Doing OK. Just got out of the loony bin. I think that anxiety often feeds depressions in me.

I've resorted to listening to podcasts about depression during my nightly walks. I'm taking them to keep my weight off I gained by being depressed and isolated for 8 years. I was depressed and alone so long that I got up to 350 lbs. and hurt my joints so badly that I could not walk without a cane. To travel I had to have airport staff push me to the flight gate in a wheelchair. My joints got so bad that I deteriorated from a cane to crutches and then to having to use a walker. My boss at work sent the human resources officer to my office to ask if I wanted to go on disability and stop working, I was in such bad shape.

It all had started in a depressive episode because in 2010 I was dumped by a fiancee to whom I was engaged to be married for the third time, having been divorced before in 1985 and again in 2000. Both times divorce had sent me into a serious depression for years. Both times involved infidelity on my partner's part, the second time infidelity that was scheduled to take part weekly for 5 years at my own home while I was away for my weekly support group for depression I was trying to overcome. I came home early from a support group meeting and found out, which ended my second marriage and bankrupted me.

It's good I didn't get married for a third time and that I found out in time that I'd chosen the wrong partner again. This time it wasn't infidelity that destroyed my relationship, it was my partner's decision to dump me because I was physically sick and not responding to treatment. So much for "in sickness and in health" in wedding vows.

I didn't know it but I had kidney disease that had destroyed 60% of my kidney function. I was misdiagnosed as having thyroiditis. I was undergoing radioactive therapy for my thyroid that wasn't working and that is how my fiancee lost patience with me. I had less and less energy until I collapsed, but since I was being treated for supposed thyroiditis my partner decided that I wasn't responding to medical treatment because I was lazy.

Because I wasn't responding to thyroid treatment after two years, she broke off her engagement and we sold our house we'd bought to live in as a married couple. This time I fell into the worst depression of my life, even worse than after each of my previous divorces. It was exacerbated by having no energy to fight depression off with only 40% kidney function I didn't know about. Having only 40% of the energy from kidneys restoring oxygen to my blood, I couldn't exercise, so I gained 80 pounds in 4 months to starters, and then gained weight continuously more slowly after that. I thought I was lazy, and self loathing set in over becoming obese in failure at having a relationship a third time.

The failure of my relationship and my health was followed by career failure.
The college where I'd been teaching lost its endowment in the 2008 economic crash and laid off deans and other senior faculty, myself included. Suddenly I had an engagement broken off, no house, no job, and my health, both mental and physical, was failing.

To find another college teaching job I had to move across country and take a 15% pay cut. The effort driving a moving van alone halfway across the country while having undiagnosed kidney failure led me to collapse at my new job as soon as I stepped into it. I would collapse at work two more times, and spiral further into depression mentally from repeatedly falling apart physically so completely and mysteriously. My younger new boss decided I was lazy like my fiancee had come to believe.

Just as with my fiancee, I had no answer for her. She was a very physically fit young bright professional who worked out at my college gym after work and wore gym outfits to teach in, while I was a tired, old, and obese colleague. Without talking to me and without my having been absent from work for sick days beyond my contract or anything to justify it in my job performance, my physically fit young boss sent our human resources department's disability officer to my office to suggest to me that I quit and go on disability for being fat.

Fortunately, after collapsing again and again at my new job the local hospital, not knowing I had a thyroid diagnosis, finally started over treating me from scratch and eventually caught the thyroid misdiagnosis I'd been treated for incorrectly for years by then. I wasn't lazy after all, as my fiancee had said to break up with me before my third wedding. I wasn't completely unfit for work as my boss thought, either. I started to loathe myself less now that I had another explanation for why I had lost all of my energy.

It was too late to restore my kidneys, I'll only have 40% function forever now. But my new kidney doctors stopped the treatment for the thyroiditis I did not have and put me on a regimen to stop the progress of kidney disease and save what was left of my kidneys so I would not have to go on dialysis forever.

I decided to lose the weight to keep my job. To do that I had to qualify for insurance to pay for my stomach surgery by losing 10 lbs. on my own first. I joined a gym even though I weighed 350 lbs. I worked out there despite all of my kidney failure and my joints' problems according to a regimen a trainer created for me. I lost 27 lbs, which was 17lbs more than the 10 lbs required to qualify for weight loss surgery that I finally had in 2018.


I'm not skinny now, but I did lose 1110lbs through weight loss surgery during which 85% of my stomach was removed. That gave me a chance for a new start, and then to really start over I had to get to the true root cause of my depression.

It turned out to be years of abuse as a missionary kid abroad that I'd swallowed all of my life because my mother had taught me God would punish me if I spoke up. In the process, she beat me severely every week growing up and lied to my father to get him to beat me weekly, too. Since we lived in a war zone on the mission field, avoiding my home for my safety backfired.

