Well, I’ve been writing intermittently about my own misery in journals, blogs and diaries for the last thirty-odd years and it just seemed I wasn’t getting the answers I needed, so here I am. Profile: depression and anxiety, dysthymia, baldness and a nagging need to write. Fifty-four years on this ball of dirt and about forty of them carrying the genetic burden of mental illness. Somehow it feels just a little exciting to know that someone else might read this.
Like you, I have a long history of events, episodes and pain that have darkened my life. I go through stages, like now, of trying to write through, write about, write out of depression and once the worst is over I lose the urge. When I’m out of a depressive episode I don’t want to re-visit it because, funnily enough, it makes me depressed thinking about it. But, deeper than that, I really do want to explore how depression, especially, has shaped and framed my life.
Right now, I reckon I’ve just climbed back up the cliff that I metaphorically threw myself off six months ago. My mood has stabilised, I can look beyond my own interior landscape and take a step or two in any direction I like. Time to give something back, me.
It’s a grey day outside, Ted (an old soft toy) is in the window but no one is going past our house to see him. Poor old thing. Our daughter loved him for years, only stopped sleeping with him when she was fifteen and realised that she was too old for that. He’s slumped somewhat to the left as if deep in thought. But he is relaxed, stoic, knowing that he will get through the lockdown. One day at a time.
