The Good Days

They do come, don't they?

With the return of Autumn, the use of therapy and medication, there are those mornings when even the depression of last night doesn't last. The days when I can see that my interior thoughts are wrong: I'm not guilty of all those terrible things; I'm not an inferior person; I'm not a fraud; I'm not even as bad a husband as I thought I was.

That doesn't mean that everything is fine. Oh no, I wouldn't be a depressed person if I could turn things around that totally; that quickly. But, nevertheless, when I awoke yesterday morning, and the sun was shining into my bedroom, and I knew that I was having lunch with a good friend, and I knew that I was seeing my therapist before that - well, it was possible to forgive myself just a little for not being a perfect child, a perfect husband, perfect father, perfect writer. You get the idea!

I burst into my therapist's office and said, rather loudly, and with a great smile on my face: "It's been quite a week!".  I suppose, after that opening, she expected a story about millions made, or a romantic conquest, or a new job assignment or my daughter getting married or.... but she was equally satisfied that it was just her patient saying, for once, that the world wasn't as terrible - not that I wasn't as terrible as the weeks and months beforehand.

So, how do you get there... to that state of mind?

As I've suggested before, there is no magic. There is therapy and medication and good luck and hard work and looking always into yourself to see if you can rethink or redefine the world, especially that part of it over which you have some control.
My wife is dead. That's unfair! But I have to live with an unfair world, and so do you. My brother killed himself 12 years ago. That's unfair, too. And my mother killed herself when I was six. That's unfair.  BUT, it wasn't my fault. I wasn't a bad person, and thinking that I was - the interior unconscious dialogue of my depression - won't make the world fair, or protect me against disease. So, drop it!

Well, sometimes I can and sometimes I can't.  And, perhaps, sometimes you can, too.