I ended up in danger on streets engulfed in combat time and again over 6 years of urban civil war from when I was 9 to when I was 15.

TRIGGER WARNING
I was in two bombings, once just going out for ice cream when I was 9 and once trying to go bowling with my 11 year old friends. In between at age 10 when I went to the bank with my dad, while waiting for him in the car I saw up close a young man next to me shot in the groin to die from bleeding out.

My father responded to the violence around us by deciding to die on the mission field as a martyr like another missionary ironically named Nate Saint had done. That's when he started putting our family at risk by doing things such as driving our car into a swirling river during a flood. We had to be rescued by a very puzzled farmer with a tractor from that episode. Other such episodes followed.

I didn't know it as a kid in a foreign country at the time, but since then I've learned from mental health professionals that my parents were mentally ill. My mom's behavior came from having untreated borderline personality disorder, and my father's was from untreated bipolar disorder. Not knowing
why they acted as they did, though, I believed them when they blamed me.

For example, one morning while getting ready for elementary school as a kid I yawned and forgot to cover my mouth. My father punched me out. Another morning I let my scrambled eggs get cold at breakfast before elementary school, and my father force fed them to me and then choked me until I passed out because I spat them up. It went on from elementary school through high school, when I became an honors student. Rather than reward me for good grades, if my father saw me doing homework he'd feel I was showing off that I was smarter than he was and maniacally he'd beat me for doing my homework. He broke my nose when I was in 11th grade for catching me reading my homework assignment in my room on the philosophy of Kierkegaard. He began beating me in there in my bedroom so often he had bars put on the windows so I couldn't escape.

That was dad, but then there was mom, too. When I was four and my mother felt overwhelmed as a parent because she had another baby, she took our family's kitten and broke its neck in front of me killing it so she'd have one less thing to care for in the house. When 5 of us elementary school kids were sexually assaulted by a pedophile, my mother blamed me for having attracted a pedophile in the first place.

I was 10 and the pedophile was an adult who attacked both elementary school boys and girls, but she said I had attracted the pedophile and I had therefore put my father's reputation as a sacrificing missionary at risk. For that she said I was never going to be forgiven by God and I was to go to hell no matter what I ever did with my life after that. By the time I got away from that pedophile I was 12. After that conversation with my mom I fell into a deep depression for 2 whole years until I was 14, a depression for which I went untreated, of course.

In addition to abusing me weekly with beatings, my father stopped traveling as a missionary and took up pastoring a local church, which made him stay at home more than ever before. His untreated bipolar disorder boiled over under the stress of living in a war zone, and he began beating my mother, then, too, since both were now cooped up together at home. It got so bad he beat her and put her in the hospital. She fought back, though, and surprised him by knocking him down at the hospital when my father took us kids there to visit her.

I escaped all of this by convincing a visiting bible college president to let me go back to the USA with him for early college in the middle of my senior year. My father had brought a shotgun by then into his beatings in my bedroom, and I was afraid I wasn't going to make it. At college I became an honors student again, and was able to pay my own way with scholarships and work study opportunities.

My parents, meanwhile, moved from one war zone to another abroad until they were finally caught committing financial fraud at a South American church they pastored and were deported off of the mission field for good back to the USA. They blamed me for that, too, saying I had snitched on them even though I hadn't spoken to them in 8 years by then for my own safety. I also (drum roll, please) got TREATMENT, becoming the first in my very needy family tree to get treatment and begin to recover.

Through all of this, though, I kept marrying people like my mom over and over until my fiancee broke off our engagement before that third wedding could take place. My depression fed my obesity problem for years after that until I got PTSD therapy to stop that particular mental pattern and then weight loss surgery to stop the obesity of which depression was a major symptom.

It was in specific PTSD therapy that I finally understood I hadn't been to blame for my parents' behavior because they were mentally ill and untreated. To accept their mental health diagnoses, though, I had to accept my own: Complex PTSD from childhood combat exposure, that pedophile's rape, and weekly brain trauma in my home's domestic violence. I'd add that because of the way they used being missionaries and pastors in their abuse, there was spiritual abuse in their, to0. That was probably harder on me even than the other varieties because it went straight to my soul.

Embracing my own mental health diagnosis of PTSD fully, though, and coming out of the closet with it by coming here and becoming a CL at DS PTSD, I was able to embrace my parents' mental health diagnoses. That helped me realize dad's violence was manic depression out of control and mom's was from her borderline personality.

I was able to come to love and forgive them both, and then love, forgive, and stop loathing me, too. I did draw a boundary and stay away from them, though, because now I recognized how untreated they were and what that meant.

They responded in typical untreated mentally ill fashion by hiring an ex-FBI agent to harass me at my workplace to force contact with me there, which I ended by reporting workplace harassment to my human resources department. They continue to try such contact nonetheless, though the ex-FBI agent did get the message and stop. I just block and ignore the unwanted contact now since it no longer has any force behind it.

