Who am I and what the hell am I doing?

Last night I wrote a long rambling poorly written blog. After reading it today I realized there was no back story of how I got to the point of it all. I mean, other than I am negative and trying to become more positive. A lot went into this rather forced self reflection. And so here is that tid bit of brutal honesty about who I am.

My name is Lea, I am 34 yrs old and have been in therapy for depression and anxiety since 1982. I was in second grade when my parents started me in therapy for phobias. I am an only child to parents who just celebrated their 50th anniversary last year. My problems are not my upbringing, they are my broken brain. In fact I had a great childhood. With that said, my parents are very negative. They are wonderful parents in many ways, in most the important ways. But negative lil birds they are indeed. I still love them and wouldn't trade them in for happy optimistic people for anything. That's a lie. I'd love to get rid of that black fog surrounding us.

I have been on meds for depression and anxiety the better part of my life. After losing my insurance and going into community mental health programs for my meds and therapy I realized that those people don't care. If they help you, rad. If they don't, well, they cant cure everyone. Non of it made me more positive, and my negativity was written off as part of my depression.

My anxiety and OCD had gotten to the point it was hard for me to work and continue school. Now, I worked the same job for 8 yrs, and another job for 3 yrs with various part time jobs for extra cash. I even owned my own screen printing business for a while. But expecting others to keep the system I develop is not easy when they do not have OCD and don't care if a pencil is in the pen caddy. Something that kept me awake at night if I didn't fix before leaving for the day. Co-workers thought I was a negative jerk who wanted them to clean up after themselves. I was. Totally.

This was just my normal life. It cost me a lot of important people. I didn't want people to get to close and get stuck in my world of crazy. But then I got to a point I was doing ok. I was functional again. After I met my husband I moved to FL, with the hopes that relocation may help me. FL has a horrible mental health system. I was given meds that had not worked years ago, received no therapy at all and only had med checks every 3 months. And those visits were 10 min each.

Needless to admit, my mental health deteriorated... My depression had me almost unable to leave bed. My husband had never dealt with anything like this before. And two years later, it had gotten so bad that along with various other circumstances, I had to move back to MI and in with my parents. I had been on my own since I was 23 so this was not easy. My husband was in FL, but I do have my 2 dogs, who are my best support system. They don't care if I am negative, they love me anyway.

Getting back into the MI community mental Health system has been a task... but one I have to handle, because off meds, I am not a person.

AND NOW COMES THE POINT OF ALL OF THIS....
I am sick of being on a million meds and still feeling like shit all the time. I started researching alternative therapies. Anything that may help me get some quality of life and be normal. I have lost my faith in western medicine and their love of just giving you new and stronger meds. And I opened my mind to the idea of alternative meds and healing...

After realizing how absurd some of these "therapies" are, I decided I was going to blog the journey. My focus is not just to get better mentally, but to become more positive. I want to lose this black cloud that hangs around me all the time.

So, here we go.