Fuck you earthquakes. Fuck you PTSD.

I wish I had their innocence…

 

It’s 1.02am and I have been trying to sleep for… well, a long time now.  I was quite sleepy at some point, but then some process kicked in in my brain and the next thing I knew I was lying there remembering details – vivid details – of  the earthquakes that have stuck in my mind.

I went from drowsy and happily falling asleep to remembering the earthquake on Christmas Eve 2011.  I was at the mall with Mum, Gaby & Emmy when all of a sudden the world began shaking.  Again.  We were in the food court and all around us could here glass items breaking, chairs scraping, screams and cries from children and adults alike.  The lights went off the emergency siren sounded; we all made a rush to the exit.  Santa was there too.  Gaby was worried about Santa, considering he hadn’t been through an earthquake before.  Mum & I?  We were trying to keep it together, trying to be a good example for the kids; in reality it was Gaby who had it more together than the two of us put together.

Afterward we were able to go to the car – in the parking building – almost as soon as I started the car there was another god almighty shake and I lost it.  We were out of the car and back out in the open before I could even register what was happening.  A bus arrived at the bus stop across from the mall and we took it home.  There was a quake while we were on the bus; all I could think of was the people who’d died in the bus during the Feb 22 quake.  We made it home, well, to Mum and Dad’s.  Throughout the day there were more quakes and my nerves became severely frayed.

I made it home, I guess Mum or Dad dropped us off.  I remember vividly because I was talking to the woman who at the time, I considered my best friend… you may have heard of her, she goes by the name of Lauriel.  She was at her ex-husband’s for the night (as a separated parent you do all manner of crazy ass thing in the name of doing what is best for your kids) and had hacked into his WiFi password.  He had no idea we were IM’ing on Skype, and we thought it was hilarious.  Just before midnight I decided I had better go to bed, but knew there was no way in hell I would be getting to sleep unaided.  I took two codeine, knowing full well it makes me drowsy.

It didn’t take long before I felt sleepy enough to go to bed.  I logged off, I went to the toilet, brushed my teeth, walked through the kitchen and lounge to my bedroom.  I put my hand on the door frame to steady myself because I was a bit wobbly.  And then there was another fucking earthquake.  It was pitch black, the house was shaking… and there I was, a total fucking blithering idiot of a mess.  I text Lauriel and told her there had been another quake.  She text with me until I fell asleep.

My mind then took me to February 22, 2011.  THE EARTHQUAKE.  I could vividly remember the colour of the sky.  It was overcast.  Looked like rain.  It was a muddy grey colour… you could feel rain in the air, it just hadn’t quite arrived.  I can remember the terror I felt when THE quake stopped.  I was on auto pilot.  “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD” I hyperventilated to myself as I picked Emersyn up from the middle of the floor, took my keys and went out to my car.  Backing down the driveway there was another quake.  I had to stop to regain composure, or at least the last tiny thread of it that remained.

I don’t know how I got there, but I was suddenly just down the road from Mum’s work (a supermarket).  There was another shake and I had stopped the car because I was hyperventilating and bawling at the same time.  A man who was walking along the footpath stopped to ask if I was okay.  I told him I wasn’t; he told me neither was he.  Composure regained once again, I drove the rest of the way to Mum’s work.  I parked.  I found her.  We hugged.  We cried.  We couldn’t let go of one another.

There ground was wet with wine.  Red.  White.  Rosé.  Cheap.  Expensive.  The earthquake didn’t care which, bottles were thrown to the ground in the violent shake, glass smashing, wine everywhere.  I hate to think how many dollars worth of wine was all over the floor, and the ground outside.

I remembered the panic as I tried to get to Gaby’s preschool.  I had to take a lot of detours due to flooding and roads being completely fucked.  I got there.  The kids were all sitting outside in the under 2’s playground area.  Gaby cried when she saw me.  But not because of the quake… because she didn’t want to go home, not when she’d only been there an hour!  I hugged that little girl so tightly.  I told myself I was hugging her to comfort her, but I know that in reality it was her comforting me.

Then I was back at my parents.  Outside with mum, in a state of… well, there is no word for it really.  Dad arrived home.  We were all safe and sound.

“Well, I almost died”.  The first words from Dad’s mouth.  Words I will never forget.  I can remember the tone with which he spoke them.  I can remember the look on his face.  I can remember the way my gut dropped.  I can remember the look of shock on Mum’s face, no doubt mirrored by my own.  He went on to tell us that he had just walked past the CTV building when it collapsed.  That he had had an appointment with his doctor – in the CTV building – an hour before the quake struck.  That he had had to choose between leaving a seminar early to get the earlier appointment, or to go after the seminar, at around 12.30.

My Dad made one seemingly mundane, inconsequential decision… he decided to be naughty and leave his seminar early.  In doing that… he avoided dying that day.  He made sure we didn’t get to experience the worst grief possible.  One little decision, one little choice, one tiny decision that was part of whatever else was going on that day.

