I’ve been talking about depression less, lately. Well, a lot less, lately. (I noticed I’ve dropped about ten subscribers, which may or may not be related, eheh.) Instead I’ve been talking about books, writing, things I’m doing. I might as well tell you why this is, and what you can expect from me, from this blog, in the coming months. (I’m going to talk about depression, my opinions about it and antidepressants, and some faith-type-stuff, so be forewarned.)

My attitudes have changed recently towards depression. I’ve been on medication for a year on the 9th; I intend to stay that way for another year, at which point I will evaluate my options and hopefully go off it, permanently. I no longer believe that depression is my “problem”. Depression is a symptom of greater personal problems, in my case, and I believe this is so for a lot of people “suffering from depression”. Someone close to me is going through the initial months of diagnoses, and she too has greater issues of which depression is a symptom.

Am I saying I don’t believe in depression? No. I do believe pharmaceuticals make it preferable, if not downright lucrative, for doctors to prescribe medication for every kind of symptom, and I believe a lot of people in the United States are taking pills instead of dealing with the real issue(s) in their lives, because it’s easier. I make no bones about it: facing your problems, your flaws, your “issues” is not for the faint of heart. It is not a party. It is not fun happy time. It is painful, agonizing, depressing. It involves tears and runny noses and sobbing prayers in the dark. It is facing your true nature, in some cases, and having to accept that, in order for the healing and moving-on to begin.

Before last August I really had no idea how truly horrible a person I could be. By that time, I’d nearly lost everything I loved. Since then, the battle has raged in fits and starts of growth, lapses of backtracking, progress, regress, mistakes made out of paranoia of making further mistakes. Since then, I’ve gained a modicum of self-confidence, of self-worth. I’m still learning. I’m still stumbling once in a while, but not as often, not in the past couple of weeks. I’m leaning heavily on God; I’m praying for His help to overcome all of these personality traits I loathe. The more I do this, the better life gets.

And so I haven’t posted anything “meaty” in a few weeks. I admit that. I haven’t. I’m busy, I’m trying to work on three or four sites at once, I’ve had meetings like crazy. I haven’t been working very efficiently. I’m addled with working on Olivine world-building, research and reading fiction like it’s going out of style. I feel like I’ve been consistently happier in the past few weeks than I have been in a long, long time. Sometimes I just don’t get to blogging; sometimes a meme is a welcome diversion. I’m thinking a lot about books and writing, and since that’s ultimately what I want to do with my life, I feel no need to make excuses for that.

I’m trying not to whine. I don’t feel like whining, in truth. My problems are many and varied, but part of my frequent prayer and constant reliance on God is that I’m not stressing out so much about said problems, and as such I haven’t felt like talking about them. If you were here for the whining, the complaining and bemoaning and confuse-o-posting, I’m sorry. Trying to cut down on that.

If you want to hear how I’m coping with depression, well, the short answer is that I’m on medication temporarily and I’m turning to God. I’m looking in the mirror as intrepidly as I can. Whatever faith you might be, I’d encourage you to do the same. But I no longer regard depression as a problem to be overcome; merely a symptom of far deeper problems in the way I think, act and react.

The problems I’m dealing with are issues of deep-set personality traits. Things learned at a tender age. I can’t offer a step-by-step to overcoming those, either. Mostly I can tell you, as above, to turn to God and take a hard look at yourself. One particularly hard hurdle for me was overcoming pride. It’s not that I was proud of my rudeness, my terrible habits in relationships, my lack of sympathy, my wandering attention span, and my autonomy. It was more that I could hardly force myself to admit that I really had these problems, when deep down I knew damn well I did. A lot of the confuse-o-posts were a knee-jerk reaction of mine, whereby I cannot comprehend the problem because I refuse to believe it’s true. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the saying goes.

I am slowly learning mood stability. How to get out of a bad mood, how to stay in a good mood, how not to stay focused on a minor blip and turn it into a mountain. How to “mellow out”, man. I am learning to be less negative, less paranoid. I am learning how to be a friend, how to sympathize, how to listen and not automatically (subconsciously) start entertaining myself the moment I lose interest. Heck, how to not lose interest, let’s just leave it at that!

It will take me a long time yet to unlearn all these wonderful things I was taught when I was young. In ways I never dreamed possible, I took the worst of the bad traits presented to me and combined them in mind-bending ways. I am a mess and God is helping me to get better.

Now, given the above paragraphs, if readers are interested in those things, those I can talk about. I can talk about “breaking the cycle”, why most people don’t and why you have to be nearly batty to try. If interested, please comment. This is all a vast experiment on my part.

I will say, however, that I will continue to discuss books and writing. I will endeavor to interject more personal stuff as I have “free time”. When you’re overworked and you sit with a browser tab open to the “Write Post” page all day, and never get to it, by 5:30 you look at it with dread and close it with remorse. I was posting nearly-daily and I’m trying to get back there, but please bear with me.

This is one gigantic way of saying that I realize my blog has passed into a new season of posting, and the subject matter is changing, has changed. If you go through the archives and sample random months over the life of this blog, you will notice that it’s done so several times before, and this is another one. As I change and my life changes, so does my posting. I realize there hasn’t been an abundance of “me” in it lately, and that I intend to change.

For those still in my Feedburner stats, thanks for hanging in. :D