A single thread of hope is still a powerful thing.

I had the plan and the means to end my life.  I also had the evidence (in my mind) that my life wasn’t worth living, and I could rationalize why everyone would be better off without me.  I was 4 years sober from alcohol and struggling desperately with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.  The one person I couldn’t rationalize would be better off without me was my daughter.  She is the reason I chose not to end my life that day.  She is always my reason to stay if suicidal thoughts ever visit my mind.

I have been a top performer in the workplace for my entire corporate career.  I was referred to by my colleagues as a leader, trailblazer, coach, trainer, mentor, and “Quiet Warrior.”  Although those should be badges of honor – for me, they were masks of high performance that hid the intense pain and agony of my declining mental health. 

I was ashamed to ask for help because I feared being judged, losing my seat at the corporate table, and being stigmatized if I spoke openly.

What I learned is:

• My story is not unique
• Many people live with a mental health condition and are afraid to speak openly about it – especially in the workplace. 
• Many leaders are afraid to speak openly about mental health because it requires removing the ‘suit of armor’ they wear daily. 
• Many believe that leaders are supposed to be the strong ones and aren’t prone to experiencing mental health challenges.  That is the furthest from the truth.  Leaders are in high stress positions that require mental clarity, but it doesn’t mean they are immune from experiencing mental health challenges. 
• What is unique is that I am willing to be vulnerable by sharing my story to illustrate that we are not alone.
• The most powerful organizations make it possible for employees to remove the mask of fear and shame and speak openly about mental health in the workplace.

On 4/1/2020, I stepped away from my corporate director role, left my entire paycheck on the table, and started Kim LaMontagne, LLC. to provide leaders with solutions for normalizing mental health in the workplace. I created a corporate leadership training called, “The 4 Pillars of Creating and Sustaining a Mentally Healthy Workplace Culture.”

The training is available in three formats: live/onsite, virtually, and on demand and teaches leaders how to recognize the impact of unaddressed mental health in the workplace, decrease stigma, shift to person centered language, create a peer support network, and build a ‘culture of safety’ in the workplace that fosters open dialog about mental health.  A culture of safety is one where employees feel safe enough to step forward and ask for help without fear of stigma, judgment, or retribution.

Although my recovery wasn’t easy, I always held on to Hope.  Hope is what allowed me to get through the days when I thought I couldn’t make it through.  Hope is powerful!

Because of hope, my mission is to share my lived experience and teach leaders how to create a culture in the workplace that empowers individuals to speak openly about mental health. 

Lives depend on it.

From early childhood I have known that my god was aware of all the ways I didn’t measure up, and he was out to get me. In my twelve-step circles I’ve heard of it as reverse pride – I think of it more as my self-esteem being in the sea’s sewer. I wasn’t just low. I was like whale dung.

When I first got sober I was challenged to turn my life over to God’s care. You want me to turn my life over to something that hates my guts? No thank you! Later, my sponsor suggested that I find a new god. I thought she was a little cracked, but in rehab I’d been introduced to some ideas from various Eastern philosophies, so the idea that my god might not be the “real” God was now a possibility. Plus, in the meeting halls I’d heard some pretty strange ideas of “higher power” – including one woman who said she prayed to Gumby because he was flexible, and another who used her kitchen table because it didn’t collapse under the weight of her handwritten problems.

I stumbled along, confused and holding on to my old ideas of a god that was out to get me, but there was the tiniest glimmer of hope. Just maybe there was a source of love in the universe. There were certainly some people I met who seemed to have tapped into something good. Could it really exist?

I spent the next several years describing myself as an open-minded skeptic. I didn’t really believe in much of anything, but I was looking for evidence to prove my original theory wrong. Good stuff sometimes pulled me toward actual belief, but years of a hardened soul required more than mere coincidence to pull me to the light.

