Feels like fall, and my heart's breaking

This week its gotten quite chilly in comparison to the weather we've had since May. Its been outrageously hot and humid for months and all of a sudden its dry and chilly. Hot in the day indeed but it cools off overnight and the mornings are downright chilly. Sweater weather until noon some days!

With the change in the weather, its definitely starting to feel like fall. I usually love fall with all the same intensity of a giddy schoolgirl, but this year, I'm not looking forward to it.

Last year at this time I was entering the hardest period of my life. And I've had hard times before. But this year was a doozy.

Hard times gone by include those years when my dad was really ill, or in a really bad addiction phase, or even the year I broke up with my first boyfriend and moved back in with my parents, was an unemployed university graduate and suffered my first depressive episode. But this year marks the 1 year anniversary of two really difficult experiences.

First - I had a baby girl last summer. She's now the love and joy of my life, but last year marked such a difficult transition to motherhood. I had a very very difficult and traumatic birth experience, one that left me exhausted and freaked out with PTSD. It was so hard to get up and care for the baby with all the pain and exhaustion and anxiety I was feeling. I pushed myself so far over the limits of what I or any human could probably handle, and suffered a serious breakdown as a result. Breastfeeding wasn't going well, so I decided to pump and bottle feed, which was like feedign twins (I had to wake myself up when the baby was sleeping to pump). That, combined with the stress and strain of being a new parent, and the extreme sleep deprivation, I suffered with depression, anxiety, obsessive thinking, serious delusions and extreme insomnia for months. I had to come to terms with a lot of pain that I'd brought with me from my past, major insecurities and blows to my confidence. It took a lot of work to get through that. I also had some major health issues that weren't helping much. I had a very resistant kidney infection, strep throat, many colds, three cases of the stomach 'flu, and even a series of extremely painful gallstone attacks that required surgery in January 2006.

Just as I was starting to think that maybe things would be okay psychologically, I got the terrible news of my dad's death. That experience just knocked me back, further back than I think I had been even before the baby.

Now that the weather is turning a bit colder, I'm starting to remember the pain of late last summer and early fall. I do feel much happier this year, much more healthy, much more healed, but I know this fall is going to be painful. I had an anxiety attack in the middle of my soccer game yesterday thinking about it. Remembering all the difficult times last fall, how depressed I was (I really thought about suicide a lot) and the fact that my dad is still gone and how much has happened that he's not been a part of over the past year.

I'm not sure how to manage it, if I should just go with the feeilngs, let them come and hit me wherever and whenever, or if I should try to talk myself through it - to tell myself that these are just anniversary anxieties, and to tell myself to look at how far I've come and that I should feel proud of myself for all that I've accomplished.

I'm not sure the best approach. I have to feel these feelings, not stuff them inside, otherwise the repressed anxiety will no doubt do funny things to me. But I am not looking forward to the feelings of helplessness that come when something totally unexpected and really painful happens to you.

Its funny - as humans we are creatures that have highly developed brains and emotions. We think we have developed some "mastery" over our environment and our world. We have developed highly complex systems and institutions that help to keep us sane and develop a feeling of safety. Yet despite all of our trappings, we still live in a world where we still cannot control major life altering experiences and painful changes. Its like we delude ourselves into a false sense of security that's really not there at all.

Are we really doing ourselves a favour by pretending we have some control over all of this, when really we have no control over much at all?