A Journey (Part 1)

Recently I told a friend that I had been treated for depression and she asked, "How did you overcome it?"

I gave her a rather inaccurate answer. I said that I had gotten tired of worrying about everything, so I stopped. Over the next few days I realized the answer I had given was wrong, or at the very least grossly incomplete. I told her about my mistake and realized that I couldn't really give an easy answer to her question.

Over the last two days, I have been thinking about the answer and doing my best to write it down. What resulted is the next eight (at least) posts that you will read on this blog, and they are more of a reflection on the question than an answer. As you will see, I don't really know the answer; all I have are suspicions. So here we go.

"How did you overcome your depression?"

1. I got tired of thinking about it.
What I meant when I said this originally was that I slowly got more and more sick of asking myself if I was happy or not. It consumed so much of my time and energy that I sort of started to do it less and less. I think that a great source of my depression was the fact that I would worry and feel guilty about the fact that I could be depressed when I had everything in life going for me. Eventually when I was depressed I would just let myself sit there and be depressed, and I think that helped the guilt go away.
When I gave this as a reason, my friend replied: “So it just lifted.”
I guess, but it happened over a period of months and, I suppose, years. I wouldn’t say that it just lifted, but rather that it very slowly and imperceptibly dissipated. Mostly anyway.

Part 2