How to cope when change is too much to handle.

It seems that with every productive, empowering month comes a month of tension and mental fog. Unfortunately, this month was the latter. Without going into too much personal detail, my aunt has been in and out of the hospital a few times this month with a condition she will deal with the rest of her life. With that comes my fear of the unknown and the inability to make things better for her. I’ve allowed her illness to become a distraction while knowing that there’s not I can do to help. Logically I know that she’ll be OK, and I know that my not focusing on my own work is doing nothing but harming myself. Maybe that’s why I do it. I seem to have this pattern of self-harm in a very abstract way. Damaging my career, my relationships, my self-esteem.

Perhaps you have notice that blog has been a bit lax in the past few weeks. Part of that is this family trouble, but part of it is also due to a big change coming up soon for Molly Rose Balms. I don’t want to talk about it yet because I’m not absolutely 100% on top of it, but I should be able to discuss it fully in July. Suffice it to say for now, it’s a big change both in my career and my life in general. Stay tuned on Saturday for a post about another big change coming to Molly Rose Balms!

Both of these big life changes made April quite overwhelming. Certainly I have not been as productive this past month as I would have liked, but I wonder how 2015 me would have handled it. Even 2017 me would not have bothered getting out of bed most days. I’ve cried a lot, but I wonder if I could have even seen through my swollen eyes enough to type this out if all this happened a year ago.

Compared to the average adult, I’d would strongly agree that I don’t handle stress well. Barely at all, if fact. But I think what is making life easier to handle for me as opposed to before is that I actually have hope for the future. To me, life was hopeless. I knew what I wanted out of life, I even knew how to get it. But I didn’t want to try because I truly believed I didn’t deserve happiness. I still believe that sometimes. I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

I used to hate the phrase “choose happiness” because it sounds dismissive of true depression – the implication being that if you choose happiness, you can’t be unhappy. Maybe that’s how some people see it, but I take it differently now that I’ve realized that I used to (and still do, sometimes) will myself to be unhappy. Don’t get me wrong: I have clinical depression. It’s real and it sucks and there’s nothing I can do to stop myself from having depressive episodes most days. But I also know that I make myself wallow in depression sometimes. I use it as a tool to avoid life. I’m tired of it.

I’ve decided to love myself more than that. It’s gonna be baby steps for sure, but they’ll be moving in the right direction for as long as possible, as often as possible. I have a goal, and changes are nothing but bumps in the road to that goal.