Warning: Instability Possible

I have decided to stop taking my anti-depressant medication. Partly by choice, partly because I can't seem to get in to see a doctor to renew my prescription, and partly due to lack of money to buy it.

I'm happy I will no longer be taking a medication that makes me sleepy. I am nervous that this transition will be hard.

I fired our family doctor about a year ago. Not a big deal for people living State side, but it's a big deal in Canada. Fire your doctor and there isn't another one around the corner who will take you on. Here we have waiting lists for family docs. Not to mention, we are now branded as non-compliant, and trouble makers because we up and fired her. Doctors are the ones here who have the power, not the patients. But that is another story. Suffice to say it is now not easy getting prescriptions refilled without a family doctor. Clinics here are far and few between, with short or infrequent hours.
We have also not had medical insurance for many months now. In fact after six months of working my insurance has only just kicked in. But we still need money to purchase meds. Insurance doesn't pay 100% after all and we are now at a stage that society would call "the working poor"(which is a hair better than where we were which was on Employment Insurance, then on nothing at all when that ended). 

All this ties in to why I am getting off the anti-depressants. A prescription ended, no doctor to re-write it and no money to buy it anyway. So four weeks ago I started to wean myself off.
With only about 20 pills left I made the choice of reducing my dosage to every other night. A couple times I waited two nights before taking the next dose. Then with two pills left I cut them in half and took them every other night.


Last night was the last one.


I have noticed a few changes so far. I'm less apathetic towards my homes state of cleanliness. I'm a bit more crabby towards my husband in general. I dream more too. Wild dreams. Not God dreams so much as just intense. I find I want out of them because they make me feel trapped. These dreams actually wake me up, though not because they are bad dreams.
I assume all this is due to the change in brain chemistry, in spite of my attempt to wean off slowly. I am sure there will be more changes, but to what depth I am not sure. I want to keep the cool, calm and collected me that I have been the last two years on my medication. I want to lose the apathy though. I do not want to regain the stressed out, angry person I once was, indifferent for other reasons. But to regain my drive would be nice. It is still in here, just less intense than before. But even that was there for other reasons. Reasons that may not be a part of me any longer.
I have learned much during these last two years. My perspective on life, on love, on grace have all grown and strengthened. But did the medication adjust my brain so that I had time and internal peace so that I was able to gain those or did it just mask who I was long enough, only to be bidding time until the old me could return?
This is a wait and see kind of thing I guess. I am going to have to rely on my friends to help me. Feel free to warn me if I seem overly stressed, I pull away, seem angry more often than not or react with less grace than I have been recently. It might take me a bit to balance out. To fit back into my skin, the old with the new as apposed to the old instead of the new. 
One thing I am really looking forward to re-gaining is peace and quiet! Once I started my meds I could constantly hear a buzzing in my head. I am looking forward to that being gone! Here's hoping!!

What's Your Gait?

I heard a story the other day from a friend. His brother had once forgotten his walk for about two weeks. It’s baffling, but looked rather funny to my friend to see his brother walk funny until he re-established his normal gait. As he told me the story I was imagining the double bounce walk Mickey Mouse does. Works well for Mickey but looks completely ridiculous on a human. 

Strange. How does one forget their normal gait? It seems impossible. A quick search on the internet shows it is a common occurrence within the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Brain damage can cause the same effect, to forget how to walk. But those have real physical reasons for losing not just normal gait but eventually how to walk altogether, and sometimes suddenly. No my friends brother was not ill but a strong young man at the time. And he did eventually regain his normal gait. 

I joked with my friend that I was smart, I hadn’t lost my walk. 

Today I forced myself to get out the door and go for a walk again. I’ve just started a healthy habit of walking in the morning. See, I could stand to lose a few more than just a few pounds but I also am in need of strengthening my legs. Having injured both my knees a year ago I did a lot of sitting. It is time for a change. Walking still hurts if I’m not careful. Small inclines are worse than flat terrain. I get home 40 minutes later out of breath and feeling like I accomplished something to my benefit. 