And he could have died.

I still can’t get my head around that one.  I can’t fathom… I cry whenever I think about it.

One.  Little.  Decision.

————————————

I snuck out here to write this blog post.  Lauriel was sound asleep and I didn’t want to disturb her.  Naturally she caught me in the act.  Rather than saying “it’s almost 1.30, what the hell are you doing up?”, she simply told me “take your time baby, do what you’ve got to do“, kissed me, and went back to bed.

That was possibly the most reassuring, loving thing I could have been told.  She understands me.  She understands my thought process.  She understands that healing doesn’t happen overnight, more importantly she understands that perhaps healing is never complete and is instead an ongoing process.  Something we develop tools to cope with, but are never truly ‘over’.

Latest project: Owl hat!

I have always loved the look of owl hats and have been meaning to make one myself.  Well, yesterday I finally did it!  I found a pattern but rather than doing the hat in the pattern I skipped ahead to the ears/eyes/nose and put them on a hat I made a while back.  The result?  Pre  tty freakin’ awesome, if I do say so myself!  I can see many more owl hats in my future…

 

And of course, you can check out the pattern at Repeat Crafter Me – Crochet Owl Hat
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Four years on…

I guess this day naturally  calls for a blog post.

Just around the corner from our house

4.35am, September 4 2010.  I woke up to my bed shaking.  My brain registered it was an earthquake, but because I was torn from a very deep cycle of sleep, I couldn’t for the hell of me think what to do.

So I hid under my covers.

By the time I realised I should be under the doorframe the quake was over.  I stumbled out of bed and tried to turn the light on.  It was a no go.  With the power out I started to freak out about my kiddos.  Gabrielle was 3 at the time and Emersyn was only 10 weeks old.  Luckily both had slept in my room that night, so I didn’t have far to go to check on them.  Emersyn?  Sound asleep.  Yeap, in her little baby world she had managed to sleep through a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.  Gabrielle was awake but seemed rather annoyed at me for asking if she was okay, all she wanted to do was go back to sleep.

Yeap.  Mum – the only adult in the house – was the only one freaking out.

Text messages started coming through.  My mum, my sister (yes, the quake had woken her up hundreds of km away), my friend Lauren, my friend Emma, my ex-boyfriend, Gabrielle’s father.  It was nice to be able to share a quick ‘wow, that was scary’ text message or 20.  Then there was another big quake, an aftershock, and being wide awake by that point, it really scared me… as well as Gabrielle.  Emersyn was still asleep.

My plan was to take a walk along the river and cross over where I usually did. Then I found this.

I heard voices outside and decided I should go and make sure everyone was okay.  The elderly lady next door invited me inside to listen to the radio, and it was then that I realised how bad it was.

Roads torn up, buildings down, flooding, liquifaction, roads closed, emergency services were out, no water, no electricity…

It wasn’t until Emersyn woke for the day at 7am and was demanding a bottle that I realised I had no way to make her bottle.  What the hell was I going to do?  I went against advise and left my house, headed for my parents, who had plenty of bottled water and a gas stove so I could actually heat the water.

Only on this trip did I realise how bad the earthquake had been.  A bridge very close to my house had pretty much separated from the road, there were cracks all through the road, the river was incredibly muddy and high… but most alarming, as I drove closer to my parents, I saw more and more houses which were damaged.  It was scary and I realised how lucky I had been.

When I got to my parents house they were listening to the AM radio.  Wow.  It was too much to hear, houses down, injuries, roads completely ruined.  The only positive thing was that there had been no reported loss of life.

And there wouldn’t be.  No lives were lost in the September 4th earthquake, maybe in part because of the time of day it hit?

It was incredibly hard not to be on edge.  Each aftershock made my nerves grow more and more frazzled, until a particularly large one sent me right over the edge and I spent the best part of two hours crying… through aftershock after aftershock.

None of us realised that September 4th was just the beginning.  Mother Nature lured us into a false sense of security, the big one had past, it couldn’t get any worse, right?!  Things could only get better, right?!

Then February 22nd 2011 happened.

12.51 February 22nd 2011. 6.3 magnitude.  185 people dead.
My dad was close to being one of them.  He was in the CTV building only half an hour before it went down.  He had just walked passed it on the way back from the chemist when the quake struck.  He used to work in that building in the early 2000’s.  My sister went to fitness college in that building.  My family had so many connections to that building… and to have it collapse… I can’t explain how traumatic it was.

I am going to leave my feelings about the February 22 earthquake for another day.  Likely February 22 2015… I can’t put myself through it right now.

I was thinking this morning about how much has changed since the first earthquake.

