February 13th, 2022

This story has many layers and puzzle pieces that I am looking back at and seeing how they all fit together. My story is about the world around me crumbling and how I found a way to put it back together again.

February 13th felt like a typical day for me. The Super Bowl was on and it was the halftime show of any ’90s kid’s dream, so we went to a neighbor’s to watch it. That night felt like a typical night. My husband, Alex, and I tucked our daughter in, I took a shower, we got into bed, and I started to read a book on my kindle. I was reading the second book of the Crescent City series by Sarah J. Maas. My favorite kind of book is fantasy books with magic and realms and possibilities that go beyond the natural world we live in every day.

The “natural world” we live in… as if the fact that this world even exists is “natural” at all. A subject for another time though…

As I was reading, my husband was starting his journey to sleep. I could hear his light snoring and his breathing changing, those little clues you pick up on after sleeping in the same bed with someone for 11 years that he was drifting to the land of dreams.

Out of nowhere, the flood gates of fear and anxiety opened upon me, drowning me in questions that before this night, I had always had answers to but been too distracted by life to really stop and think about:

“Why are we here?”
“What is the point of human existence?”
“How did we come to exist in the first place?”
“Do we really work so hard just to one day die?”
“Does life have any actual purpose?”
“When we die, is there really nothing after this?”
“One day, I’m going to lose my family… my husband, my daughter, my parents, my siblings, my nieces, my nephews, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins… we all cease to exist. This life can’t just be for nothing.”

Most would call this an existential crisis or nervous breakdown. When was the last time you sat and really thought about these questions for yourself?

Fear dug its claws into my mind and held on for dear life. I sat up in bed, alarming my husband, who held me all night while I panicked and shared my deepest fears with him. I finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning and awoke the next day with the fear and anxiety still clinging to me.

It was Valentine’s Day. I couldn’t figure out the point of existence. My husband was doing the best he could to show up for me. Our 8-year-old daughter was at school. All I was worried about was Alex going to the store to get our daughter something for Valentine’s Day so we could keep some semblance of normalcy for her while we were clearly in a mental health crisis as a family.

Months before this happened, I started going back to therapy. Now, I’m not a stranger to depression and anxiety. I wouldn’t say we’re old friends, but we have shared time together intimately over the years, but I try my best to see it out of my home, my heart, and my mind as often as it knocks on my door. To do this, I usually drowned myself in busyness, productivity, in accomplishments. In 9 years, I earned five different certifications and three degrees in nutrition and fitness. I started a family, built a business, and moved overseas twice. I went back to school full time and homeschooled my daughter during a global pandemic. I never slowed down long enough to spend time with my emotions. I’m not a physical runner but I am an emotional runner, never confronting the hard stuff for long enough to actually move through it. Going back to therapy was my way of finally saying “enough is enough. I need to move through this so I can put it behind me, once and for all.”

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, most things are now virtual when it comes to mental health care. I’m thankful that this makes things accessible for groups of people that may otherwise not be able to access this much-needed care, but it does take some of the personalization out of it. My therapist was good, but she didn’t challenge me. The service I used came with a psychiatric partner who met with me and mistook my anxiety for ADHD, putting me on an antidepressant commonly used to help with ADHD symptoms.

While I am not anti-medication in any way, I don’t think the first line of defense when we’re struggling should be medication and I believe there are a lot of mental health professionals out there who may share this view. The medications can absolutely make therapy and the other work easier to accomplish, but they can also lead you down a road that is hard to travel, which is what happened to me.

I started the medication and in the six weeks that I was on it, I lost my appetite, my sleep, and my happiness. I sunk deeper and deeper into a hole of depression, though I tried to make it seem like everything was fine and dandy on the outside. Mental illness is still SO stigmatized that those of us who live with it have a hard time opening up about it so I stayed in my bubble, not really telling anyone what I was going through, or making light of it with jokes and deflection.

Finally, I had enough. I told my prescriber that this medication wasn’t working for me. Her solution? To increase it. I said absolutely not and stopped taking it altogether. The therapy company connected me with a different prescriber who then opted for Adderall. Stimulant medications are scary and habit-forming, but if ADHD was what I had, then I was willing to give it a try because I figured this doctor knew better than I did at this time.

For one week I took this medication and at the end of it was when I had a nervous breakdown, on February 13th. Five months later, I’m able to look. back and see that the medications probably played a big role in my breakdown. Medication-induced depression is a real thing, but I have also been told that burnout played a huge role, along with alienation and abandonment by some people who were closest to me, and some interpersonal family issues, things that I plan on touching on throughout my blogging journey. Put all of those things in a shaker glass with some ice, shake it up, and you’ve got a Mental Health Crisis mocktail on your hands.

If anyone has ever experienced severe anxiety and major depression, you know that all you want to do is FEEL BETTER. My next post will be about my experience in the Behavioral Health unit of our local hospital and the misdiagnosis along the way.

Fair warning, this blog is going to be centered around God and faith. I know that mainstream media has made you believe that science has “proved” God to be obsolete (this couldn’t be further from the truth), or that being a Christian isn’t trendy (the loudest Christians don’t speak for all Christians), or that Jesus didn’t actually walk this Earth. I have spent the last three months devoted to figuring out why I believe what I believe and having some of my own supernatural experiences, and I have a different story to tell you.

I was a skeptic, a “my relationship with God is my own,” a “the Bible is a document written by men, for men” type of person without ever reading it myself. I was so prideful that I couldn’t believe that anyone had any say over my life, but me. Trust me when I say, this journey has been transformational and beautiful. I encourage you to join my exploration of existence and faith without bias, without judgment and just hear me out, especially if you’ve ever found yourself in a place of isolation, loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

Looking forward to sharing this journey with you,
Dev