I recently hit a really big milestone in my life.
It has been more than four months since my last major depressive episode.
That has never, I repeat, never ever happened to me.
In fact it’s so rare that instead of tracking my “depressive episodes” I track my “okay episodes”. Which is time spent between my “normal” depressed states.
Normally, an “okay episode” lasts a week or two. Rarely it can last as much as a month, and three times in my life has it lasted more than a month, none of which were before I became an adult. The first was 2007 when I started college. That lasted 3 months. The second was the summer of 2012, and the third spring of 2013, each lasting a month or two.
So I am in completely uncharted territory with my mental health right now. I never expected this would be possible. After all, if you were to spend 26 years in a state of turmoil more than 75% of the time, what would you believe? That there was hope over the horizon? Or that hope was a silly thing people made up to help children deal with the harsh realities of life, and real adults knew better than to hope for a happier future?
Well the past four months have restored that hope for me. The hope that I can be okay for long stretches of time, the hope that I can be in touch with the parts of myself that love, create, work hard, and feel accomplished. The hope that I will continue to develop the will to live, and to live fully. The hope that when my depression does return (more on that later), I will be able to weather the storm with acceptance and compassion for myself. The hope that when I do experience hard times, I can remember that it’s not always like this. Not all the time, not forever.
I have become very in tune with a life of “this too shall pass”.
Even the good stuff.
Even the bad stuff.
Looking back on how I feel when I’m depressed I know that if I was reading this article by this point I’d have done one of two things
- Told myself “yeah congrats to that person, but it’s just not going to work out that way for me” and closed the tab.
- Screamed at the screen BUT HOW!?! And scrolled down to see if there’s a bulleted list somewhere of things I can try.
The Journey 