Medicine, Depression and BLoggers

I want to say to the bloggers out there who live with depression and are courageous enough to speak about it on your blogs, how very much your stories touch me.

I have lived with this “Black Dog” (thanks, Dr. Dork, for educating me about this term) since 1992. It seems to worsen with age (I am now 46) and it also seems that each time my medications requires a change, they works for a shorter period of time than the last.

(Not to be confused with this black dog who is the love of my heart!!)

Some days, it is indescribable. The sorrow, the depth of the pain inside, the constantly having to remind myself that as it came back, it will go away again, at least for a while.

Those “whiles” are becoming so much shorter though. It is hard to keep up hope. I have read that, “Suicide is what happens when the pain becomes greater than the resources for coping with the pain”.

It is extremely hard to continue searching for reasons to hang around when I think about the fact that I may have to fight this for 20 or 30 more years, and it seems I spend more of my life trying to justify staying than not, but when I hear other individuals saying the same things I think when I am in that dark place, I begin to think I am not so alone as I thought I was. I dwell on, “If they made it through another time, I can too”.

I began reading BLOGS when I found the first one written by a doctor. The I found another and another and it just snowballed from there. My "favorites" list is about 2 miles long now. My dream as a child was to be a surgeon and I actually trained and worked as a surgical tech for a short time back in the 80's, and anything medical still fascinates me, but I have learned so much more reading these blogs.

Through some of these new web “friends” I have learned that this black dog of depression is not unique to me and that there are other people who have the same self doubts and dark, weepy days that I do and I would NEVER condemn them for “being weak” or “whining” yet I have beat myself up over this like it was some kind of weakness for years. Ya’ll have taught me to be more kind to myself.

So, when your days get busy and you think you never get through to anyone with whatever it is you spend your day doing, keep in the back of your mind that you just never know just how many people you DO touch.