting more responsibly.

I've been having a real tough time coping with the emotional fall out of all this. I can at least say with some degree of quiet pride that I didn't get into an argument with my brother the last time I saw him, even though his egoism and casually vulgar attitudes really made me angry. Hard on the heels of this, I realized that my problem with depression has come back full force. It is rather embaressing for me to have to take antidepressants. I feel that I should be able to cope with this problem with out these things.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. So, last night, we filled the perscription on the way home and my husband reassured me that this is a legitimate medical problem. He said that if people approached postpartum depression and depression in general as a "real" medical problem, then there wouldn't be people murdering their small children because they were convinced that the babies were doomed for hell by accident of their birth. It's rather chilling to realize that I had internalized that attitude and the rather disgusting version that I had grown up with: psychological problems = attention seeking behavior.

It is my hope that I'll do a better job handling these things, but I can't help feeling like the wind's gone out of my sails. I really wish that it were possible for me to get out into a garden and put this anxious energy to work doing something, like hoeing potatoes or something. Scrubbing out the bathroom can only be done for so long before the fumes from the cleaners make me start wheezing, sadly. That said, thanks for listening to my bit of a rant/whining about life at the moment.

I'm sorry if I happened to bring anyone down also as they read this.