Flashback Friday – Was I really like this?

I read a few of my early blog posts this morning.

Some of them I wrote just days after getting out of the hospital.

There is a lot of uncertainty in these early posts. I am feeling my way towards something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

Check out this post I wrote 3 or 4 days after getting out of the hospital.

I wish I could sleep.

But what I did know, was where I had been was the scariest place on earth.

Being in the hospital was good. Being in my own mind was bad. Not knowing what was going to happen next, not understanding why I was so depressed, not seeing or facing my relationship with depression was incredibly painful.

Walking into the emergency room and saying, “I need help with my mental health” was excruciatingly painful. But doing what I had been doing for months, and expecting a different response was even more painful.

The morning I went to the hospital, I only saw three choices.

First, I could kill myself. Even just the idea makes me wince. I have not made my peace yet and am not ready to surrender my life, regardless of how shitty it appears to me when I am depressed. So, this option is never one I put any time into. Yet before I started taking Prozac, I was getting suicidal thoughts daily. Using mindfulness training, I would just see them, and then let them go.

Second, I could keep doing what I had been doing for 43 years and expect a different result. Now as I see it, that is the crazy option.  And yet I had chosen tat time after time after time. Then I was surprised when I got the same result. “I was surprised I got the same result!” If there was a time to use a label, this would be it.

This left choice number three, seek professional medical help.

Making that decision was one of the hardest things I have done in my life. Finally making a conscious decision to face whatever it was that was getting in the way of my life was what I opted for. And this decision has sent my life off in a whole new direction.

Using the tools, I have discovered, I have made significant progress in living with depression. I have discovered SMART recovery and WRAP, DBT skills and many other valuable tools to help me have a healthy, balanced life.

This blog has been my classroom, my homework, and my therapy. In combination with all the other resources I have assembled, medication, a therapist, a psychiatrist, my general practitioner, my peer advocates and the support of family and friends, I am changing my focus and my relationship with depression.

In a week, it will have been six months since my hospitalization.

I am excited to see where my life is going. The future looks more manageable as I live with depression, keeping it where I can always see it.

What’s changed for you in the past six months?

Read another of my earlier posts

Why did I make that decision?