Birthday musings

Around my 39th birthday last year I fell into a bit of a hole. I wondered for how long I would be on this earth, if I now had reached mid-life and I looked back on the dreams I'd had and the things I did and did not do in my life. I can tell you, it was not all pretty.

For the last few years I have been working on my dream. But while I was working on it, it felt as if there was more that should be there. Something I could not yet grasp. And the longer I stayed in the game, the more my dream changed.

First there were material things that were fun to watch. I had lived in small apartments in big cities for a long time and craved living in the countryside. For me, but even more for my child. So we moved and had interesting adventures on the way. For a while we lived in a very small house and camped a bit in the garden in a camper, where I saw clearly that “my” dream of living off the grid in a tinyhouse is really not mine, more likely it was strongly influenced by social media. We also lived with friends, also one part of my dream – or what I thought my dream was. But sharing one bathroom and kitchen when we were 5 people in the house? Also not for me. Maybe I had lived alone for too long, but that stressed me out. There were other material things I manifested, where I once had thought they were my dreams but something always kept missing. I know one part is, that my dreams require either more time or more people who work on the same goal. Right now I have neither.

But what all the focus on the outside and on the material part of my dream showed me, was, that I need to concentrate way more on the inside. I had fallen into the trap of “If I just reach XYZ, I will be okay. Life will feel safe, manageable, enjoyable and free.” Guess what: no matter what goal I reached, I never felt those things. Or not for long. First reaching the goals came with a big sigh of relief, only to find out after a while that there always seemed to be a missing piece.

So at one point I decided, that I would take the year until my 40th birthday to “get better by forty”. But how should I measure that? I took notes here and there, read plenty of books about a variety of topics that I could see influenced my state of mind: sleep, food, exercise, mental health, parenting, spirituality and so on. Don't forget the occasional romance novel to give my mind a break from all the knowledge.

And while I was halfheartedly doing plenty of things, but nothing with a concentrated effort, I saw what helped and what not. And I started having more contact with my stepdad, who at this point struggled badly with his mental health. I felt grateful for the emails we sent back and forth, because I had a bad feeling that he might not find a way to deal with his depression for much longer, because his medications kept failing him.

The combination of the books I read, the conversations I had with my stepdad, the things I did to improve my mental health and all in all being very conscious about what was happening inside my brain lead to interesting results. My outer world kept changing. My circumstances became even more challenging financially and with a work-injury and don't even get me started on the state of the world. But still I slowly started feeling better on the inside.

How was that possible? Of course I had good and bad days like any person walking on this planet. But in the big total I felt like my mental health was improving. I had not been depressed or burnt out, just oftentimes deeply hopeless, sad, angry and frustrated that my life was not improving much. Only in tiny bits, but then the next setback came. But still my mind kept getting better over the last year and with it the quality of my life, even though the outside should have meant the direct opposite.

And on March 24th of this year, I sat down in the afternoon, wrote down some goals and knew that I wanted to talk about my journey with mental health. Until then I had held back, because of the fear of what my family would think. There is a lot that they don't fully know. But on that day I decided that I could no longer hide. I could no longer hold back. So I wrote. I planned. I made a video before going to bed, that I planned to upload the next day.

Satisfied with my plan I went to bed and when I got up the next morning I saw a missed call from my mum. That was unusual. So early!? But before my mind could form the words, I knew in my gut what had happened. And then she told me. While I had been sitting at my kitchen table the afternoon before, and made a plan to talk openly about mental health online, my stepdad ended his life. His pain had become unbearable. In his goodbye letter he wrote about how the medications failed him and he was afraid that his depression had become resistant to any medication. So he chose to put an end to his pain. His final step.

I felt devastated. And so much more. At the same time I knew, that I need to speak up. I once asked him, if he'd like to write something with me – maybe a blog about mental health. I told him that I believed that his and my journey could help people out there. But he refused, he did not have any energy to spare in his battle and he said for one thing he doesn't want to burden anyone with his story and also he thinks that it would not help anyone.

On the day when I got the call from my mum, I suddenly saw very clearly that his story had already changed a life. My life. I have been deeply affected by the things he told me about his life and his struggles and by watching him struggle on and off for decades. And I am very sure, that his life, his presence, his own words and the books he shared with my when I was in the dark places in my life, prevented me from ever falling in as deep as he did.

So now I am here. I want to share with you what I have learned – through my lived experiences and through books, my stepdads words and his life and what I do to take care of myself, so that the “lows” never turned into a full blown incurable depression. Because, as my stepdad told me: If I don't learn to live and enjoy my life fully and after my own choosing, how can my child learn to do it for himself? He cannot.

So here I am. Dedicating my life to learning about mental health, so that I can pay it forward. I hope you join me on my journey.