Our Story, Part 5...

This is Part 5 of Our Story.  To get the complete story, read in order starting with OUR STORY PART 1, OUR STORY PART 2, OUR STORY PART 3, and OUR STORY PART 4.

I've been feeling for a while that I need to write down Dean's and my story for our family history books, for our children and grandchildren to know and understand how their parents/grandparents ended up together.  But I realized that I needed to give some back story because there are some key people along the way that set me on some necessary paths to get to Dean that will help you to understand who I am, how I've changed over the years, and why Dean is the best man I've ever met and how he's perfect for me.  I didn't want to write a short love story "We met at church, dated, married, had a baby 3 years later....", that's too vague for my tastes.  I want my posterity to know WHY I love Dean, and why we go perfectly together.

Our Story, Part 5

***This installment of Our Story took me a while to write.  Much longer than the other installments.  I was able to write the first couple paragraphs with no problem, but then I would just stare at the screen with the cursor blinking in the same spot day after day, unable to adequately organize my thoughts into proper sentences.  The thoughts were there, I just had to do them justice in structuring them because this is the integral part of Our Story for me, and I’ve never attempted to put them down on paper before.  This is a glimpse into a period of my life that very few people know about what really went on, but I want my posterity to know.  You’ll see.***

So our first date was a bust.  I happily went back to my homeostatic life and absolved myself from how I acted on our date.  After all, wasn’t he the one who was corny and invaded my personal space? Couldn’t he read my mind during it to know that I was annoyed and bored?  I had fulfilled my part of the pity date so I had every right to wash my hands of him now.  I’d just have to make sure that I gave him a quick courtesy smile when we passed each other in the halls at church and I was good to go.

However, Dean thought our date was the greatest!  He was bummed he didn’t get to kiss me, but he wanted that night to go on forever.  I infiltrated almost every thought of his for days after he dropped me off that night.  He was infatuated with me.  He wanted to see me again so badly even if it was just at a church social function or activity.  It killed him that we were only living a few miles apart and yet we were in 2 separate worlds.

Our paths did cross.  I did give him that quick courtesy smile at church in the halls.  We ended up being at some of the same church functions 2 or 3 times after our date, but I always made sure to be talking to someone else whenever he came near me, and I refused to look over and acknowledge him standing there because I was afraid he’d ask me out again if I gave him 2 seconds of my time. Very ladylike of me.  

I finally stopped being callous and decided that if he asked me out again that I’d just say no and he could deal.  I acknowledged him at social gatherings and eventually started making small talk with him again, and it turns out we had some pretty fun conversations.  I noticed that he was so incredibly friendly to everyone that he met and the man smiled all.the.time.   We had common friends, and none of them had anything bad to say about him.  They all knew how much he liked me, but they also knew I wasn’t digging on him. 

One night we were some of the last stragglers after a church function and we ended up having our own little conversation for a while about who knows what.  Ok, so I guess this guy isn’t so bad.  He’s cracked out happy all the time, he’s actually pretty fun to talk to, he’s not a narcissist who only wants to talk about himself, and he’s not as weird as he was on our first date.

Alright, I guess I can be friends with him.  We just won’t ever ever EVER be an item, and he’s a weirdo on a first date.  He’s harmless and he probably won’t try to kidnap me and keep me chained to a chair in his attic and pretend that I’m his wife.  

We made plans to hang out after the get together just he and I because I truly liked talking to him, but he had to run somewhere first really quickly so we said that we’d meet in the Top Foods parking lot at a certain time.  So I made it there on time, waited at least 10 minutes past our agreed upon meeting time, and then I got annoyed that he was late.  So I drove away.  I get a phone call a couple of minutes later.  “Hi Michelle! It’s Dean.  Where are you?”  “I’m on my way to Puyallup.  I have to give my Mom her insulin shot before she goes into diabetic shock and dies.”  “Oh wow, that sounds serious.  I’m so sorry.” “Oh, it’s ok.  It happens. “  We then chitty chatted on the phone about who knows what, I told him I gave my Mom her insulin shot and saved her life in the knick of time, and then I headed back to Top Foods to meet up with Dean.

I didn’t go to my Mom’s house.  My Mom wasn’t insulin dependent diabetic. But I did drive all the way out to the South Hill Mall exit from Federal Way, about a 20 minute drive each direction, took the exit, took a left to go over the bridge, and then immediately got back on the onramp heading back towards Federal Way.  

Why the lie and the wasted money on gas to leave Dean waiting there in the Top Foods parking lot for 40 minutes while I gave my Mom a facetious insulin shot?  I wasn’t going to let him think that it’s ok to make me wait while he’s late for who knows for whatever reason.  If he wanted to be my friend, but of course I knew he wanted to be more, I would be the one to be late.  Being late wasn’t an option in my book.  Silly shallow shallow Michelle.  