Plus, I get to think uninterrupted for those 40 minutes. 

I had been recently asked what my passions were and I had nothing come to mind at all. I could remember old passions that died over time due to lack of money, lack of opportunity, and just plain death of my own desires and hopes because of the stresses of my crisis filled life. It was recommended to me to go for walks to talk with God and re-discover my passions. The idea brought back memories. That was one thing I did love to do back in my home town as a young Christian. I would go for walks along the escarpment listening to the birds, looking at the shapes of leaves, the sunset, and the city below. I loved to hear the crunch of leaves under my feet in the fall and see the raccoons in the trees in spring. That was a quiet time with God. The only quiet time I had alone, and I would just marvel at His creation and how amazing it and He was. 

So, my journey of walking began again.

My vision and understanding of things has deepened over the years. I can now see connections and things God is trying to highlight for me to follow better than I could as a young teenager. Today my walk had me enjoying the sights of the beautiful walking paths but also mulling two seemingly disconnected thoughts. I had been told I’d forgotten how to do things like Jenn would do them and I needed to do them like Jenn would. As I mulled this statement, which I realized was more true than I’d like to admit I also thought of my friends brother forgetting his own walk.

 Forehead slap!

 I had forgotten my own spiritual gait! I had lost it and was trying out a different way of walking that was unnatural to me, but I was trying desperately to make it fit. I was even beginning to get use to the feeling of the new walk, even if it did make me look silly. I knew it made me look silly. I could see it in the eyes of one of my children, and in the face of grace of one of my friends as she just let me. Most didn’t notice my gait had changed. I’m not sure if I was trying to keep it a secret or if I was even that successful at hiding it from anyone else.

I’m the one who has forgotten my gait!

  I am suspecting that my previous spiritual gait heavily relied on a crutch of some kind. Religious parameters that I understood and lived by because I was told it was the right thing to do. I find it easy to live by black and white, right and wrong parameters. It gives structure and security to me. Since losing many of those man made rules of religion I have felt lost. Little is left to lean on. I do feel unsteady, left open and exposed, and unsafe. I have nothing to hide behind, or rely on to guide me. If nothing is wrong, or unlawful but I’ve live most of my life as though they were, where does that leave me except to think that what I lived was a lie. 

Now what?

How do I walk now that the structure I used to hold on to has been removed from me? Of course my gait is going to be off, unsteady, silly looking even! My legs are weak from lack of use for so long. I’m not so sure how to stand on my own two feet, relying on something that is less structured. Part of me wants to find out what I’ve missed for so many years. Who I would have been without the crutch. Another part of me just wants the old parameters back. My gait is liable to be off for a little while longer still as I figure out what’s safe to hold on to and what’s not. What will give me support and what restricts me. What was really me, and what was the crutch I relied on for so long. 

So, what do I do with the God instructions to “do things like Jenn would do them”?

I know I have to relearn my walk, but I’m not convinced it will look exactly the way it did before. I am hopeful that it will eventually be stronger and more powerful than it once was. Just like I’m hoping this physical act of walking regularly will increase my stamina and over all strength. For now, the stride is short and slow. My footsteps are unsure and clumsy. My knees can even give out on me causing some pain. There is an internal struggle to know which path to take, to figure out how best to get where I’m going. I think I need to just focus on the fact that the best sign is that I’m up and off my butt. I’m moving on my own steam and without the old crutch. Forwards or backwards. It’s all movement that will only serve to strengthen some unused muscles.

I will regain a functioning gait.

