Are you there, Internet? It's me, Abbey. You know, the stressed-out mom slash late-blooming college student who decided to write a blog to chronicle her life adventures alongside the stress that comes with finally deciding to get her act together and earn her degree?
Yes, that's me. Nice to see you again.
I know what you're thinking: It's been almost exactly a year since my last attempt at writing an entry to this silly little project of mine, why should you bother reading what is sure to be a half-assed attempt at explaining my long absence? But please give me a chance, because I swear that I have an excuse for my lack of internet presence! A great one, in fact!
I'll begin with the obvious update: School. I graduated (Yes! Finally! Woo!!!!!!) last December, summa cum laude with an impressive collection of recommendation letters from professors that I admired (idolized might be the better word), promising job perspectives and the possibility of grad school looming on the horizon. At this point, I would love to say that I dove into my new post-grad life headfirst with motivation and zest that I spent years investing in school, but obviously if that were true, I would have written this blog months ago. I didn't throw myself into the new chapter of my life because I didn't have motivation. Or zest. Or any other encouraging adjectives whatsoever.
What I did do was go through something rather big, so say the least. I don't really know how describe what I went through. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a mental breakdown exactly, but something like a mental breakdown's sloppy first cousin. I suddenly felt lost, purposeless. I had worked so long and so hard trying to achieve such a specific goal that once I achieved it, I had no idea what to do with myself. Well-meaning people told me things like "Relax!", "Enjoy yourself!", and "Take your time trying to figure out what you want to do!". After awhile, all I wanted to do was grab them by their well-meaning shoulders and shake them as hard as I could while screaming "I don't want to do any of that! Don't you know me at all?!"in their faces. It wasn't pretty and frankly did nothing for my already-lacking people skills. Amongst other things, I began avoiding these well-meaning people.
Practically everyone suggested that I write something; a blog, a book, something to remind myself why I went back to school in the first place and what it was that I was trying to achieve. It was somewhere around this point, I discovered something interesting: I couldn't. It wasn't that I didn't want to, but that I genuinely physically couldn't write. I would sit down at the computer and my fingers would turn to lead. Do you remember that scene from "Home Alone" when Kevin McAllister is so terrified of the furnace in the basement that every time he looks at it he pictures a glowing, evil monster? Well, that was suddenly how I felt about my computer. I couldn't bring myself to even look at it, much less attempt to string together a few measly sentences. Forget writing a blog, I couldn't even write a grocery list without breaking into a cold sweat.
I'd like to say that that was as bad as it got, but it wasn't. My inability to write, focus, or make any of the big life decisions looming before me began to feel like too much to handle. I found myself questioning everything, from simple things like what to blog about or what to feed my kids for lunch to bigger things like whether or not I had chosen any of the right paths in my life, career, marriage, life, you name it. I had never felt lower, never doubted myself and any of my abilities less. I felt adrift in a big scary world, lost in a sea of people who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing with their lives while I was unable to make even the most basic of decisions. I felt useless and unvalidated, and I hated it. I was constantly looking for ways to validate myself.
So for awhile, I tried validating myself in all the wrong ways, in all the wrong places. My addiction to Twitter reached an all-time high. When I lost a follower or posted something that went days without a reaction, I felt that this only proved how truly useless I was (I will get into this much more later, but for now just let me say that if you are feeling even slightly down on yourself, my only advice would be to avoid social media at all costs. It doesn't help. It makes you feel better initially but then much, much worse. Trust me on this one). Unsurprisingly, none of my ill-concieved means of validating myself ever worked. I only felt myself sinking lower and lower, any tiny grain of confidence I had ever had slowly continued to slip away.
Famous artist Pablo Picasso had what was referred to as a blue period in which all of his works were muted, monochromatic, somber and all-around blah (or at least as blah as someone who produced incredible works of art could manage to be). For a lack of a better term, the last six months of my life have been my blue period, the bluest I have yet to experience in my life, even worse than both of my bouts of postpartum depression (and I didn't think that anything could be worse than that). For awhile, it felt like my self-imposed blue period would never end.
The good news? I'm coming out of my blue period, slowly but surely. I'm writing again (obviously) and making a conscious effort not to be so hard on what I write, which is sometimes much easier said than done. I bit the bullet and made some career decisions and am now proudly holding not one, but two great jobs where I actually get to put my hard-earned degree to work; I am the Social Media Manager (ironic, I know) for an incredible nonprofit adult literacy program called Reading Works and am an online tutor for kids all around the world in every subject from middle school essay writing to college calculus, and everything in between.
There are definitely things that are helping to pull me out of my funk. First and foremost, my incredibly understanding husband who frankly should have left a Josh-shaped hole in the wall and gone running and screaming in the other direction years ago, but thankfully decided not to go that route. He is constantly telling me that I'm a great mom and the smartest, most talented person he knows and he's so convincing that I'm almost starting to believe him.
I also got on board with two things that I should have done a long time ago, but for vain, stupid reasons avoided like there was no tomorrow: Counseling and anti-depressants. This is something that I plan on getting into much, much more later but for now I will just say that I fully understand how stigma keeps people from getting the help that they often desperately need and how truly silly that stigma really is. We live in a world that is (hopefully) getting more accepting of different people and different situations every day, so why not this? But I digress. If I get started on the topic now, I won't have something to come back and write about, and I don't want to leave the internet at large hanging for another year. So you're welcome for that.
See? I told you that I had a good excuse for leaving my blog to collect cyber dust! But I'm back now and finally ready to add more color to my blue period.
Who's with me?