We changed our plans to meet up at the Red Robin parking lot. I felt vindicated that I had made him wait, and then we went in and talked and talked over endless fries refills.  Dean was just so easy to talk to.  We honestly had the best give and take conversation I’d ever had with a guy, and Dean intrigued me, and he was intrigued by me.  Over the course of the next 2 weeks we met up 2 more times and drove to Snoqualmie Falls on one of those meetups, and the hours flew by feeling like mere minutes.  

He still had this bit of nerdiness that became cute and yet annoying at the same time.  I didn’t find him unattractive anymore, but I also didn’t find him as this dashingly handsome Don Juan that I wanted to sweep me off my feet.  I was getting to know who Dean really was, and I was having an inner struggle with that because I was happy with us just being friends, nothing more, but I could tell the tides were slowly turning.

Dean was starting to morph in my eyes.  No, he wasn’t a 6’3 chiseled athlete like I had hoped would fall head over heels for me.  He didn’t have his college degree yet.  He worked as a fix-it guy at a company that his family members were able to hook him up with a job at as soon as he got back from his mission.  He had no money.  He drove a 1993 Ford Escort.  The man wore Hawaiian shirts for heaven’s sake!  

But he was intriguing. He had big aspirations.  He knew how to work.  He was spiritual.  He was smart.  He was funny.  He knew how to truly invest in a conversation. He loved his family.  He loved Heavenly Father.  He loved Jesus Christ.  He had always been faithful in the Gospel.  Every cell in his body was composed of pure kindness.  

One night he and I were just hanging out at his house down in the basement talking and watching movies, and next thing we know it’s almost midnight, and I suddenly wanted him to kiss me.  Lo and behold, we end up making out for hours and hours because when you’re 22 years old you can do that sort of thing and not even blink an eye.  As callous as it sounds, that make out session was more to satisfy my carnal cravings than it was as an expression of true affection for him.  Dean was safe, I knew he was still head over heels crazy for me, and I knew I could easily make the relationship go one way or another.  It’s difficult to separate feelings and emotions when there’s physicality involved, and I fought my slowly changing feelings for him with every mite of energy that I had.  I told my friends that I didn’t like him and that I was just making out with him to have someone to make out with over the next few times that we hung out and we ended up kissing.  I put a halt to the physical part of our friendship/relationship/whatever you want to call it, and I tried to convince myself that I didn’t like him and that I wasn’t drawn to him.  

But deep down I knew that wasn’t true. 

 

My heart and mind were telling me that this guy was different from all the rest and that I needed to just give in and let the relationship happen. 

I did.

And it was wonderful.

He was wonderful.

We were wonderful.

As soon as I let my walls down, truly let Dean in, I let run free the silly and fun loving yet serious and slowly spiritually growing girl that I knew was in there, we fell fast and we fell hard.  There were so many stories to tell him, I didn’t hold back anything, he knew every detail of every heartbreak, every victory, every miracle, every dream, every fear I had.  He had already let me in, but he was completely amazed and enamoured to the n^th degree when I let him in.  

I’ve always explained it like this: Dean wasn’t what I wanted, but he’s what I needed, which turns out is what I wanted, I just didn’t know it at the time. 

I did need him.  I craved him like I’d never craved anything in my life.  There was something that he settled in my soul whenever I was around him or on the phone with him or just even thought of him. He made me giddy and calm all in the same breath.  He galvanized every atom in my body just by holding my hand. 

The infancy of our relationship was beautiful.  We were a perfect match, and I knew that we were destined to be spectacular together.  We spent every possible second together while I was house sitting a lady’s house on the waterfront of Lake Tapps.  We flew to Washington D.C. and stayed with Dean’s aunt there, and we saw some of the most amazing structures and pieces of American history as we stood there hand in hand.  We drove up to the mountains just to lay outside on the hood of my car to watch shooting stars on a cloudless night in the freezing cold.  We would go on drives to nowhere deep into the middle of the night just so we could talk and talk and talk.  We would just sit on his couch with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder and be content that the world was quiet. 

 I was in love with this man that I never thought I’d ever love, the man who would never ever get a second date from me.  He loved me just as fiercely in return. 

We had our fun times together with family and friends, but there were some bumps in the road along the way.  I was living with my best friend and her parents at the time so that I could pay off some credit card debt quickly, and they didn’t take too kindly to him for some ridiculous reason.  I decided I needed to get out of that living situation quickly so I got my own apartment where I didn’t feel like Big Brother was watching any time Dean was over.  And a few of Dean’s family members weren’t so accepting of me either at first.  His family thought that I was changing him, and in a way that was true.  He was coming into more of himself as an individual, and we were growing as a couple instead of him only having his family for his social outlet every night.  Things eventually were smoothed over, thankfully.

