Here We Go...

Round 1: Depression strikes...

Just when I thought I had everything under control... in walks depression, takes me by the throat, and leaves me gasping for air.

Haven't I struggled enough? Haven't I fought hard enough for the little sanity I have left? Or so I thought...

The tricky thing about depression is that just when it leaves you and you think you have an edge over it, you think you have mastered and conquered it... it comes back to haunt you. It comes back to threaten your recovery, to stint your accomplishments, to disable you from progressing.

I hate depression.

And yet, I love it.

I love it because it does not define who I am but rather how I feel. When I know how I feel, I can predict my behaviors... and others can, too.

When I'm depressed, I can justify sleeping for days. After all, sleeping seems to be the only thing that helps me pass the time until the depression minimizes or subsides.

A list of things that do not work as effectively as sleep:

Praying
Eating
Reading
Watching TV
Studying
Exercising
Playing Games
Listening to Music
Photography
Talking
Thinking
Creative Writing

All of which are efforts to be commended... because at best, when you are severely depressed, you are lucky if you can get out of bed, let alone dress yourself. Sometimes, I cannot even imagine feeding myself, or writing my own name, let alone talking to someone about how I feel.

When I'm depressed, I don't even know how I'm feeling; I cannot even describe it to you. At the very point when I am feeling the most depressed, you wouldn't even know it, because I'm incapable of telling you this. I'm merely hoping that you can sense it.

A lot of people do not understand that. There are people who think that you should know when you are sad and you should know what is making you depressed. That it's only logical to know these things. Bullshit. Sometimes, I do not even know I'm alive. Sometimes, I feel dead...when I'm depressed.

Then you have your garden variety of people who think that if you are clinically depressed you wouldn't be able to comprehend that you are, let alone when you are. Bullshit. I wish you could be me for one day. You would experience more severe ups and downs in that single day than you will in most people's lifetimes.

I'm a rapid cycling bipolar... you just never know when things are gonna take a turn for the worse... or better? Hours, minutes, even seconds separate my mood swings and, Honey, they can be as severe as Illinois' weather irregularities this Summer.

When I'm depressed the only thing that digs me out of it is the simple thought that I cannot imagine living one more day feeling the way I do. I feel suicidal, yes, but not in the literal sense.

It all boils down to this simple fact: there are things in my life that are good (positive), and I want them to live on and increase, and also there are things in my life that are bad (negative), and I want them to die or decrease. If the person housing these things is dead, does any of it matter anymore? No. Therefore, suicide is not the answer. Killing off the good AND the bad just does not work. No, it is the bad that must go.

Now, I start to see that there are things I must do to make the good things increase and the bad things decrease. This is where I begin devising my plans for the future. In turn, I am literally revising a plan for my life filled with hope.

YES! This is what I've needed all along... hope! A light at the end of the tunnel. Something worth living for, a goal worth working toward.

This is my favorite part, because for one moment, between the depression and the mania, I am at rest in the middle of two extremes: content that I have hope for a better future and unaware that I am so far away from reaching these goals.