Depression

Being sick is so convenient when one is depressed. When I'm sick, I spend all day burrowed in blankets, alternately napping, sipping apple juice, or sounding my little digital shouts via facebook and webcomic forums. I also watch dust swirls in the sunbeams in my bedroom. Which, consequently of the depression, is all I want to do anyway. The problem arises on my good days, when I still find myself fighting to get out of bed in the morning, as if my stomach was full of bricks, my bones made of lead.

I feel like there are two ways to deal with feeling depressed. The first way is to do things that take one's mind of off the depression. I am an expert at the distraction technique (those little digital shouts can consume hours of a day if I let them); Over the last two weeks I've read six books, and watched an ENTIRE season of a Korean drama, Secret Garden. The problem with the distraction technique is that it soothes, but doesn't heal. Inevitably at the end of the day, the depression I've been trying to avoid always comes back in feverish anxiety as I'm trying to get to sleep. So, I have to try the second way of dealing with depression, which is to try to figure out the cause of the unhappiness and then try to fix it.

I don't mean for this blog to be depressing. Rather, I'm trying to stay optimistic and hopeful. I'm trying to do things that eliminate, not just distract from, my depression. Some of the things in my life that make me unhappy right now are not going to have an immediate fix. My three main goals for myself when I got back from Korea were to get a driver's license, get a job, and move out of my parents house. All of those things are going to take a while to do, but in the meantime I am trying to get together regularly with friends, to volunteer at a schools (I just started an ESL class with the world's MOST ADORABLE kindergartners), to have a more active prayer life and (luckily for you, I suppose) to discipline myself to write.* When you see this blog, you can read it with a vicarious triumph, noting another day that I did more than just lay abed--I wrote. A small victory perhaps, but a victory nonetheless.

-Renee

PS: For those of you who will, please pray for me to be and do more than my fallen flesh desires right now.

*By writing, I mean in increments > 140 characters. I just got twitter and I have been on... more than a lot