I can’t believe I actu­ally have time (and energy) to write today. Per­haps it’s the fact I’m en route (and in the air), antic­i­pat­ing a nice reunion with Hubby. And the fact that I’m kinda caught up with work things for now. Either way, I’m feel­ing some­what inspired today.

I flew out to South­ern Geor­gia this week for a train­ing ses­sion at a regional hos­pi­tal in the area. It was a one-​​day ses­sion, so ulti­mately I should have flown back yes­ter­day evening instead of today. Except the clos­est air­port to this town was approx­i­mately a 3-​​hour drive. Even if my ses­sion ended when it was sup­posed to end at 5 pm, I would have never made it back to Jack­sonville, FL in time to catch the lat­est flight back to Detroit. So instead, I’m catch­ing the ear­li­est flight back to Detroit today. Non-​​stop, of course!

Since my flight didn’t leave until noon, I thought I’d take full advan­tage of being close to the ocean. Just like I did a cou­ple weeks ago when I was down in Miami (South Beach, baby!) But since I had a lim­ited time, I thought … what bet­ter way to dip my toes in the water by watch­ing the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean? So early this morn­ing, I sat on the beach to watch the sun hide behind clouds; watch­ing the clouds pro­gres­sively change hues. It wasn’t the best of sun­rises; def­i­nitely not any type of “golden hour” scene. But it was beau­ti­ful, nonetheless.

As I sat on the beach, I reflected on how much I still love the ocean; still love being around water. And no mat­ter that it was cloudy and that I felt drops of rain splat­ter onto me, I felt peace­ful, con­tent and – for a brief moment – happy.

I knew some­time in mid-​​July that, despite being on med­ica­tions, my clin­i­cal depres­sion had started to resur­face. (Which, if I would have read back at some of my pre­vi­ous posts, I might have real­ized this a lot sooner.) The pre­cip­i­tat­ing fac­tor – or rather the event that forced me to re-​​seek treat­ment – was when Hubby & I offi­cially moved all our stuff from Chicago back to Detroit.

It makes sense, look­ing back now, that I would need to feel weighted down by every­thing; to feel the con­stant fatigue asso­ci­ated with depres­sion. It makes sense now why I couldn’t even to get out of bed; why I couldn’t stop the rac­ing thoughs of anx­i­ety that would keep me up at night … or, at the very least try to relax.  The truth is that in the span of a year, I had lived through many stres­sors that could have eas­ily sent any other per­son run­ning up a moun­tain, only to jump off the cliff.

Not that I’m say­ing that my stres­sors were any worse than any­body else’s stres­sors. (After all, I’m not writ­ing this to com­plain about my life.) I’m just stat­ing the facts.

I look back at 2010 in awe of myself; of hav­ing sur­vived through one of the most stress­ful years of my life. (And by that, I do mean that there were both bad and good stres­sors.) “But why am I feel­ing so mis­er­able now?,” I remem­ber ask­ing myself in the begin­ning of August.

I had no answer at that time, but today I real­ize that this was exactly what hap­pened when deal­ing with my depres­sion the first time around. But that time, it took three years after my failed IVF to real­ize that I hadn’t even begun to deal with my loss. At least this time, it only took 9 months from the last major life-​​stressor to real­ize I needed help again. And two months from mid-​​July to finally do some­thing about it.

I’m slowly begin­ning to feel the fog lift. And by slow, I think of the “Slowsky” tur­tles in that one TV com­mer­cial (who, coin­ci­den­tally, just recently had a baby … WTF?). Over the past year, there have been moments of bright col­ors scat­tered amongst the other days of gray. There were those days where I felt brave enough to face the world amongst those other days where I just didn’t want to deal with any­thing. But it seems like that those moments of hap­pi­ness – brief as they can be – are hap­pen­ing just a tad more fre­quently than before. And I guess that’s some­thing to be proud of.

One thing is for cer­tain … even when the sun goes down in life, it even­tu­ally rises again. Here’s hop­ing for brighter days ahead.

*****

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