Happy times! Me & my chief bridesmaid

Gabrielle is now about six weeks off turning eight
Emersyn is four!
I have a beautiful niece (who, ironically, was born on Feb 24 2011) who is three
I fell in love with my best friend, Lauriel
I moved to Wanganui to live with her and her kiddos
Lauriel and I got married
I am now half way through my Bachelor of Communication
I have had writing published (online, but it still counts!
I have made some really amazing friends since moving here

That list up there ^^^ is enough to make me realise I have so much to be happy for, so much to be proud of, so many reasons to smile.  At times it can be hard to forget that, and I know it is something I need to work on!

 

Not THAT type of hooker

What can I say, I love a good play on words!

I started this blog for two reasons.  First of all, I want to share my experience with anxiety and depression. I have suffered from both for around 12 years now, the depression was triggered by a pregnancy loss (a termination to be more honest), while the anxiety was triggered by my beautiful nephew dying of SIDS when he was four months old.  Then there were the traumatic Christchurch earthquakes in 2010/2011.  THAT was really what set me off.

For a long time the depression would come and go, but the anxiety has always been relatively constant.  I was a single parent for six-ish years, and I think this forced me to ignore the depression, to sweep it under the ‘too hard’ mat and hope it would go away.  I convinced myself it had, but I realise now I was in denial.  It took the love of a beautiful, funny, wonderful woman (Lauriel) for me to get out of denial and start to accept my depression was more existant than I believed. 

It seems stupid, doesn’t it.  Meet an amazing woman, fall in love, move in together, get married, start the rest of my life… and fall into a deep depression.  It confused me for a long time.  I didn’t understand why I was suffering so badly when in reality I was the happiest I had been in… well, forever.  It was as if there was two of me.  Depressed Emma and blissfully happy Emma.  Over the past year things got worse and ‘depressed Emma’ became more prevalent than ‘blissfully happy Emma’… I was still happy, but there was this persistant fog, this horrible cloud that just wouldn’t lift, no matter how happy I felt in the other part of my brain.

Things came to a head about four months ago.  I had a breakdown in the shower.  I got out, sat on the bed and cried.  And cried.  And cried.  And cried.  I was numb.  I couldn’t feel anything.  I couldn’t think.  All I could do was cry.  Lauriel informed me we were going to the doctor, and I didn’t say no.  Like a child I let her get me dressed, get me out of the house, walk me into the medical centre, walk me through to the nurse, walk me through to the doctor, walk me through to the pharmacy.

Ninety minutes and a three month supply of Fluoxetine later, we went home.

I started seeing a psychologist not long after that, and finally feel as if I am starting to get on top of my depression and anxiety, though I doubt either will ever be gone.  I recently had my third appointment with my psychologist and he told me he is proud of the progress I made. 

Most days I think he is right, I have made great progress.  But then there are days where I feel like I am right back at step one.

Oh yea.  The second reason for starting this blog.

Crochet!

One of the worst aspects of my anxiety is I am terrified of being a passenger in a car on a long trip.  Around town, fine.  Onto the State Highway?  No fucking way.  We had a birthday party to attend in June and I had a major anxiety attack before we left.  Crying, shaking, imagining crash scenario after crash scenario.  Lauriel eventually said we didn’t have to go, but I KNEW we had to.  I KNEW that I had to push on through and that I had to test myself.  My psychologist had spoken to me only days earlier about exposure being the most effective form of treating anxiety. 

Lauriel broke the day into small chunks for me.  First off all I was to concentrate on getting dressed.  Then having breakfast.  Then getting ready to go.  She had me choose a book to take.  She suggested I take my crochet.  I decided it wasn’t a bad idea, but doubted I would be able to concentrate on it.  We got in the car.  I did up my seatbelt.  Lauriel started the car.  We were off.

I started crocheting immediately.  Know what?  I didn’t take my eyes off my crochet until two minutes before we reached our destination.  A WHOLE trip had passed by without any anxiety.  There were no freak outs, there were no crash scenarios racing through my head.  I concentrated on my crochet and that was it.

It was then that I realised crochet was something I could do to calm mysef, to focus myself, to divert my attention away from whatever it was I was fixating on (along with being afraid of being a passenger, I also convince myself on a very regular basis that I’m dying of some horrible disease).  Crochet almost became my saviour… well, after my wife anyway.

I have a few hard months coming up with various dates which have bad connotations… so I have decided I am going to make a blanket for our bed.  It is going to be huge.  I am doing granny squares that are little and to make the blanket big enough for our bed, it is going to require 484 granny squares.  

My plan is that when things get tough mentally/emotionally, after talking it through with Lauriel, I will pick up my hook and start working on the blanket.  I might get a couple of squares out of the way and feel okay, I might end up at it all night. 

This blog isn’t going to be all depression and anxiety though, I also plan to share the good stuff, because part of what I have learnt in the last four months is the importance of appreciating the small stuff.  Cliché as hell, but incredibly important.  Who knows, maybe I will do a daily ‘3 things I am grateful for’ post.  I probably won’t.  But maybe I will.