Twenty some-odd years ago I was driving home in a sudden winter storm when a plow truck crossed the snow-hidden yellow line. As I realized I couldn’t avoid the impact, time slowed down to a crawl. I tried to steer away from the oncoming headlights but my wheels had no grip on the icy road. I felt a warmth around me, like giant arms holding a child in an embrace. I was overcome with a sense of peace – a knowledge that no matter how bad it was going to be (even if I died), I would be ok. And then we crashed.

I was badly injured and in shock, and had a long recovery in front of me. When the hospital staff asked if I wanted to see the chaplain, I eagerly agreed. Maybe he (or she) could explain to me what I had experienced. I related the story the story to the priest, and he smiled back. “God came to you,” he said.

To this day I am not Catholic, nor Christian, nor of any other particular religion – but I believe that the priest and I have the same God – as do a variety of other believers including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, some pagans and other spiritual non-religionists like me. In fact, I’ve met a few bona fide atheists that may even make the cut.

The divine is a giant disco ball – depending on where you are in the world or the time that you look, you’re going to see the sparkles differently. This means that my view is right, and so is Ishmael’s and Father Mike’s and yours.

Since I felt those loving arms around me, I have the basis of some kind of faith. True, I have a little one inside of me who is still leery of trusting God, but she’s no longer the only voice inside of my soul. I still struggle sometimes with depression, hopelessness and shame, but I can choose to remember that embrace. The Universe loves me – and I think the Universe loves you too.

My hope is not infinite, but it is invincible. There is a difference.

When I think of infinite hope, I picture giddy happiness. I think of my imaginary alter ego, Daphne, frolicking amongst the wildflowers, sure that every calamity will be transformed into love and light.

I am not Daphne.

I see invincible hope, on the other hand, as the hope of a warrior, who sees the ugliness and pain and darkness of the world, and is courageous enough to confront it. Some days I am that warrior – although I may be her in suit of armor and limping to battle. Bring it on!

Other days I simply aspire to be her. Some days the darkness overcomes me, and it is only the memory of previously being the warrior that carries me through.

On all days I am well aware of the darkness. I live with chronic mental illness – PTSD and depression – and accompanying suicidal ideation. The days I don’t consider taking my own life are rare. I have had these thoughts for as long as I can remember, and I suspect they will not go away. I attempted suicide several times when I was young.

Over twenty years ago our nephew, Hoyt Privé, died by suicide. He’d struggled for several years with psychosis and an obsession with dying. When we lost Hoyt I discovered what that kind of grief feels like. It was devastating for me, and even more so to watch my sister-in-law react to his death.

Losing Hoyt helped me commit to doing whatever I needed to do in order to live. There have been times where that meant asking to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and even to have electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to keep myself alive. I have suicidal thoughts, but even when the urges seem unbearable, I know they will pass. I get the help I need to stay safe in spite of the ideas in my head. I put on my armor and talk about the unspeakable.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, there is help available – and there is hope. Please reach out. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255 from anywhere in the US (and the national 3-digit suicide hotline 988 will be implemented soon).

Some say I have a rubber ducky obsession. I’m not really obsessed; instead, rubber duckies serve as a kind of mascot for my mental illness.

One of my mental health diagnoses is major depression with psychotic features – meaning, with my depression I’m prone to audio and visual hallucinations. It is not a true psychosis. I usually know my experience is not real, and I’m lucky that the visions and voices are rarely scary.

One recurring hallucination is that there is an army of rubber duckies marching into the room. I joke that when the duckies show up, it’s a red flag – only a funny red flag. I usually wave a white flag of surrender back. I know it’s time to accept help. 

I have actual rubber duckies scattered here and there around my house just to remind me that it’s ok to do just that – ask for help.

AND, I collect frogs too – no hallucinations, but rather, a young woman I mentored taught me that FROG stands for Fully Rely On God – I adopted that as my own “god-shot” and have froggies all over my house to remind me that the Universe will always be there for me, if I ask.

I used to think I was all alone in the world. In an earlier entry I outlined how, as a child, I developed the belief that God hated my guts. My little one still carries that belief. As part of my healing, as a young woman I chanted, “I am a child of God, He’s looking out for me, and He wants me to be happy, joyous and free.” While my views of the divine are a little twisted, this chant continues to remind me that it’s ok to lean into the powerful and loving energy in the Universe.

