I was talking to my therapist about various things during our last session, and one of them was how much better I feel for having started writing again.  She knows that I blog and that I keep my journal.  I’m not sure if she reads my personal blog or this one– I suppose telling her about them keeps me honest.  I was also showing her a poetry series that I was working on, since some of it had to do with other things we were talking about.  She handed my journal back to me and said something simple but perspective-altering– “what a relief to recover something you used to do for pleasure.”

When I think of how many pink cloth diaries and wire-bound notebooks and scratch pads I used to fill with bad poetry, stories, rantings to myself, and every other musing, prosaic and poetic when I was an adolescent and teen… all I can say is I did it because I enjoyed it.  It gave me relief.  I wasn’t sharing what I wrote (and it was before the internet, anyway) or expecting criticism– I just wrote for my Self.  And I just . . . stopped, lost that part of myself with my first really bad depression in college.  I didn’t recover my writing in any consistent fashion until after my diagnosis in 2005.

I’ve always let peter out things I really enjoyed when I entered a bad depression.  As depression’s lead blanket would descend, causing me to lose my joy in life, and as my insecurities would foster a deeper depression, I would become convinced I didn’t deserve happiness, and would withdraw from life.  I would withdraw from, or even sabotage friendships.  I would stay in my dark bedroom all day.  I would let the phone ring and ring and ring.  And I would let the thoughts circle around, in ever-tightening spirals in my mind, until it was impossible to break out of the vortex until my brain chemistry righted itself.  But now, I know more about the whys and hows of my depression, and am slowly getting better about seeing the black cloud on the horizon.  I know now that if I allow myself to back away from all the things I enjoy, then it’ll be worse than if I just grit my teeth and at least go through the motions. The activity itself is therapeutic.  So now, I resolve to do the things I used to do for pleasure, whether I feel like it or not.  I think that “practice makes perfect” has especial meaning when depression is keeping you pinned to your bed.

Write every day, for the release, for getting the circling thoughts out of my head.  Get out in the sunshine every day, because the secret to bipolars is that we are all part plant and part cat, and need sunshine to stay sane.  Meditate every day and do yoga three times a week, so I can let go of some of the circling thoughts that don’t really require writing out.  Call a far-away friend once a week, and ask them about what’s going on with them.  Have lunch or dinner with a friend at least once, preferably twice a week, because I have good friends, who care, who make me laugh, who deserve my attention.  And try not to forget the things I like to do for fun, because the only thing better than the relief of recovering that joy is never really having lost it.