Dean started going to Highline Community College to work on fulfilling his prerequisite requirements for chiropractic school, and he did homework at my apartment every night.  He worked as much as he could so that he could pay his way through community college, and I kept on working at my full time job that I loved in an eye surgery center.  We ate out too much, saw a ton of movies in the theater, but I was still chipping away at that credit card debt that was hanging over my head.  By this point we had been dating for almost 6 months and had started to talk about marriage and dreams of our future together.    

I invested myself completely in Dean, and he did the same.  We were insanely happy together, and we were all one another could talk, think, and dream about.  We were truly equals. Life was moving in nowhere but a positive direction together….

And then my arms started tingling.

I vividly remember one day being at work at my desk all alone, and my arms felt like there were a million tiny electric shocks pulsing up and down them and it wouldn’t stop.  I wasn’t cold so putting on a sweater didn’t help.  I rubbed my arms like you do when you’re cold to try to get blood flowing through them in hopes that the tingling would subside, but it didn’t.  It lasted for a little while, and eventually it went away.  Hmm, that was weird, I’ve never had that happen before.

It happened again the next day, just for a longer period of time.  Then the tingling would happen in intervals over the following weeks.  

Then the shortness of breath started.  I felt like I just could never quite get a full breath of air in my lungs.  Then accompanying the shortness of breath came the anxiety.  Unexplained anxiety.  Anxiety that made my chest feel like I was having a heart attack at random times during the day.  My mind was always going going going, racing to the next thought before I could even finish the one I was on.  I couldn’t sleep at night.  I couldn’t ever seem to get my heart to quit feeling like it was trying to explode in my chest even though my pulse rate was normal.  And eventually when I finally did embrace sleep in the early hours just before dawn, it was nigh impossible to wake up.  I didn’t want to wake up because I knew that my body would go back to the fighting the anxiety, shortness of breath, and the tingling.  It was draining, and I dreaded every new morning.  I felt nothing and yet I felt everything at the same time.

    

I didn’t understand what was going on with my body.  I had always been healthy.  I was in this amazing relationship with Dean, and I knew I was safe with him.  I knew it. So why was I suddenly so skittish in almost every aspect of my life?  It was like a switch had been flipped when the tingling in my arms started.

My heart knew I was safe with Dean, but my mind didn’t.

After weeks and weeks of battling those horrendous symptoms and crying uncontrollably by myself, to Dean, on the phone to my sister, and talking through what I was feeling and not feeling, I finally started to uncover what was going on.

I was clinically depressed. 

I had never been depressed before in my life.  Why in the world would I be depressed when I had the most wonderful man that I would ever meet madly in love with me, and I was madly in love with him?  We were talking about getting married and starting our life together so how could I make sense of these intense feelings of despair and angst that plagued me from the second I woke up until I finally drifted off to sleep every night through gut wrenching sobs? 

My unconscious was trying to sabotage our relationship. It was pulling out every last stop it could to make me think that Dean wasn’t who he said he was.  And eventually the thoughts started creeping into my conscious that Dean wasn’t who he said he was.  No man could be this kind and trustworthy and faithful.  No man could truly be this dedicated to a woman and not have wandering eyes.  No man could be this dedicated to the Gospel.  No man this wonderful could ever want me.  I had a million other sabotaging thoughts run rampant through my mind, and I didn’t know how to fend them off.

I didn’t know how to make sense of the 2 different worlds I was in.  I would look at Dean and see him, I knew that he embodied the essence of good, I knew that he was faithful to me, I knew that he and I were supposed to get married and sealed for time and all eternity in the temple.  But in the next thought I’d think that he wasn’t looking at me, I’d think he was looking through me searching for the next best thing.  I’d think that he wouldn’t want to be with this girl who was an emotional disaster all of a sudden when she’d been so fun and full of life for the previous 6 months.  Why would he want to stay with someone who didn’t completely trust him even though he hadn’t done anything to betray my trust?

But thankfully Dean knew me.   He knew that this wasn’t the Michelle that he fell in love with.  He knew that whatever demon I was battling was temporary, and he held my hand through every single tear I shed, and he never once doubted that we wouldn’t make it.  When I would cry to him asking him how would I ever know that he wouldn’t cheat on me or one day down the road start belittling me, he would just hold me and softly reassure me that he wouldn’t because you don’t do that to people that you love.   

I have tears cascading down my face as I’m typing this because I am eternally grateful that Dean is such a good and pure soul to have been able to see me throughout those couple of months.  He could have easily walked away a hundred times.  I had my moments of being mean to him because I was so full of doubt and angst and needed constant reassurance that this kind and gentle Dean wasn’t a façade, and that he wouldn’t ever change into someone else.  I knew that I loved him and trusted him, but I just couldn’t feel it for a while. 

