Anxiety remission....feels a little like grief?

When I began blogging, I was still early on in my recovery.  New to medication.  New to cognitive-behavioral therapy.  New to the diagnosis of OCD and GAD.  I couldn't fathom that there would come a time when I felt normal....whatever my new normal would feel like.

But as my daughter's 6th birthday approaches, I do feel normal.  (And I don't mean to imply it has taken 6 years to get here.....I've just been reflecting lately.)  I've gotten to the point where my OCD and GAD don't define me.  I don't feel compelled to share with every breathing body I come across that I deal with these issues.  I don't feel like I am constantly struggling to get a handle on my negative and catastrophic internal dialogue.

My mood-disorders are in "remission."  I have accepted that there isn't going to be a cure, and I'm ok with that.  My biggest worries early on was that due to medication I wouldn't be able to become pregnant or have a healthy pregnancy/baby, and if I didn't take my meds, I wouldn't survive another postpartum period.  I have done so twice now since 2004 with no problems for me or my sons.

So I'm at a good place now, where I don't really blog that often about my anxiety.  Which makes my blog title seem a little out of place at times.

But having gone through the experience of a nervous breakdown is like experiencing death, in a sense.  Although I have moved on and don't dwell on what happened, I cannot forget it.  At times, I am reminded of how low I got during the fall of 2004, and it scares me.  Just as grief can wash over a person years after the loss of a loved one, the same is true of a breakdown.  The edge dulls, but the scar is still there.

For a long time the autumn of the year was hard for me because it reminded me of that terrible time.  But both my sons were born in autumn (September 2007 and October 2009), so now I have happier memories that overshadow the earlier ones.  It seems that now memories of my breakdown bubble up whenever my daughter's birthday approaches.  At her first birthday, I just barely had my big toe in the waters of therapy and meds, and I nearly cried while singing Happy Birthday to her.  I was thrilled that she was a year old and so sad at the same time.  To this day, I think my relationship with my daughter on my end (internally) is filtered through the lens of my mood-disordered self (which is an entire blog post unto itself).

Which explains my reflections of late.  Her birthday is this coming Thursday.