The world has a funny way of changing you into the next person you are to be in this life.

As I have been ill these past few weeks with a chest infection, I have lost track of the two capsules a day I was to take of my antidepressants, only taking one most days. Yet, a strange feeling came over me with a reduction of the medication. Not worry I could go back. But courage.

I felt that I needed no help. Well no professional help. No psychiatrist or counsellor opening my files and putting me on show with a variety of outlandish assumptions about what defined me. I could do it alone. I would firstly learn to love myself. That is the key to all. Then I would work upon discovering triggers. Everyday. Non-stop. No rest. No relaxation. Stressful stuff! But that's how I feel about most things in life, without focusing on my depression each day, so why not be productive in my distress?

I could do it.

Off my own back. Fight this demon.

At first my plans were to destroy the deep blackness inside of me. Suffocate it with happy colours and style. But that is exactly how I fell into an earlier relapse last year. Pushing it further down.

But then I realised, it's not about storming in, all guns blazing, chucking the icy bucket of water over that dark ocean. It's about accepting it's there inside you. The harsh waves crashing against the shore. But just like the movement of the tide, coming in and out, there is a natural ebb and flow to the movement of emotions. Some days the ocean is lost in the horizon. Other days, its nibbling at your feet. Accepting that you will always walk alongside the tide is the first step. Yet the hardest.

I am grateful for that horrible cough. An incredibly insignificant moment in the grand scheme of things, yet it was the first stepping stone to effective recovery.

John

A Moodscope member.