I think one of the ways that we can save our own lives is when we decide to believe that we DESERVE to live a good life, and that we CAN create a passionate life for ourselves.
When I experienced clinical depression many years ago, it was this belief that motivated me to ask for help, and to persevere through the different “trial periods” of medication and/or counseling.
It has been more than 12 years since I first sought help for clinical depression, and about 4 years since I experienced – and recovered from – a relapse.
For a very long time, this website has been my salvation, allowing self-expression while feeling less alone in the world as a person who had first-hand experience of the abyss that many of you reading this know about. I had long wanted to share more with you – not only about the darkness I had lived through – but also the light within that showed me the way.
In 2002, shortly after I had recovered from the depression relapse, I drafted an outline from which I wanted to write a book. In a moment of inspiration, I wrote out 3 pages of outline in what seemed like minutes.
The impulse for that outline was a feeling of, “NEVER AGAIN!” I had once gotten complacent; I thought clinical depression would never return to my life. When I was proven wrong, I knew that I could not slip into complacency again, and that “self care” should be my #1 priority.
Then, as if that inspirational creativity had served its purpose, it got up and left. I didn’t do anything more with this outline. The outline disappeared into multiple stacks of paper on the desk, until one day, I completely forgot that this outline ever existed…
Until 2009.
I was cleaning out boxes of paper and found the outline. It had been so long, I felt as if I was looking at someone else’s outline; I almost don’t remember drafting it!
But I knew that my desire to share the “gift of depression” remains. That flicker may have waned, but it never died.
And I know that this year, 2010, is the time when I am ready to do something about it.
Image by Miamiamia (India)
you already know what to do,
Suicide is a hard issue to address, because there is not only social and religious judgment against it, but also because we can feel helpless when there’s someone whom we love who is ideating it (or if that person ends up going through with it, and we are left asking ‘why’). Some people may think it takes “courage” to actually end one’s own life… but I believe that courage or cowardice has less to do with this, than the feelings of desperation that leads one to believe that “there is no other way”.
