What is Recovery?

I guess the first question should be "What is depression?" a good friend of mine who is all sorts of awesome came up with a pretty good description in her blog post entitled "Depression is Crazy, Stupid, Dumb"

For me, depression was just nothingness, blackness, darkness, emptiness.. and anger, possibly due to the pretend happiness, because "What have I got to be depressed about?"

I have spent six years in recovery. The first two years were a hard fight. One where you're already exhausted from having spent four years in the middle of that dark storm cloud, just trying to get up every day, where you're losing every single day. Every. Single. Day. Then you start on that slow road towards the light, and you can't do it without help. You need an army behind you, because no matter how much "you deserve to be happy" you CAN NOT DO IT... JUST CAN NOT!!

Eventually you can do things without help, but you keep fighting, because if you stop fighting, the dark cloud WILL come back. You probably think of yourself as 'better' but the undercurrent is that you're still swimming, just not as much against the current as across it.

You proclaim to the world how much better things are. And they are. Honestly. ANYTHING has to be better than the blackness.

But that dark cloud is still there. It's just way off on the horizon. So far off, sometimes you forget it was ever there, you forget how hopelessly awful things were when you were caught in that storm, and of course you forget what an amazing job you did fighting it.

Now, the problem is, when you forget about depression, that's when it can creep up on you. If you're facing it dead in the eyes every day and have beat it before, you know you can beat it again, and you can put in place all the things to do it again, and to keep it at bay, but what if you don't notice?

I know I am better, in that I am a better person for having fought depression and come through the other side, but sometimes I forget. There is no CURE. There are better times, times when the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff, or when the good stuff makes me forget the bad stuff. Sometimes I need the good stuff in order to pretend the bad stuff isn't there. I don't know to what extent the good days are just me pretending. Subconsciously maybe? Self preservation? Denial?

Certainly things have never got even remotely close to how they were over six years ago when I was admitted to a mental health unit. I think it's easy to disregard how close the cloud may be when you've been in such a bad place.

It's all relative isn't it? But is it good compared to 'depression', or is it bad compared to 'happiness'?

Am I being melodramatic when I have a bad day because it's not nearly as bad as it used to be? If so, what if that bad day turns into a bad week, or a bad most of a month? Surely that's 'bad'?

But I'm kidding myself, surely, if I expect to be happy every single day. So, I take a day off here and there, I try to do the things I do, try to exercise, try to sleep well but not too much, I try to be around people, and try not to succumb, but also have to try not to pretend everything is rosey.

My name is Alex.
Six years ago I was hospitalised due to depression.
I had spent four years fighting, and losing.
I spent another two years fighting really hard to recover, with professional support.
I spent the next four years in an abusive relationship, but still improved despite that. That was JUST ME! ON MY OWN!
I still have bad days, but mostly have good days.
Regardless of whether it is a good day or not, I still fight every single day.
Every. Single. Day.
And... I am awesome!