I stopped my relationship pattern, too, and I haven't dated now in 10 years.
Since getting weight loss surgery I haven't had a serious depressive episode in 2 years. I took up meditation to help me have a more positive mind/body connection, and I expanded my teaching load from Spanish to include psychology courses, too. I don't tell my students my story like I've done here, but my classes are well attended. They particularly attract those going into nursing, because I have practical experience with trauma and recovery that I pass on to students in class without telling them it's my own.

I may date again, this time more likely with someone who is not untreated for mental illness like my mother was. She served as my only role model for relationships that led to my failure to cure a partner with my love alone. I now know that is not an effective treatment for mental illness, no matter how well intended it may be. A psychiatrist has found that Prazosin helps me with my PTSD nightmares and I can take it and it alone since it is not processed by the kidneys, which in my case are too damaged even for aspirin, but by the liver instead.

The 13 tips for flashback management help me get through my flashbacks during the day, even when I have them as I teach psychology classes, which happens often Avoiding bad relationship choices has kept me from triggering more episodes of depression lasting years at a time as happened in the wake of my two divorces and my broken off engagement. Being thinner and more energetic at work has gotten my young boss to reassess her opinion that I should be on disability rather than be working.

Things over all are looking up. I'll never be normal, not with my background, but I'm highly functional. Though still only working with 40% kidney function, so much so that two small churches have now hired me to 8 years running to be their minister for a part time job weekends. My sermons are mostly anonymously about what I've learned here about trauma and recovery.

Consequently, I have the role of wounded healer as their minister rather than shaman. Parishioners come to me with their own healing work for it to be validated rather than expecting that it start with me in the first place. I'll be leading a service like that again tomorrow, in fact.

I don't have the answer to my deep depression episodes in the past that lasted years each time, nor do I have any immunity against its happening again in the future. I do have the assurance, though, that unlike what I was told at the bottom of each of my depressions in the past, I do not get depressed because I am lazy, and I do not have PTSD anxiety because In invited trauma that was my fault. From that assurance as my starting place so far I've been able to work my way back from each time I've bottomed out with depression back to recovery again. It's work, though, and I need support for it, which is why I've come here for 8 years now.

I'm telling you my story because the depression stories of others really help me here. If this isn't helpful, simply ignore it. However, if I didn't offer it after hearing you be so open about depression, I would feel selfish. So I'm adding that the latest depression stories of others that helped me were from musicians I admire.

One was from Melissa Etheridge, who lost her son to opioid addiction. The other was from Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco. Tweedy recovered from terrible treatment for depression from a therapist who put him on opioids and really wanted to go on tour with him more than he wanted him to get well. Having been misdiagnosed for years myself, in my case with thyroiditis when I had kidney disease, I could relate.

I heard both podcasts while walking to keep my weight off, walking I do now as a substitute for going to the gym now that the pandemic has closed it down. So far so good; I weigh exactly what I weighed a year ago. As I was walking this week I thought of both of you struggling with that familiar depression I know so well, so I thought I'd share my story and the stories of Etheridge and Tweedy so you'd know our stories aren't the first nor will they be the last and that you're not alone fighting depression by yourselves.

Tweedy told his depression story on the site sarcastically called The HIlarious World of Depression, hosted by someone who is a depressive himself, obviously.
https://www.hilariousworld.org/episodes


Etheridge told her story to Rolling Stone magazine instead.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/melissa-etheridge-beckett-cypher-livestream-1040467/

You Marah and you Thor are both really great people to know on DS PTSD,.
You're so open about your struggle with anxiety and depression that I just wanted to take the full time out at least once to share what makes me think of you as I myself cope with my own anxiety and my own depression every day. So far so good for me, so I'm sending you both my support, too.

I know that feeling. My psych-doc says anxiety and depression are both "children of helplessness". Yeah, I know, real helpful at 4 AM, eh? *headdesk* Point is ---- you aren't alone. Obvs, as I'm up at 4 AM, tho' in my case physical pain is th eculprit, but then I feel helpless and anxiosu and here I am!

Support

Big hug for you Marah..... I think a lot of us are having more depression and anxiety then ever these days

I'm feeling it to...

Big hugs for everyone of calm and support.....xo

Marah, sorry that you are going through this. You are not alone. Agrees hugs to everyone of calm and support. You guys are the best.

I'm listening to a another new podcast right now interviewing David Bazan of the alternative rock band Pedro the Lion. It's my second one with him because he is a pastor's kid like me from the exact same faith tradition, as me, coincidentally. So his honest insights about dealing with depression comes from where I am coming from and that makes his insights relatable for me. I recommend podcasts these days, there seems to be one out there for everyone.