Part 1, The Dam

It never fails.  Whenever I have time off from school I have a breakdown.  I started to realize it the first year I taught after moving here 4 years ago.  The first couple of days off all the emotions that I didn’t have time to deal with while being in the trenches came down on my like gunfire and it usually resulted in a screaming, crying, irrational fit.  I learned to watch for it and when I saw it coming, tried to work through it with as little destruction as possible.

This year, though, I wasn’t hiding in a trench.  I was building a dam. I was “walling” up the stressors that I didn’t have the time or the want-to to deal with.  The horrible thing was that I didn’t realize I was building it until the dam broke and the flood began to drown me.  I started to feel it as we approached our end-of-the-year state testing at the end of May. I could tell something was wrong with me.  I wasn’t looking forward to being able to relax in my classroom with my students as I usually do each year. My skin became so uncomfortable on me that I wanted to crawl out of it.  Then once school was out, I thought I would be able to take a second and breathe and work through whatever was bothering me. But that didn’t happen since my smart self decided to schedule all the doctor’s appointments for all the kids that first week off so that every day I was still in motion and not able to spend time on what was wrong with me.  

Then came the news of some celebrities that had committed suicide and all the social media posts that followed about depression and getting help and paying attention to signs.  That was when I really paid attention to myself. I started to have scary thoughts, unreasonable, horrific, not-who-God-made-me thoughts. I realized that I was sinking into depression.  Not situational depression, but a darkness that was snuffing out every ounce of light in me. I kept putting on a happy face and trying to have that joy that I wrote all about.  Again, ignoring my emotions and the stressors that I kept shoving to the side – building that dam back up.  

But I was working against running water.  And I wasn’t able to build it very high before it collapsed again.  My hyperventilation became so serious that I couldn’t catch my breath and started to get dizzy.  I couldn’t think straight about anything. I started treating my family badly, and I started to turn inside on myself.  

Then this week happened.  And, I am going to admit, I did not walk gracefully through the storm.