Life Is Difficult But You Have To Embrace It Anyway....

What choice is there?  Well, we're aware of the alternative aren't we, but that just isn't acceptable - surely one suicide in the family is enough to bear?

I'll start by saying that depression's a terrible thing, a really nasty condition which creeps up on you when you least expect it, but I'll tell my story as best as I can.  There's a history of it in my family, so I've inherited a tendency towards it; the first time I ever recall experiencing it was one Christmas when I was about nine or ten - I'd contracted bronchitis and it laid me low, both physically and mentally.  I kept on thinking that my mother would die and as she was my only surviving parent, that was pretty awful.  From then on I've suffered from fairly regular bouts of it, it's improved as I've got older but it still creeps up on me.  I have cripplingly low self-esteem which is hard to deal with; in the 1990s when I dated I tried to make myself feel better by dating a selection of totally unsuitable emotional fuckwitty men.  Casual sex is awful: it tears out my soul.  One prime example of this is when my brother died in 1995, I was so depressed that I could barely function and the emotionally stunted tool of a bloke I was seeing at the time wanted to take advantage of that situation - how pleasant of him, I hope karma has come and bitten you firmly on the bottom.

I've never really taken much medication for clinical depression, often with a combination of exercise and a light box in the winter, it clears itself.  I have had counselling though, two tranches of it to be exact and like in a Woody Allen film, it's really addictive - just talking about yourself and your feelings for ninety minutes a week is really cathartic, albeit slightly neurotic.  I'm actually going to study psychology at City Lit - the course begins in a couple of weeks.  I think it'll be illuminating in so many ways.

So here's the thing, we all get sad at times, but sometimes it's worse.  What I really would like to underline is: don't use people - they have feelings too you know and it's never easy.  I keep on finding that people aren't particularly interested in the characters which surround them - it's seemingly getting much more uncaring out there.  Perhaps this is written from the perspective from a woman who has finally let all the tears out she's been hiding away for so long, but it feels good to be able to express it in words anyway.