Whether duckies, froggies or chants, I continue to need these reminders. My little one still carries the belief that God hates her – it’s as though it lives deep in my bones – in my cells! That doesn’t mean it’s true. I live my life trying to heal those cells, and need all the help I can get.

“Hush, Karen. You are OK.”

Who gets in a fight at Disney World?

That would be my father –

Striking another tourist

For daring to step in his vicinity

–

My tears fall not because it happened in

the land of magic and wonder

But because it was just

Another day in our lives

–

From infancy I would scream in his presence

Living in reptilian fear

When older I taunted him

Forcing the inevitable on my timeline

–

I survived, as did my mother and my brother

And even that beaten down Disney tourist.

I still carried the damaged suitcase with me

Clinging to it as though it carried my life

–

Upon my birth Dad had put down the bottle

To avoid being the drunken brute his father had been

Turned out inebriation was overrated

As the cause of family violence

–

Yet he perused garage sales for toys he could afford

Skateboards, a pogo stick, skis and boots.

He taught me to ride a bike, to fish, to shoot

With hesitant reflection I admit he cared

–

For half a century I’ve carried my resentment

And failed to see that I was not the only burdened one

Before him my grandfather threw fists

And before him generations did the same

–

I wasn’t seeking forgiveness when

It came softly knocking at my door

Explaining that my baggage does not define me

Whispering “Just as his baggage did not define him”

I am a perfectionist.

There. I stated it.

I don’t expect perfection out of you – on the contrary, you should be gentle with yourself and realistic in your expectations. But I do set my own bar high and note every little misstep that prevents me from meeting my goals. I even organize my sock drawer.

In school, I expected to get every answer right on exams (and still have “nightmares” about not knowing an answer on a test). I graduated with a 3.96 as opposed to a perfect 4. I don’t know what grades my classmates had, but I’m well aware my of my own GPA shortcoming.

I didn’t even celebrate my near-perfect score – and had it been perfect I wouldn’t have celebrated that either. It’s not a victory to achieve – it’s expected. I desperately need to achieve in order to prove to myself that I deserve the air that I breathe.

For me, being perfect is shame-driven.

Dr. Edith Eva Eger stated it best when she wrote of her own perfectionistic streak:

Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken – you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing. In trying to combat my low self-esteem I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness.

Egers, Edith Eva. The Choice: Embrace the Possible

Way back when, as a little girl whose world was often tumultuous, I determined that if so many bad things were happening to me and around me then something had to be really wrong with me. I learned in church that God was in charge of all things and nothing happened in His world by mistake. Therefore the abuse I suffered was no accident – it was because there was something so wrong with me that God hated my guts.

What’s a girl to do when she’s evil?

I suppose I could have given up, but if there’s one trait that defines me (other than perfectionism), it’s determination. I don’t want to be better than – I just want to be equal, and because I believed I started out at a deficit I needed to be perfect just to pass muster.

I could score high on my SATs. I could score the winning basket at the whistle in the tournament game. I could attract the attention of college recruiters. I could have a near-perfect GPA. I could serve on government commissions and boards of directors. I could look like a leader.

The problem was, it was never good enough. Each success was simply what I was supposed to do. There was always the next achievement to look to, or the next hoop to jump through. Nothing fixed that sense that I was evil, and therefore unworthy.

The focus on achievement contributed greatly to my downfall a few years ago. The worse things felt inside the more I threw myself into being a high-functioning, super-producing member of society. I used vacation time for more volunteer work. I never sat with myself, or my feelings. It became unsustainable and I crashed.

For me, identifying the real problem – the unworthiness – was the most important step on the journey toward healing. Naming it didn’t fix it, but simply has given me the chance to proceed on a different path.

I don’t have to be perfect to be acceptable – I just need to be. I need to listen to my heart. I am no superhero. If my sock drawer is unorganized, no one cares – certainly not the divine energy in the Universe.

