Depression

I am not depressed any longer, though I was for several years and still watch myself to see if I am showing signs. I tend to be pretty cautious about stressing myself out too much, not getting enough sleep, saying yes to too many things, because I want to make sure that I don’t dig myself into a deficit again. Sometimes this makes me feel guilty and I shrug and say—yeah, well.

However, one of the things that has happened as I recovered was the realization that I messed up a lot of relationships when I was depressed. I probably knew I was doing this on some level, but I couldn’t help myself. I was trying to roll into a ball to protect myself, and that meant just dropping a ton of relationships. And now guess what? I have to repair all those relationships.

On the one hand, I am so glad not to be depressed anymore. I really am. On the other hand, I feel like the universe has been saving a big pile of excrement for me, on the occasion that I came out of the cave. An un-depression present, so to speak. You’re feeling better? And by the way, you should notice that you’ve ruined everything while you were sick so you get to spend the next ten years undoing that.

Yeah, yeah. People say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I’ll learn some really important lessons from this. I’m sure compassion for others in the same situation is one of them. But there is a part of me that is a little angry. I didn’t ask to get depressed. And don’t tell me I made a choice, either. My choice was to survive a horrible tragedy, not to get depressed. The depression was my bonus side effect.

And now after working through all of that, I get to work through a bunch more. I WANT to fix my relationships. But sometimes I mostly just want them to be fixed already. I want to not have to make up all those years of work. Yeah, not going to happen. That’s depression again. If you are one of the many people whose relationship to me got messed up: Sorry! I’m working on it, I promise! But it will take some time.