Difficult Decisions

No one ever said making difficult decisions was easy!

I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Some may beg to argue if it is a real issue, but I assure you.. it is! Yes, I travel a lot to tropical locations, and sure it isn't hard to fall in love with those places and find your home to be lack luster and depressing. However, I am literally shut down during the winter. Seeing how we live in Oregon, where there is pretty much rain and grey skies for 9 months.. a good 6 months of that time, I am severely depressed and frankly incapable of life.

This comes to be a burden for my family. My husband takes on more responsibilities and my children have an uninterested mother. I am not proud of who I am during the winter, but I simply can not control it. Med barely help. I have used one of those sun lamps, didnt work, tanning, supplements, eating healthy, trying to force myself into working out... but ultimately, I just want to sleep like a bear. I want to hide away from it all, cover my head with the covers and wallow. The only thing that really helps me is a a precisely timed trip. Usually I shoot for the beginning of February. I sort of have the whole thing mapped out for my depression and when the ideal time is for me to go. My schedule looks like this:

- Late October/Early November seasonal depression starts to settle in.

- I use holiday shopping to keep my spirits up as best as I can.

- By December the struggle becomes very real, and the whole idea of spending time with family becomes more difficult and finding the energy and excitement to decorate and enjoy the holidays with my kids becomes even harder.

- I manage to suck it up through Christmas and New Years eve.

- By January 1st, it becomes prevalent that I have to booked a vacation for the beginning of February or have already booked said vacation.

- January is a blur of struggling to find happiness, and knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. My days are 100% reflective of the weather. If the sun is out, I am more likely to make it through the day without napping. Otherwise, I assure you mornings I struggle and mid day I absolutely have to nap to function.

- February my trip comes, usually a week minimum somewhere warm, sunny, and tropical. This will become the best part of my winter, and within a day or two my entire demeanor will change. I will become energetic again, happy, and full of life.

- A day or two before returning to crap weather, I will start to slow because the whole idea of returning to Oregon and the weather will start to depress me. While I will still make the best of my time.. my mind and body both know.. life will be sucked out of me once again.

- We return from vacation and with any luck at all.. the weather is sunny. This will help me carry my happiness a bit longer. At least at this point I know we only have 1-2 months of ridiculously horrible weather.

- Spring Break comes and at the very least I try to travel to Central Oregon where there is more sun than cloudy days. My dad lives over there, so even just a few days helps pick my spirits up. This buys me a little bit of time. I do try to plan my time away during that week accordingly. If the valley is going to have some nice weather, I will adjust my time to be gone while the weather is expected to be bad.

- After spring break has come and gone, we are slowly moving our way into much better weather, and nicer days become more frequent, and in turn my happiness levels increase daily, but still reflective of the weather.

- By June we are somewhat in consistently good weather, and my happy season will last till mid September or mid October. Just depending on the type of year we are having.

So in a nutshell, 6 months out of the year minimum I fight significant depression. That depression is 100% reflective of the color of the sky. Grey skies, depressed Heather. Heck even in the summer if we get a summer storm that creates those ugly grey Oregon skies.. it will almost instantly suck the life out of me.

All that being said, leads me back to difficult decisions. I tax my entire family, but especially my husband during my time of depression. We have discussed several times the option of moving. In fact right before I met my husband I was slotted to move to San Antonio Texas. However, I met him and thus got stuck in Oregon. Our entire marriage I have asked him to put in for a transfer for somewhere warmer and sunnier. Every year comes and goes, I get worse, and he is resistant to moving. Ultimately there has always been excuses. For example: Well if we are going to have kids, we want our family near. We dont want to move once the kids reach school age. His mother passed away, and was afraid to leave due to his dad. My favorite excuse he used on me is "You are really close to your mom, you wouldn't be able to live apart from her" (yet... before him I lived away from her, and happiness trumps having my mom around. We are close enough she would travel to me. She loves to travel.) Either way.. there was always an excuse. Not my excuses, just his.

However, this particular winter was extra difficult. As I mentioned, each year I get worse, and thus, this was the worse year yet. I believe part of that is due to taking our "winter" vacation in late October to Hawaii. That meant I had to light at the end of the tunnel. Then we did our road trip to San Fransisco, which we anticipated along the way having at least some sun for me.. but no. It was overcast and cold the entire time. Suffice to say our effort to find me sun, failed.

Which then lead to a rather large fight between me and my husband. Every year around February or March we end up in a fight.. because he has reached his breaking point with my depression and burdening the bulk of all the family and household duties. I dont blame him, I am sure it is exhausting. Well this year, he said that he needed to make a hard decision... to try to promote or transfer with his work, or up and leave his job where he has been for 16.5 years, and is 3.5 years shy of his 20 years with the federal government. Ultimately, he decided... our love, our family, and my health..... was more important than our financial stability.

Some may say that is insane! However, we have made some good investments, and we are wise with our money. We would never do anything that we thought would put our family in jeopardy. But, up and leaving your bread and butter is a difficult decision.

So now that we decided we should move, the question was.. to where? I created a spreadsheet (because yes I am that kind of girl) that listed out various state/locations where we could live. I listed Oregon/Arizona/Texas/Florida/Hawaii. All locations except Hawaii, he would be able to promote or transfer to for work. Then with Oregon I listed our monthly expenses to get a gauge of where we stand financially and ultimately how far we could budge and still feel comfortable and not change our lifestyle much.

Hawaii ended up being our cheapest option, but also the place where he would have to find a brand new job and start over. We are fortunate enough to already have a home there, and know how to live there and keep expenses down. Aside from that Florida was our next cheapest option and was nearly identical to Oregon. Texas and Arizona were slightly more. He asked me, where I wanted to go after reviewing the spreadsheet and comparing all the cost of living comps. I knew in my heart where I wanted to live, but I knew it made the least amount of sense. I hum ho'd around the answers and flat out said, I know the logical location for us, and the best decision for us financially. But he asked where my hearted wanted to be.. and naturally I said Hawaii.

He said, while it was absolutely crazy, he agreed. His heart was in Hawaii as well, and ultimately he knew we would all be happiest there, verses anywhere else. We knew that this came at a great cost, like his full retirement.. health insurance... general stability. But the wealth we gained from being able to ultimately live outside all year round, to eat fresh fruits from our yard, spend more time with our family and less time at work.. is what really matters. Sure our house is 1000 sqft smaller, and frankly about the size of a large apartment. But, in Hawaii.. we need less.

In Hawaii we can comfortably live a minimalist lifestyle, while not feeling like we are losing or missing out on anything at all. All that being said we also know there are great obstacles to get around. We also know we have to sell our house in Oregon, and make a lot of changes in our lives to make it happen.

So... now we will embark on attempting to make that move! While it is exciting for me, there is a lot of stress anxiety with moving in general. Then consider moving across an ocean, and to a place where you have absolutely no family, and there is absolutely no way possible for them to reach you, except for taking a flight. While Hawaii is still part of the US, it often feels like another country because its not connected to the mainland.

We have to think about things like schools. Hawaii isn't known for great publics schools, in fact their scores are pretty low. Some mainlanders experience racism, especially school age children at school. So the research begins. Do we do online school, home school, charter school, private school (is there even one near?), or public school. We want this move to be to a benefit for our children and offer them more than we can give them here. We know the education system lacks, and we dont want them so have a poor education. So there are just many things to consider now. To price out, the how to do's, where and whats!

So I guess.... wish me luck!