Finding My Way

Finding My Way

Depression.

It is just as nasty and sad and horrible as it's made out to be. 

I almost didn't make it out. I hit the bottom, a place so dark, so oppressive, that it took a serious brush with death to get my brain to wake the hell up. 

An almost fatal accident, stop looking at me like that. Not suicide, I promise. Though I know the weight of serious depression, so I can understand to some degree why some people make that fatal and irreversible choice. (I don't condone, I understand--that's it. But I digress.) 

If I had been more aware, more awake to the world and my place in it, it wouldn't have happened. I won't share what did happen, not yet. Been several months, almost a year, and I still can't talk or even think about it without thinking I'm going to die and freaking out.

My life the last twelve years has been harder and harder to survive. I don't say this for pity, or sympathy. I am the architect of my own fate, and I am in this position entirely due to my own failings.  

Guess what I learned? Being depressed is a vicious cycle that's almost impossible to stop. It's a life-stealer. I gave my up dreams, my talents went to waste, and I settled...on everything. I gave up my ego and my pride, but lost my ambition and drive. I put on weight, lost my muscles and my curves, lost my friends, stayed away from family...I lost a lot.

I got so depressed...that I didn't realize that I WAS depressed. I honestly didn't know it. It was so gradual, so insidious, that it was in me, stealing my life and the entirety of my twenties, before I even noticed it. At the age of thirty, with nothing in my life worth much more than the barest of smiles and a shrug of indifference, I was dead on my feet. I was no longer me; the woman I once was was gone, reduced to a flicker in the deepest well of my being.

Sure, there were some good things in there. Met some new people, got married, got some pets, a house. But out of all of the things I gained the last decade and change, I'm now, right now--weeks away from losing all of that. 

I am losing a lot--and I couldn't be more excited.

I found my talent, my voice. It took nearly dying, and an odd,  obsessively passionate response to a TV show of all things that made me feel ALIVE for the first time in a very long time. 

I used to be a writer. As a teenager, I wrote ALL the time. I was fast, too. In the time it would take a peer to write a five page essay, I wrote three or four. I could spin out stories in the blink of an eye, and holy crap, they were good. I was fast tracking my way to great when my life hit the first speed bump. Not getting into that right now, but it was the first of many setbacks, and I was ill-prepared to meet them.

That's enough for now. Suffice to say, I am getting better. 11 months and counting. Working on five different novels of varying lengths and unique plots. By spring of this year I should have the first of them released. I can't wait.

I can't wait for my old life to end, and my new one to begin. The life I lost years ago, and I am so close to getting it back, or better yet--really starting it.