HEALTH & WELLNESS
world she doesn’t have all the answers. In fact, she’ll
even tell you she still struggles. It’s just that now she
doesn’t allow herself to “sit in it,” but instead “sit with
it.” “It” being the depression.
Justine “gets it” when people describe their depression
as something that never leaves. It’s the mental cancer
that you must maintain...or else it will take over and take
your light. It will hold you emotionally hostage. Unless
you do something to fight back.
Knowing that Justine spent most of her freshman year of
high school in a body cast and was again in a body brace
her senior year...because the first surgery to repair her
broken back didn’t take....I assumed that is what triggered
her first bout of depression.
But she says that wasn’t it.
“The back surgery stole my soul because I was so
lonely,” she said, but it wasn’t the deep clinical
depression that she would later suffer in college.
Major depression runs on both sides of Justine’s family.
There have been multiple suicide attempts with different
family members.
The trigger that threw her into her first bout was
when she was working at a substance abuse clinic and
witnessed a client relapse from his meth addiction and
violently attack another patient.
“I lived in such a dark place, my nightmares were so real,
I could taste in them,” she said.
Justine managed her depression with meds and therapy.
But when she and her husband decided to have children,
she was told her back injury wouldn’t allow her to
physically carry a child. So they chose to do in vitro
fertilization and hired a surrogate.
Justine’s journey of researching and recovery had
just begun.
She changed everything in her life. The way she ate, the
way she slept, her routine.
“What I have found to be most helpful are not the most
FDA approved,” she said.
She documents all of it in her book Ever-upward:
Overcoming the Lifelong Losses of Infertility to Define Y
our
Own Happy Ending.
“I want to educate people on the fact there are so
many options in treatment. None of them are curealls,” she said.
For Justine, it’s a combination of yoga, faith, prayer,
supplements, therapy, probiotics, stretching and listening
to music.
Every day is different.
“It’s whatever I’m drawn to...what feels doable…what I’ll
most enjoy that day,” she said. “There are days I crave
it and others when I just have to choose recovery. You
don’t get to choose whether you have it (depression)
or whether your brain is wired that way, you choose
whether you treat it.”
There are days Justine says that even after she’s pulled
out all the therapy stops… she’s colored, journaled, taken
a walk, that she still feels the same. Those are the days
she says she “sits with it, but not in it.”
“But about these guys?” I asked, pointing to the hanging
slug...caterpillars. “Are they part of your recovery?”
“We need to know that we are all connected. Taking care
of other things is an important part of life. Depression
makes you feel like it is the only thing,” Justine said.
Soon after, her depression took on a whole new life.
The one dream she’d always had was to become a mother.
The embryos didn’t take. And after those attempts,
something about the in vitro drugs altered her body
chemistry so that her anti-depressants stopped working.
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Because you live in isolation. Just like the caterpillars
holed up from the outside world…waiting for someone
to help let them free.
Justine can’t wait.
SAVVY I SOPHISTICATED I SASSY