Kimber's Five

Lately I have been telling my husband that I feel like a new person. I don't feel like I've grown or that some things are different... I feel like a brand new person. My thought process feels different, I feel differently about nearly everything, and my goals and priorities are different. When I trace back how I ended up here, the last 3 years in Washington state (our previous duty station) keep popping up in my brain. Those years changed me. For a long time, I thought those years defeated me. I didn't feel like I was enough. I felt like all of the goals that I had set for my life were pushed off for another 3 years (which they were). I felt like I couldn't make friends. I felt like people didn't understand me. I felt like my family was too big/too crazy or that maybe they didn't like my kids. I felt like life kept throwing us challenges, some bigger than I ever expected to face. I felt like my depression was going to swallow me and that I wouldn't make it ...

This is the second part to my "Mental health support" post. This one is about what I have done to create an environment for myself that prioritized my mental health. At some point when my mental health was at an all-time low, I thought about all of the things that were bothering me and adding to my depression. I put things in columns: one column was things I can change and the other was things I couldn't change. The list helped me realize that I cannot change all the bad things happening to our family and I can't change how people feel about me. However, I can change the support around me and I can change how I feel about all things that happened. I went home to be with my family and friends during my husband's deployment and to give myself a chance to process the past couple years. Getting myself out of the situation also gave me a chance to think about what I liked about being at home with support and all the ways life was less hard when I wasn't goin...

Man, what a tough week with such amazing people ending their lives. There seems to be a lot more talk recently about mental health and I am all about it {if you have read any of my blog posts in the last year or the past 5 minutes, you probably already know this}. I had a mental breakdown last year. I've gone over my story many times, but basically my husband is a submariner and went back to sea duty, which means deployments and the boat schedule and duty days. I had our 5th baby here and it was a complicated pregnancy in which we almost lost her many times, almost lost me, and I battled preterm labor. After I had her, I kept telling myself it would get better, but then life carried on as usual. Our 2 asthmatics had flair ups. My grandmother had a stroke. My mom completely severed her Achilles tendon. My husband's boat schedule kept changing. My post-partum complications were horrible and made me feel like less than a person. Just... everything. Everything was a struggle. I di...