Focus on the gains, not the losses

An inexperienced gardener, I wanted to plant something at the “beginner’s level,” mostly to limit the chances of my efforts being fruitless and increasing the odds of achieving success in this field.

Therefore, we planted low-maintenance rose bushes, citronella, basil, peppermint, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, and strawberries.

The two strawberry sprouts I picked had tiny little white berries and a few blossoms, which meant that some sweet juicy fruits were in the making already! My three year old daughter could hardly wait for the fruits to ripe!

Just how hard can it be to grow strawberries, right? Well, it turned out not to be so easy for me! First, we planted the sprouts on the ground, at a reasonable distance from the next, the peppermint, on the corner of our strip of soil.

The first morning after planting them, most of the tiny fruits were gone. Could it be that some squirrel came and had dinner on our patio last night? Who knows! What I know for a fact is that protecting and nurturing the remaining berries is my mission now.

Next, I transplant the strawberry sprouts to a raised pot, to make it less accessible to any insect or crawling animal that might be craving our precious berries. All goes well for a few days, and the plants seem to be thriving until one morning I wake up to a horrific sight: the leaves have holes! Is it a plague? Is it the insects? What can I do to save them from a fatidic end?

Losing a plant would be just terrible, terrible! For someone struggling with anxiety and depression, like myself, it can only mean one thing: Here’s something else I can’t do right. As if I don’t feel inadequate in my own skin, this new endeavor is proving more difficult than I expected. 

Please don’t die, strawberry! If you survive and thrive it will mean the world to me: it will mean that I can be successful at something, anything! Just please, please, please, survive and thrive!

I go to the Home Depot and after showing pictures of the “holy” leaves, the advice of the garden expert is to use some non-toxic plague and insect killer, and so we do. After a few days of this treatment, the problem seems to have been curbed, and the strawberry plant is looking better.

Then July happens. And if you live in Texas, I need to say no more! The heat! The scorching summer heat! Our tiny berries? Burnt! It seems like almost overnight, my strawberry plants have dried! The leaves are almost brown, lifeless.

I decide I’ll do whatever it takes to save them. I move the pot to another spot in the patio so it doesn’t get a lot of sun during the day, and water it in the morning and even use a spraying bottle to mist it during the hottest hours of the day. I just can’t let them die! If they die, oh, dear Lord, if they die, it will mean that I can’t do anything right! Why, oh, why?

As I look at the brown leaves, spray bottle in hand, I think of the last few days of “intensive care therapy” I’ve spent tending to the strawberries at odd times during the day, coming to talk to them, encouraging them, and almost begging them to survive. It’s time to face the inevitable: They’ve died.

I have to accept it, as hard as I worked, I just couldn’t grow strawberries. What went wrong? What could I have done differently to save them? It really doesn’t matter. It’s not the end of the world. As I take them out of the pot, I take a moment to view the rest of my garden.

The basil is so big! The roses are blooming almost daily! The parsley, peppermint, and rosemary are thriving! Every evening when I water my plants, the smell of the herbs gives me joy! So much joy! It is so nice out here in our little patio after the sun went down, with the fresh aromas in the air!

And that’s what I need to keep in mind: I can’t dwell on the losses. Yes, the strawberries were a big failure, I tried my best and they didn’t survive, but look at the rest of my plants! Most of them are growing strong, thriving!

If I want to keep depression at bay, this is exactly what I have to do: focus on the positive and don’t let the negative linger in your mind for too long. Instead of thinking of the loss of my strawberries, I celebrate and feel thankful that the rest of my garden is making progress. I am not a failure after all! Yes, my only fruit plant died, oh well, nobody is perfect.

The cilantro died with the heat too, by the way, and that wasn’t the end of the world for me either. I managed to survive that loss and enjoy the aromas of the rosemary, citronella, and the other herbs that made it through the scorching Texas summer with me.

Love and hope,

Nancy C. Harris 

All that's left from my strawberries: A picture.

Stop procrastinating happiness

One of the classic exercises psychology uses to help people define exactly what they want to achieve through therapy is the visualization essay. They ask you to answer the question: If I woke up tomorrow in my ideal world, what would that look like? How would the following be different: self, relationship, job, social life/friends, family, finances, etcetera?

Your answer to that can be as simple or as detailed as your mind dictates it. When confronted with this assignment given by my mental health professional right after my depression diagnosis, I typed in 940 words describing all the things that I wanted to improve in my life.

In my ideal world, my relationship with my husband was so much better! I lived in a house instead of a condo; I had a job I enjoyed; even my family had moved closer to us! I mean, if I’m already dreaming, why not throw them into my picture perfect life?

And to my therapist surprise, I wrote the whole essay in present tense. When visualizing, I wasn’t thinking of the future but narrating what was taking place. And this ideal world had many things that didn’t exist in my current life, such as a house!

