The Battlefield of My Mind

It has been a long time since I’ve written a blog post that is deeply personal.

To be honest, the internet has become a scary place for me to be.

First, I am finding it hard to put myself out there because it feels like everyone put themselves out there. The noise is immense with everyone expressing how they are feeling, why they feel that way and what everyone else should do about it. Frankly, I just don’t want to add to that noise.

The past two years of my life have been painful years of growth for me. We have gone through what feels like one thing after another. Along with those painful moments have come a different kind of maturity that I never had before. The kind of maturity that makes me want to sit down and shut up. The problem is that sometimes I sit down, shut up, and stay down when I should be standing up and using my voice to speak.

But, honestly? I’m terrified. I’m afraid to put myself out there because of how awful people have become to anyone who is in law enforcement. I know I haven’t spoken publicly about the various things that we have gone through this year, but just to name a few: Theo’s cruiser being vandalized to say “ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” and “PIGGY PIG”. Theo being followed home from work and having a possible break in at our house (I say possible because we never saw anyone, but our front door was wide open and we woke up to a loud crash to find an item inside the house that was impossible to move was moved.). It was terrifying. Companies refusing to do business with our family because my husband works in law enforcement. Theo being called a racist, pig, rapist, wife abuser and bastard on a daily basis at work. I could go on and on, but that just gives a small glimpse into our actual in-person lives. That doesn’t even begin to touch the bullying of law enforcement families I have seen online. I have stayed fairly quiet, so people have tended to not attack me, but some of my friends will get the nastiest messages- not because of what they are saying, but because people want to undermine what they are saying just because they are police wives, daughters or girlfriends. It’s sickening. It’s disheartening. And it makes me feel like I need to lock up and hide away, never to let my voice be heard again. After all, simply because of the job that my husband works, many people now feel that my voice, and my place in life is less than.

Obviously, I have a lot to work through. I won’t deny that there is some anger, resentment, and bitterness in my heart and I KNOW that if I don’t cut it apart immediately, it will continue to fester and grow and only serve to harm me. Forgiveness, Selflessness, Contentment, and Joy despite my circumstances are things that I am working on- on a daily basis!!

However, I wanted to write this blog post to be honest and finally have the courage to write about some of the personal things that are going on in our lives.

Back in the wintertime, I knew I was starting to slip into a little bit of depression. This is fairly normal for me, I tend to struggle with SAD, especially in February/March. I also had just weaned Ezra and the hormone shift is always a bit overwhelming for me. I knew that if I could just make it to March/April, I would be alright.

Then the pandemic hit. Everything was flipped upside down. Theo was still going to work and the air was filled with fear. I bought into it. I stressed about it. I dropped the ball in teaching my online class and just did the best to continue to hold the family together at home while Theo worked. I worried about my parents in Niger and the 5 members of the Hines family who are in the medical field (3 of them working directly with COVID patients). I wasn’t in a great place. Thankfully, the weather began to improve and my one sanity saver was our daily hiking challenge in April.

May came and I began to spiral. It was SPRING, it was MAY and I SHOULD be “snapping out of it” by now. I began to consider seeing a doctor and perhaps pursuing a medication to help me. I was just not in a good place. I had no joy, no hope, no peace. I was functioning, but making basic decisions and taking care of the kids was HARD for me. Things that came naturally to me before were not coming to me at all. I was dropping balls left and right and it seemed like some days the only thing I could do was feed the kids and give them some semblance of a functioning household.

Now here me out: I’m a highly functional person on a regular basis. I wake up and I GET THINGS DONE. I don’t sit down. I don’t stop. When I started feeling all kinds of horrible, I still wasn’t down for the count. I didn’t spend the day in bed or lay on the couch. Instead, I was still doing stuff all day long, but it took me 5x longer to complete any task. Making a decision like what to cook for dinner would paralyze me for hours as I went about other tasks. Physically, I was still doing just fine. From the outside, I probably still appeared that I had it “together” (whatever that even means). But on the inside I was just not doing well.

You all know what comes next. The shooting of Ahmaud Arbery followed closely by the murder of George Floyd. The nation erupted in anger, tears, peaceful protests and some extremely violent riots. I would kiss Theo goodbye in the morning and send him out to stand in front of a line of people shouting obscenities, throwing water bottles filled with urine, throwing bricks and rocks, and then going home to post all about their peaceful protests on Facebook. I made the mistake of logging on one morning to find a post that said “LET THE CITY BURN, AND ALL THE LAW ENFORCEMENT WITH IT”. The same person who posted that asked if I wanted to have a playdate next week. It was SO CONFUSING. The things people posted online clearly showed that they hated all law enforcement, and yet it was like they didn’t realize I was there. I was seeing their posts and reading their opinions and knowing that they were talking about me. They were talking about my husband. And it was like they couldn’t connect that the idea that they hate is the man that I love. It was like it was a separate entity- these law enforcement officers weren’t REAL to them, so they could direct whatever types of anger, frustration and opinions towards them and their jobs. But those officers were very real to me. Very few people reached out to me during this time. Even fewer people reached out to ask our opinions on how things happened, what our family thought about reform, how we would recommend handling it. Because you know what is frustrating? Having people who have NEVER once even talked to a law enforcement officer make grand sweeping suggestions, accusations and comments.

Friends, I am not against reform. I am not against conversations that bring about change. I am not even against disagreements, if they remain civil. But what I am against is people who refuse to look at all sides of the coins before making a decision. Every parent is familiar with how frustrating it is to have law makers make laws about schools when they all probably went to elite, private schools and don’t have a clue what it’s like to actually be in a public school classroom. Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Except it’s not just lawmakers. It’s everyone. And their brother. Who think they know exactly why a police policy is wrong and should be changed.

Ok, I digressed into another rant. So sorry. Once I started writing, it just started to flow.

As you can imagine, a woman (that’s me!) who is already in a fragile mental state did not handle this whole situation very well. I thankfully was able to step away from all social media as soon as I started seeing the posts. But then I felt lonely, isolated, terrified all day when Theo was at work. I turned to Scripture, I talked to my parents and several close friends everyday, but there didn’t seem to be many IN it with me, anyone who cared how all this was affecting me. Now, listen…I understand that sometimes some voices need to be quiet so that other voices could be heard. I know that posting all about police and our experiences wasn’t wise at that time. I know that the voices of our Black brothers and sisters need to heard and listened to. However, I also felt suddenly entirely abandoned by nearly everyone. It didn’t seem that there was room or space for me to have feelings, emotions and experiences, because I was not the primary headline. Just because my husband works in law enforcement. It felt like betrayal, hurt…oh, it was so challenging. I wasn’t able to sleep at night. I was stressed and tired and just not doing well.

So I finally saw a doctor. She is a wonderful doctor who wrote me a prescription for an anti-depressant and sleep aid, but also recommended that I give it one more week of trying to see a counselor, exercise, attempt an earlier bedtime and continue to seek out Scripture and prayer.

I gave it about two more weeks and finally decided it was time. It was time to take a medication that would hopefully take the edge off of the pit that I was in. I needed to be strong and functional for my kids and my husband. I needed to be able to look forward to something again and not be filled with fear and anxiety on a daily basis. I had tried it all, and all was not helping.

I felt confident and at peace with my decision and began taking the medication. Within two days, I was seeing the effects of the medicine.

Too bad the effects weren’t good.

In fact, they were awful.

*** This blog post is already SO LONG, so I’m going to stop there for now and post Part II tomorrow***