D is for Depression

Depression sucks! It sucks the joy and colour out of everything around you, makes you feel grey yourself and as if you're wrapped in grey, heavy cotton wool blanket of stiflingness. It makes your head stuffy, your legs turn to lead when it comes time to get out of bed and everything tastes bland.

I found my old notebook from my schooldays last week when I was going through boxes of junk, preparing piles of stuff to send to charity shops or to the dump to make space. I've been here 18 months now & there are boxes I have yet to open, let alone actually unpack. Part of that has been physical - after both operations, I had to take it easy with lifting and stretching but part has been mental too - they contain my old life and all it's memories and I just didn't feel strong enough to clear them.

I'm not sure I'm strong enough now but I have to make a start - clearing out the old to make way for all the new stuff I have planned. Not only that, if my hopes & dreams become reality, I won't be able to take most of it with me anyway, with shipping being so expensive!

I cleared a huge space in my wardrobe too - clothes I'll never be able to wear again either because the cut is wrong or because I just don't like the way they look now. I need to go shopping for a whole new wardrobe and try to find a new style that suits my new body shape. That was harder than I expected it to be - I thought I'd pretty much written those old clothes off  but it seems a small part of me still wants to be shapely.


Anyway, back to the notebook - it held scraps of paper & mementos of my teen years including poems I wrote, full of the usual teenage angst. Some of them however, still hit a chord with me now. Could I have been suffering with depression even that far back?

Loneliness

Alone, all on her own

sad, moody and bored.

She stands on a littered kerb,

hearing nothing but emptiness.

She's cold and unwilling,

she sees only the uninhabited houses.

A bedraggled cat scampers across the still scene.

But the girl notices nothing,

she is alone, all on her own.

This was me, aged 12. The others are much in the same vein although I obviously discovered boys & they became more love lost type poems then. Could I really have had such a bleak outlook even then? It's hard to remember now but I do remember having cuddles with my Dad, crying because I didn't fit anywhere.

I've talked about depression before - I don't know if it's the long, lonely winter, stress from being so far from my love or just hormones on the fritz but the Black Dog is sniffing around my door. Luckily, sunshine is one of my cures and we are heading into Spring. I'm going to fight this sucker, I am not going to let it drag me down again. I've got way too much to do!

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