Even though we talked through every fear and paranoia a million times over, the symptoms were still there, and I was still obviously depressed.  Life was just unbelievably hard.  I eventually went to my primary care physician and told him all my symptoms, he asked me a bunch of questions, and he definitely said I was depressed.  He wrote me a prescription for an anti-depressant right then and there.  I filled it, and both Dean and I noticed a marked improvement within the next 2 weeks.  My anxiety eventually went away, my heart palpitations stopped, I could finally sleep soundly.  My irrational fears involving Dean went away.  I felt back to my old self.  It was glorious, and we went back to our insanely happy and yet content selves.    

Well, happiness is unfortunately short lived sometimes. 

After about 6-8 weeks I started to have the same symptoms reappear.  I was still taking my anti-depressant religiously so I absolutely didn’t understand what was going on.  I figured I’d just keep taking them, and surely this had to be a little blip in my system for some reason, that it’d go away as long as I kept taking my prescription.   I could deal with anxiety and shortness of breath and irrational thoughts for a little bit.

They didn’t go away.  They came back with a vengeance.  A wicked vengeance.  I fought it and cried and tried to pray the depression away, but sometimes you can’t pray physical ailments away.  I got so bad that I would miss at least 1 day of work per week due to everything feeling so overwhelming, but thankfully I had the most tenderhearted boss in the world.  I would love to find her and tell her thank you for being so understanding during the most difficult time in my life.  I got to the point that the smallest decisions, whether or not to do laundry, eat, shower, clean, go grocery shopping, they all became such heavy weights on my chest that I needed Dean’s support in almost everything I did.

It’s hard to put depression into words unless you’ve experienced it firsthand because I never ever thought it would be as bad as it was until I went through it.  It’s the absolute worst and most despairing feeling/non-feeling in the world, and you truly don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

 

My anxiety, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, lack of sleep, and thought processes were becoming too much.  The anti-depressant I was on definitely wasn’t doing what it was supposed to even though it had for a little while.  I got to the point that I didn’t want to be around anyone at all, and I would only be around those who I absolutely had to for work purposes, but I still wanted to be around Dean despite my irrational thoughts that had come back because like I said, my heart trusted him but my mind wasn’t quite so sure.  

I felt like a prisoner in my own body, and I knew that this healthy minded Michelle was in there somewhere, but I had no idea how to access her.  Over the course of just a few weeks the depression became so intense and overwhelming, and sleep had eluded me for days.  I could only sneak in a quick 20 or 30 minute nap once or twice throughout the day, and I was up all night because I couldn’t ever get my mind and symptoms to subside.  I felt like I wanted and deserved a new body, a better body because this one was failing me, and I didn’t do anything wrong to deserve this. 

My mind started to take a different direction.

One morning I couldn’t muster up enough emotional energy to go to work, and I was at a new low of lows.  Dean called my boss for me to tell her that I wasn’t doing so well, and that I was going to stay home that day.  She lovingly said she hoped that tomorrow would be a better day and for him to take care of me.  Dean called his work and told them that he couldn’t come in, and even though they were mad he didn’t care because he knew that I was in a different place that day, and that he needed to be by me taking care of me. 

I was so mentally and physically exhausted from fighting this debilitating depression for months on end now with only a few weeks of reprieve.  I started vocalizing that I truly felt like I was trapped inside this body that had become this disease’s and not mine anymore, and I didn’t know how I could live the next 60 years in this body as a prisoner to this disease that wasn’t relenting.  I hadn’t felt happy in months.  My mind wasn’t my own anymore.  I was sobbing and sobbing from my very core and just laid on the couch with Dean crying next to me trying to hug me as hard as he could.  Looking back now I think he was sacrificing himself and trying to squeeze the depression out of me and into him because he would have taken any ailment of mine in a heartbeat and have him suffer through it instead of me.  I am sobbing now typing this. It’s so difficult to try to put this experience into words.

I finally said out loud what I’d been thinking for a few days.  I didn’t know how much longer I could do this.  I didn’t know how much longer I could live like this.  I didn’t know how much longer I wanted to live like this.  I told him that I knew he was wonderful and that I was sorry that I couldn’t heal myself, that medication couldn’t heal me, and that apparently Heavenly Father didn’t love me enough to take this away, and that I understand how people can start to have the thought process of wanting to end their lives because I was beginning to think that way.  I just couldn’t see a way to exist living how I was with the weight of the world feeling like it was pressing on my chest and on my mind every second of every waking minute.  

I was truly in my own personal hell. 

Once I said that, Dean got up and grabbed the phone and made the most important phone call of our lives….