It is often what we don’t name that drives us. So yes, I am a perfectionist, who feels unworthy. And today I’m kicking that part of me out of the driver’s seat.

Dad always said, “You gotta take care of yourself. It’s you against the world.”

I hated my dad.

Five years old and I was a rebel already. Dad was wrong. I held the doors open for people – and giggled when they didn’t know what to do with a little girl being a gentleman. I skipped lunch and gave my lunch money to Sabrina, because her mother forgot to give it to her.

It felt good to be nice to people.

Not to say I was a well-behaved little girl – much the opposite. At five years old I hadn’t started talking yet. I could write, but refused to speak. I was terrified of so many things – and angry like the dog up the street that bit anyone who dared to come near. Yes, I bit too. I punched and kicked and shrieked, and generally did not behave well at all. But I’d hold the door open for you.

My adult self has a friend whose daughter is so much like me. Sally is just a little older, but boy, do I know how she feels inside. She can be really nice one minute, and before you blink she’ll be having a tantrum. Right now she can’t live with her momma, because she is so angry she hurts people, or herself. I do that sometimes too. I even attacked Henry, my best friend – he’s a teddy bear. Or he was, before I stabbed him. My momma threw him out after that.

Sally is living in a special place right now where they are trying to help her learn to deal with her anger. Her momma was so worried about her that she asked the doctors what to do. My momma didn’t know what to do with me, but there weren’t a lot of doctors back then to help kids who behaved like me. I thought I was bad. I bet Sally thinks she’s bad too, but she’s not bad. She’s just been through a lot of stuff. Her first momma was really mean, and did drugs too. My momma drank a lot and did some bad things. That’s part of why I was so scared and angry all the time. I wasn’t really angry at my momma, though – I was angry at me. She did those bad things because I was evil, and it was hard to be my mom. It took me a long time to believe people when they said I was a good kid.

Sometimes when I ask whatever is up there in the sky to take care of Sally, I feel like I’m asking for both of us. I want to mail a box to Sally, with toys and books. We couldn’t send her Henry, of course, but I bet she’d like a stuffed bear, or a dog or a frog or a cat. I think she’d like some new toys. I hope she knows how much she’s loved.

I was recently challenged to list 10 wants.

I have a history of mistaking my own needs as mere wants, and then denying their fulfillment. For example, as a young adult I went hungry rather than going to the food shelf or soup kitchen, because while I believed those to be good endeavors, they were for people who needed them. I shouldn’t need them, nor was I going to die if I went hungry. Instead, I ate twice a week, when I’d gathered enough refundable soda bottles to purchase a granola bar or a bagel.

Since in my mind food was not even a necessity, it is no surprise that I was incapable of recognizing wants lower on the spectrum – a habit which persists. Recently, when trying to decide where to go for ice cream, a friend recently joked that my motto could be, “I dunno.” Once we decided where, well, I won’t admit how long it then took for me to decide on which flavor.

In spite of my trepidation around the challenge of 10 wants, I did manage to eke out a list. I was later challenged to share the list, which I managed to do in a small, private Facebook group.

This is not private, nor is it Facebook. It is public! But why not share my wants list here? My goal is to challenge my thoughts and fears. By exceeding my perceived limitations, I continue to grow and expand.

So, as of today, here is my list of ten wants (gulp):

1. I want to be ok with having needs, and even wants.
2. I want to use my story to spread hope.
3. I want to be brave enough to share who I really am.
4. I want to be able to feel safe when there is no imminent danger.
5. I want to feel my difficult emotions without immediately thinking about suicide.
6. I want to physically feel well and more energized.
7. I want to finish writing my first memoir.
8. Some day, I want to spend three months touring Australia, from Sydney to the Outback.
9. I want to receive compliments without fighting back in my head.
10. I want to host a women’s writing retreat.

For good measure, here’s one more: I want YOU to share at least one of your wants in the comments below. If I can do it, so can you!

God hates my guts and wants me to suffer.