Love Like a Pancake

I am seeing visions that love is coming and hearing a lot about love needed. So,what´s the deal?
The deal is, love is what our lives should be in pursuit of. Love is what our thoughts, meditations and lives should produce. But how can that happen when what we put in is junk? Everyone thinks the old adage ¨you are what you eat¨ only applies to food but it does not. Are we not told to EAT the bread of Life,daily? I´m sure I am not the only one who has heard that the Bible is Gods love letter to man. If we put the Word of God in,which is another expression of His love for us, then love is what should come out of us too. Yes it matters how much you and I put in.
Ever made pancakes with no baking power or baking soda? It produces flat pancakes. How about too much? Ever add too much? The pancakes expand and get full of lovely air bubbles making the fluffiest pancakes around! So fluffy that the syrup just soaks in deep becoming one with the pancake, instead of sitting on the top. Doesn´t Gods word work like the raising agent in pancakes? Add little or none to your daily life and the love He and others attempt to pour into you just doesn´t get absorbed! Being careful to add lots of Gods word into our daily lives, in reading, meditating, speaking, proclaiming and even praying back His word to Him makes your heart, your life soft and fluffy so that as God and others pour out their love you absorb it quickly! I have watched my kids do this, if you keep pouring on the sweet syrup eventually the pancake gets over saturated and what comes out when you poke it with your folk is syrup. That´s the result I want in my life. I know that right now I´m not at full saturation level, but it is the goal.


I´m not the kind who likes to be left hanging without an action plan. I always disliked messages that told me what I was doing wrong but gave me no hope or plan to improve. So, I want to look at a few things I have been taught or learned in my life to put myself on the plate (to carry the pancake analogy just over the top). I mentioned a few practical things above that help prepare us to receive love. Reading Gods word, meditating or thinking about Gods word, speaking Gods word, yes out loud to yourself, proclaiming His word and promises over yourself and your circumstances, and even praying back His word to Him. These last two are often neglected.
Now I´m no fool. I can hear some of you say, ¨but I have done all that and I still don´t feel loved¨. I hear it because it is something I have said or thought many times over the years. There was something I was still missing and it was only recently that the revelation of that missing keys has come to me. I say keys, because there are in fact two things missing from this list. One is faith and the other is expectation.
Let´s look at expectation since it is the first thing I grasped that I had wrong. Where is your expectation? Mine was in the dump. I either didn´t expect anything at all or worse, expected only negative to return to me. I expected to get something from people that I should really be getting from God. No man (or woman) is capable of giving you what you truly need, selfless unconditional love without thought, or compromise. Only God can do and has done that by selflessly sending His Son to die in your place. I then realized expectation is not tied to feelings, though feelings can be tied to your unrealized expectations. I had to determine within myself that I was going to place the right expectation on God first and then my fellow man. I had to determine that I was going to stop expecting bad and start expecting good, and that blessings would come my way.


Once I determined this I was confronted with something I did not expect. Where my faith was. In order to allow myself to expect good from God I had to believe Him, and believe that He loved me. Surprise of all surprises I found out that I did not really believe that He was even capable of loving me. Imagine that! The God who formed me in my Mothers womb, who insures that all my days are written down, among a long list of things I have not enough time or room to include. Talk about contradiction! I could tell you and fully believed that the Bible was all true and that I believed it was, but when it got down to the details I never set myself to believe that God actually loved me.
Now, in order to not get off topic, or make this 4 pages long, I need to address one more thing without getting too detailed. My feelings played a huge role in what I believed, but should not have. I never felt that God loved me, therefore I did not believe He did. Conversely, when things went well, or I was in a good mood I was less likely to doubt His love, or maybe better put I was less likely to consider that He did not love me. So, in order to make the crooked straight I had to determine that my feelings were pretty much liars and should not be trusted over Biblical truth. Nor should I allow my life to be lead by feelings, for they are not the master of my life but can be an enjoyable part of it. It is the truth of God and His love that needs to be my master, setting the course for my life and how I live, act and react to people or circumstances in my life.
This started about love and I will end it with love. I do not feel I have fully grasped the all encompassing Love of God yet. I do believe it will take a life time to pursue and I will still not fully understand it, but I have determined to be determined in my pursuit of it. I know that even if I do not feel it, Gods love is still there for me and eventually in my pursuit my feelings will line up with the truth. And the truth is that I am His favourite child and that He truly does dance and sing over me! 

Originally written: March 6th, 2009