To Be Honest

I’m good. I got it. I’m fine. No, no it’s all good. No, I can do it, it’s okay. Sure, no problem. I’ll get it. It’s all good.

To be honest, almost every time I said any of that, I was probably lying to appease someone. The people-pleasing I spoke about in my last blog is something that I have been doing all of my life. I don’t even remember how it started. I just remember feeling like I never wanted to bother anyone with anything. And I mean anything.

I heard a song not too long ago that really resonated with me. The lyrics talk about putting on a mask before you leave the house so that no one really sees you. That was me. That can still be me if I am not careful. It was so bad sometimes that it would actually end up hurting me. I think I mentioned that I have asthma in previous blogs. If I haven’t, now you know, and it can be really bad. I used to tell people that I was okay, even when I was really struggling to breathe. Even when I was taking way too much of my medication to get through the day. I can catch myself still doing that sometimes. It would be so bad that I would just push through it until I couldn’t. And when I couldn’t, that’s when I ended up in the emergency department for breathing treatments and sometimes for a stay. Sometimes those hospital stays would be long and sometimes they would be short, but either way I was in the hospital.

My last blog talked about faking it till you make it. That’s what I did. The problem was that you can’t do that with your health. Not your mental health, not your spiritual health and certainly not your physical health. It can be downright dangerous and for me it was.

It was so dangerous, in fact, that I have been resuscitated four times and saved from the brink of needing to be resuscitated once.

Those resuscitations happened when I was much younger. This last time in which I was close to losing my life was not all that long ago and quite honestly the scariest. The funny thing is that as I sat in that emergency room with so many doctors and nurses around me trying everything to help me breathe, all I could think about was my husband who was watching from the corner of the room, and my parents who were at home and at this point didn’t even know the shape I was in. I just kept thinking, he looks so scared, and they will be so upset. As for myself, all I could think was, well, I’m 48. I wasn’t supposed to see 30 according to what a doctor had told me so many years ago. I had 18 borrowed years. All of my friends are gone, I am the last one standing.

If that is not people-pleasing at its best I don’t know what is.

I did it all the time! I didn’t even understand that until not too long ago. During that hospital stay, I was diagnosed with anxiety and then shortly after that with depression. I remember the doc saying that for an asthmatic, it was completely normal. I didn’t understand that at the time. I mean, I understood the anxiety but the depression not so much. As I am writing this, I am not sure I fully understand the depression part. What I do know is that when I was diagnosed, a lot of my life finally made sense.

To be honest, it would be surprising if an asthmatic didn’t have anxiety, wouldn’t it? How could anyone be struggling to breathe not have anxiety?

So yes, that makes total sense to me, but like I said, the depression, not so much. In fact, it still confuses me. The depression is something I might have to work out while I’m writing. Writing tends to be my go-to when I am trying to figure things out. And that is something I have just figured out in the last few years.

So, here is another part of my journey. Working on the people-pleasing is something that I will most likely always have to do. I will probably always have to check myself to make sure I am not putting on a mask before I go or do anything.

I think I just realized how often I still wear that mask. How often it is just easier to put on the mask than it is to truly look at how I am really doing. How I am really feeling.

Maybe I need to take a look at that Feelings Wheel a little more often, to help me be true to myself, so that I can be honest about how I am really feeling.