Pretty harsh words, eh? But that was the way I made sense of my difficult childhood. My mother drank a lot, my father was a violent man and I was often his target, my uncle molested me from the time I was a toddler, I had trouble at school… the list goes on. God was supposedly in charge of all things and this was my life, so I had the evidence. He hated me.

At some point I came to believe in a different kind of Higher Power – a loving and gentle energy in the Universe. I’ve also come to trust that not everything that happens is part of God’s grand plan – some things are man-made. The transition to my belief has been slow, but not steady.

When I first got clean and sober I balked at the “God stuff” in 12-step programs. I told my sponsor about how much God hated me, and she made it simple – find a new God. What in heaven’s name did she mean by that? God is God – right? Yet my concept started to change right there.

While I developed this enlightened trust in a loving energy, at some level I hung onto the parallel belief that God hates me. Core beliefs are hard to shake, even with lots of therapy and good intentions.

But I just had another growth spurt, while participating in a program called Illuminate that was offered by Marlo Ellis, of The Uncommon Woman. She challenged us to identify those core beliefs – the stories that hold us back – and to develop new stories to help us move forward. I tried it on for size:

I am so much more than the trauma I endured. I’m a child of the Universe, and she celebrates my joys. I carry her light when I share with others.

Wowza!

Invincible Hope is about exactly this revised story. I am greater than my traumas and I have a message of hope – of light! When we spread hope and light we feed that good energy in the Universe, and for me, I feel grateful, energized and purposeful.

So what is YOUR story? What needs to shift? What step can you take today to start moving in a new direction?

You can find Marlo Ellis at http://theuncommonwoman.com

The other day, my digital time sheet was missing its cost center field, and so I emailed HR with the subject line, “wonky time sheet.” My HR rep emailed me right back, explaining that she hadn’t yet sent the notice that for most of our employees, we would no longer have to use that field. She also complimented me on the use of the word “wonky.”

I love quirky words and phrases, like crikey and golly gee willikers and goofball. Wonky is one of my favorites, although I don’t recall ever looking it up in a dictionary. Today I did.

I was gravely disappointed by Merriam Webster’s definition, “characteristic, or suggestive of, a wonk.” What on earth is a wonk? So I clicked the link, and found wonk described as “a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field” and used the synonym “nerd.”

My time sheet was definitely not nerdy.

Which led me to the Cambridge English dictionary, where I found that wonky is also an informal British word basically meaning unsteady, off-kilter or of an unusual shape. Like my timesheet!

But this post is not about a wonky timesheet – it is about a life that has been unsteady, off-kilter and of an unusual shape. It is also about normalizing wonkiness, to some degree.

I listened to an amazing woman share a story this week about her hope and healing, and found myself feeling somewhat ashamed that my own story doesn’t match her described path about straight-line healing. It hasn’t even been two steps forward, one step back. It’s been more like the scribbles of a toddler learning to use a crayon – all over the page and outside the lines.

That’s progress too.

I have PTSD and depression, sometimes with psychotic symptoms – basically, when depressed I’m prone to both visual and audial hallucinations, and my thinking can get really distorted. There have been times where it has been impossible for me to function much in the world. At other times that I’ve been wonderfully successful. Most the time I’m somewhere in between.

My path has been… wonky.

Who doesn’t want to be functional, effective and highly respected? Yet at the pinnacle of my career success – finishing my degree, advising academics, serving on commissions and boards of directors – I took no joy in my achievements. I felt mostly numb yet blindly driven by shame. Each career win was only a notch in my belt buckle, and I always needed more notches.

Notches didn’t fix my problem. I crashed into a very deep depression from which I’m still recovering. I don’t have that cool job anymore. My volunteer work looks very different – much more laid back, and the kind of stuff I can usually do without putting on a power outfit.

And I like it.

I like it because I have feelings again. Mind you, I still don’t much like having feelings – yet I’m slowly learning to befriend them. As I embrace my emotional being, I feel so much more alive. I also feel more joy in sitting still today, than I felt receiving recognition for all my “success.”

I’ll stick with the word wonky today.