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Who Is My Depression?
“I think of it as a little child that needs comforting.”
One of my teen-aged children taught me a valuable lesson about mental illness. We were together in a counselling session. As we often do when discussing all sorts of illnesses, the counsellor had been using metaphors of conflict. We “fight” a cold, we “battle” cancer; and similarly, the counsellor, in an effort to motivate my teen, was asking them to “confront” and “combat” the anxiety that was severely limiting their growth and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t like to think of my anxiety as an enemy,” my teen said.
What Is My Depression?
What is depression? It is an illness, not an identity.
Looking back I know I’ve been dealing with depression since at least my thirteenth Christmas, a day when I cried myself to sleep in a haze of sadness that descended from nowhere. I loved Christmas; nothing had occurred to disappoint me; there was no reason at all for the despair that engulfed me. There were more days like that to come.
I remember a year and a half into my time at university (pertinently, just after Christmas vacation had ended), running upstairs . . . .
Between 2005 and 2008, I lost four tiny babies to miscarriage. In an effort to help others who may be experiencing similar losses, I want to share the story of that journey. If you click on the title above, and then follow the “Next in Miscarriage Journey” links at the bottom of each post, you can read through my story sequentially.