Hello again

I've had a lot of people ask me lately what in the world has happened to this blog. I wish I had the energy to be writing but I have been dealing with really, really bad depression lately and it is wiping me out. I have been exploring all different kinds of options and am trying to figure out what will work best to help me come out of this funk, but right now I am kinda in survival mode. Someone asked me the other day how you can tell the difference between the normal "blues" (which we all feel at times) and serious clinical depression and it kinda stumped me. Depression isn't really something you can describe, unless you've actually been there you have no idea what it's really like. Even for me, when I come out of it I have a hard time remembering how things could have possibly seemed so bad.


But yesterday as I was outside trying to enjoy the fall air I thought of something that made sense. A normal person's mood often ebbs and flows according to the circumstances of their life. They get stuck in traffic...it makes them mad. Their kids get sick and they're up all night...they are tired and irritable the next day. They're not consistently doing the things they know they should be doing in life...they feel depressed. When you have "clinical" depression those things affect you too, however the difference is what happens on the flip side...when things are going right and when you're doing everything you should and you STILL don't feel good. That is what is so exhausting, to be going through the motions of all the things you should be doing (of course not perfectly, who does?) and to still feel rotten day in and day out, to have beautiful fall weather that makes you cry instead of smile because you wish you could enjoy it but you just can't, to sit down and make lists of all the things you know deep down you are grateful for but you just can't feel it.

Sorry for such a downer post. There's a ton of other stuff I want to write about once I'm out of this "fog" because truthfully there have been a lot of things I've been doing really well lately. Even though I've been feeling down I haven't let myself spiral out of control back into the ED like I would in the past. Sometimes progress in recovery is so imperceptible that it's hard to give myself credit for what I'm doing. But every once in a while I look back at where I've come from and realize that even if my life is nowhere near where I want it to be, I am a long way from where I once was.