So I am a little late in the game with getting on this Scintilla project, but I figured this would be a perfect fit for me. I love prompts to get my thinking to get me moving. So although today is the 5th day, I figured I would write about the prompts that inspired me. So one of today's options was to discuss "a time I got away with it" For me it isn't exactly just one time...it is a lot of times.
For me what I got away with was pretending that everything was fine. There was a period of time right after my son turned one and that we were moving into our new house that I got away with pretending that everything was fine and it wasn't. My husband began to suffer from severe depression. I didn't know it at the time, for a long time I thought it was me. If I could be a better wife, be better mother, be a better housekeeper...he would start to get over the anger and sadness that he was living with. After many months I realized it wasn't about me it was about him and I was trying my best to help him. As anyone who has experienced depression or lived with someone who has depression knows all the help in the world can't make someones depression go away.
So I did what I had to do. I locked us down. I cancelled plans, never had people over, stopped talking to a lot of my friends. I shut us off from the world so that people wouldn't know how bad things were at home. How miserable my husband was and how miserable our lives were. If you would have seen me at work, I looked fine. I pretended. I acted. I lied my way through almost six months of my life. Until New Years....my husband was to ill (I always refer to it as ill because in my mind depression is a sickness not something we can just change like a mood) and I snuck into my son's room to watch him sleeping and was staring out the window at all the houses lit up for the holidays and realized how ungodly tired I was. Believe it or not pretending that everything was fine was killing me. So I made a decision I wasn't going to try and get away with it anymore. I needed help and so did my hubby. It was then that we started to work towards getting back to a real life.
I know still to this day that most people in my professional life and a whole lot of people in my private life still have no idea how bad things were for those 6-8 months and most never will. Looking back I know pretending that everything was fine and perfect was not good, but at 28 I didn't know what else to do. Today I am stronger, I am wiser, I know that even if I could...I wouldn't want to get away with covering it up again.
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I know the feeling all too well of having to put up a front and pretend everything is fine. I am glad though that you're overcoming it. Welcome to #scintilla by the way, and look forward to your future posts :)
Always here for you!