Since we got married, we have lived in a 900 square feet condo. Pretty tight. I always felt that “if only we had a house, with a backyard, a garage, a bigger kitchen…” our days would be so much better! Therefore, I had procrastinated happiness until this goal of acquiring a home would be achieved. Big mistake.

You shouldn’t delay being happy. Depression can be a matter of life or death, every day in it is a day in pain. Happiness is a priority. A bigger house, a better job, a newer car, those things would be certainly nice to have, but I just can’t afford to wait until I acquire them to get out of my misery.

So, on a hot Sunday morning of this past May (2015), I sat down to go through the flyers and junk mail from this week, and there it was:  our local Home Depot ad, and what did I find? Nothing less than a great offer!

Today is the last day to get four herb or vegetable plants for $10 dollars! That’s less than $3 dollars each! I am feeling lazy and lousy (the usual) but if I don’t get this offer before the day is over I know I will regret it. I could start a little garden in my tiny patio for less than $20 dollars! It takes all of my strength to get up from the couch, take a shower, and make it to the store, which is, by the way, less than a mile away from our condo.

Once we get to the nursery, the smells and looks of the cilantro, peppermint, parsley, basil, and rosemary take me back to another happy time in life. My grandfather in Mexico used to have an herb garden. We rarely ever bought cilantro, peppers, or basil at the store, all it took for us was a short walk outside and we had a fresh bunch of herbs to complete the ingredients for our dinner.

Wouldn’t it be nice to gift my daughter with similar memories of kneeling on the earth to get fresh cilantro for her soup? We only have a narrow strip of soil to grow plants; luckily it doesn’t take much space to grow an herb garden!

We spent about $50 dollars total between the herbs, bags of soil, and digging tools. We also bought two rose bushes on sale, because what is a garden without red roses? 

My three year old daughter, my husband and I spent the rest of the day digging out the old dirt and replacing it with good, fertile soil, which could serve as an analogy to what behavioral therapy is: Supplanting the thinking patterns (procrastination) that hurt you with positive ones.

Just like I couldn’t wait one more day to take advantage of our local store offer, I couldn’t wait to see our garden grow! That night we went to bed exhausted and happy. And it drizzled a little during our sleep. What a great morning tomorrow will be!

Love and hope,

Nancy C. Harris 

My family's gardening gloves. It's easy to guess whose is whose...

The beginning of it.

I suffer from depression and those who have been there know it: It’s quite an ugly battle. For over two years now, every day I make it through is one huge victory. Sometimes the beast (that’s how I call and visualize my condition, like something overpowering and monstrous) kicks in with all its force and it seems as if I won’t be able to fight it off once anymore.

In search for a cure to my illness I went to many different sources: I took antidepressants (Lexapro, anyone?). I went to therapy with a psychologist who had three lustrous diplomas on her wall and whose long years of education couldn’t do much to help me. I quit my loathed job, found a new career…

Of course, I also tried to exercise because physical activity is a great aid in the treatment to depression, everyone says, if only I had enough energy to get out of bed! Some days I feel so lousy that the sole act of taking a shower implies a great accomplishment; to think I could perform any fitness task is ludicrous!

By the end of my second year “battling the beast”, I found a licensed counselor that accepted my insurance and started anew with a cognitive behavioral approach. And boom! She did not make me sit down and talk about what went wrong in my childhood and analyze it for hours and hours with no end in sight.

Instead, she helped me identify the negative behaviors that I was bound to repeat -given my background and upbringing, and then replace those with positive ones in order to build up my confidence, increase my self-esteem and get me out of the dark path I had been stuck in for so long.

And that’s how I came to discover my very own type of treatment for depression, what I call “The Home Depot therapy. One of the things I learned from the cognitive behavioral perspective is that you can’t change your life and expect to beat depression overnight; it takes time, and it takes baby steps; baby steps are fine and ultimately will conduct you to find the light at the end of the tunnel, and -let me tell you, getting out of there is pure bliss.

So based on this principle, after more than five years in our tiny condo with an almost-never-used small patio, I decided to grow a garden. I did not embark on this venture with the goal of creating an enchanted “out of your dreams” retreat, but merely with the “baby step” of growing a few herbs, strawberries, and a bush of roses. And so my blog begins.

More than providing gardening tips (because I’m no expert, that’s for sure); my intention when I share with you my trial-and-error approach to renovate our patio is to show you that, regardless of how deep and dark your depression might feel, there is hope, there is a silver lining in your sky, you might not see it yet, but it is there, believe it.

In my experience, no beast will beat your spirit as long as you are willing to kneel, either you fall on your knees to pray and ask God to help you get through the day, or kneel in order to dig in so you can plant a 3 dollar herb sprout, it is always good to be on your knees from time to time. Get dirty and sweaty, and sit back and relax to enjoy the fruits of your hard work either in prayer or in the garden, or even both!

With love and hope,

Nancy C. Harris 

This is me in our tiny patio on a chilly morning of April, 2010, indulging in fresh baked blueberrie muffins and butter! Don't insult my taste buds with fake butter, I want the real thing!