My Journey

I think it’s important to understand who I am, so that the words (and occasionally kooky things) I write have some grounding.

My name is Charlotte.  I was born and raised in possibly the most beautiful part of the world: mid-northern Ontario, surrounded by trees and lakes and warm summers and snowy winters.  I left home at sixteen, to pursue my Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, which I earned in 2011.  I moved to Alberta, where I started working as a mixed animal veterinarian seeing cows, dogs, horses, chickens, cats, whatever.  Shortly after, I met my husband, bought a house, got a dog and two cats and lived the dream.

Sounds great, right?

Grit my teeth and puke in a river.

I don’t think that little bio says a thing about me, frankly, and it doesn’t even come close to naming my proudest achievements or hinting at the hardest things I have done.

What just doesn’t come through is that I suffered from anxiety and depression from the time I was school age.  I had chronic pain in my shoulder and back at 12, which no one believed.  I had such crippling social anxiety that I once peed myself to get out of gym class.  I was evaluated for mental delay because I was so hesitant to talk in front of people and so awkward with my body (btw, I earned multiple academic awards throughout school and hold multiple degrees).  When I learned to drive at sixteen, I spent a great deal of time considering how I would have to drive off the road so I didn’t survive, but it could look like an accident.

Things improved slightly through university.  I wasn’t any less awkward internally, but I had a reasonable coping mechanism and classes were big enough I didn’t have to talk to anybody — I was able to slink in and out in peace, thank you very much.

When I graduated, I landed a job I was really excited about.  It was not great.  Between the stress of being responsible for animal lives, 4am calvings, and a boss who repeatedly told me I was an idiot and could I just go away and do something useful — I started climbing into bed the moment I got home, and getting out only when my (unrealistically amazing) husband physically dragged me.  I broke down in tears at an ultrasound course.

I changed jobs.  This one had a significant commute, and I once again spent a considerable amount of time debating various methods of driving off the road.

At this time, awareness of anxiety and depression was coming up in the media and in the veterinary profession.  I visited a psychologist to discuss my problems, and spent an hour discussing how my boss was having a hard time and I should be more considerate.  I was rushed to the ER that night.

I was started on anti-depressant medication and sent to a different psychologist.  This psychologist diagnosed me with dysthymia, which is basically genetic depression (since it started when I was a kid), and told me I would always have it so I would have to learn to live with it.  I actually did drive off the road a week later — purely by accident since the drugs made me so sleepy and not really care about anything, like living or dying.  I was unable to see my doctor to change the prescription for several weeks.

Here’s where things turned up.  And here is my own journey, the things that worked for me.

I made an appointment with a naturopathic doctor.  She put me on some things to clear out a number of toxins.  I stopped eating refined sugar and gluten for a year.  (I can tolerate gluten now, not the sugar.)

I started pursuing the things that I had been interested in as a kid.  Mainly horses and writing.  I told myself it was okay to pursue them.

I changed jobs, but finding myself no happier there, I started formulating a plan to get out and do something different.

In those first years, I would say I had 80% improvement.  I wasn’t super excited to be getting up in the morning, but I could.  And I could laugh and smile and had enough energy to last the entire day.  I started my own business — alternative health care for animals.  I bought and trained and event a horse.  I wrote a novel.

Then, through a stroke of infinite luck and universal wisdom, I accompanied my mother-in-law (who was afraid of flying by herself) to New Mexico for a course in some weird hoodoo voodoo she was doing.  It was a weekend about emotional clearings, about old hurts and even ancestral ones that clung to us, and Geotrans quantum field integrations.

I had only the slightest clue about what was going on, but I gained a moment of awareness that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.  That I was not babysitting my mother-in-law, she was unknowingly serving me the very thing I had looked for my entire life.  I signed on for a year course.

In that year, my business has become a massive success, I have written two more novels, I am more in love that I ever have been before, and I Feel Awesome.

I am still a work in progress.  I still have some bad days, but I want to tell you that as I was writing all the terrible stuff at the top I realized I had legitimately forgotten what that felt like.

Now I feel that I am worth it.  I can.  I am loved.  and I am exactly where I need to be.

Btw, I did have genetic depression, it had come down from my ancestors over many, many generations.  I don’t have it anymore.

I wanted to tell you all of these things about me because I want you to know that when I say ‘I study happiness’ and that ‘I have had to find happiness for myself,’ I have come from a place where there was no happiness to be found.  This is not some shallow pep talk, this is not ‘just smile and you will start to feel it’.  This is happiness at its most nitty and gritty.

I also don’t want to paint the picture that this is about depression.  We are all looking for happiness and meaning.  This just happens to be my journey.  So far, anyway.

I know there’s more.  I know we’re going to keep levelling up and we’re going to do it together.

{everything is cool when you’re part of a team!}