I call bullshit.

I call bullshit on people saying, “You’re so brave.” Look, I know it’s a nice thought, and nicely meant, and I should be flattered and all, but the truth is, there’s no bravery involved when you have no other choices.

I simply had to find my way out of depression. Even though I was productive while I was depressed (almost freakishly so), I knew I couldn’t continue at the pace I was running at for too many more years. I’ve never had a backup plan—no parents to swoop in, no partner to stave off the hand-to-mouth scenario.

(Believe me, that’s not a complaint—you can’t buy motivation like that.)

For a not insignificant number of years, I tried to be gentle with myself. I reconciled myself with the obvious conclusion that I was doomed to be a writer-slash-artist. Rather than hide that, I tried to let it grow strong. This was when I was just beginning to get an inkling of how messed up things were; luckily, at the time, I had no inkling of the work that lay ahead. I cried to friends. I cried in therapy. I cried during massages. I cried in the car.

Oh god, all those poor ex-boyfriends.

It was all about Releasing and Getting In Touch With My Feelings.  That sounds trite, but it was what it was. Spade called. Then, after a few years, I realized that, even though I was making incremental progress in my behavioral choices, the pain I was in just wouldn’t budge.

So I manned up.

As hard as it was, I forced myself to shut some parts of my healing process down. I had to move on. I had been trying to wait ‘til everything resolved itself organically, but all of a sudden I knew that would take years longer than I had already spent. I was living with my mother, and that had to stop before I could truly get better. In order for that to stop, I had to get a better job than teaching four-year-olds how to make tiny boats for Thumbelina in the afternoons. In order for that to stop, I had to become a less cryey person in the mornings. In order for that to stop, I had to shut down. What kind of job was I ever going to get that had flexible hours and time off for uncontrollable sobbing?

So I did the corporate dance. And I liked a lot of it—it was social and I liked working hard. It seemed healthy. Made me forget my sadness a lot of the time. I got promoted time and again. But I gave too much, and so I’d burn out and feel like a failure again.

So I became a Pilates instructor. It was social, it was movement-based, it was something I loved doing anyway, and it could happen on my own schedule, around my writing and teaching artist jobs for several non-profits. It took me three years to realize that, while I loved all of those jobs, none of them paid enough, or had regular schedules, or any sort of reliable income.

So I became an Office Manager.

Except this time, instead of straight-up corporate America, I worked at a non-profit. Non-profits organizations are great to the artists who work for them, because they don’t care what you wear and there are no meetings. There’s no paid vacation, but they give you comp time. This was in early 2007, when I was first diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and all those other things I’ve blogged about before. And this was the job that supported me while I opened up all those messy things I had tucked away and worked through them. I had been blogging about them for five years, but I hadn’t actually been working on them with someone.

I was ready.

I was so ready that it actually didn’t take very long to unplug myself from the destructive and misguided thought patterns that were making me depressed. In a way, I was lucky, because my depressive behavior was caused by external events that had happened early and had sent me down the wrong path. It was like I had been working my way through a massive video game for decades, only to reach a dead end.

“Sorry, your princess is in another castle.”

When my therapist said she thought I was out of the woods, I asked if I’d have to stop coming there. I was only paying $7 a session on a sliding scale, and I pictured a long line of unhappy people on the other side of her door. She said, “Oh Hell no! We’re just getting started.”

Turns out it takes a bit of work to be not depressed. It’s like you *thought* you knew how to use a bike, but what you’d been doing all along was hoisting the bike over your head as you waded through water. Sure, it’s technically easier to ride it on pavement, but you still have to learn from scratch. You need the training wheels and the encouragement. So for the next year, once a week, I’d report back as to how things were going, and my therapist helped me calibrate my responses and find my balance.

Now it’s easy peasy.

For those of you who’ve been reading my blog since I moved to New York in late 2008, you know it’s been logistically tough. The biggest challenge was moving three times, each time leaving behind stolen possessions, leaky apartments, or a pantsless roommate. But the counterpoint to that was the good job I found at the start of the recession. And now, after almost a year and a half of uncertainty, it seems I have some slightly more solid options before me. I’m one step closer to maybe someday being a full hire with paid holidays/sick/vacation and health insurance. Maybe even two steps closer, hard to know.

What I’m trying to say, in a thousand words or less, is that if there’s a big difference between carrying a bike through water and learning to ride that bike, there’s an even bigger difference between learning to ride a bike and riding that bike well.

You remember how it feels, right? You’re wobbling along, afraid of every pothole or stick in the road, when all of a sudden you look up and realize that you’ve got this, you know this. You’ve known this all along. It’s easy. Just go headfirst, into the wind. The bumps will work themselves out.

Now that I’m no longer fighting with my bike, I find myself zooming down a wide, flat road on which there are some choices coming up. For the first time ever. Kind of. Yeah.

Now we’ll see if I’m brave.