As you all know, I underwent ECT treatment, from January ’19 to July ’19 and it has essentially cured my depression. Although, I much prefer to say that I am in remission, because depression is a sneaky illness, and can pop back up without warning. The one thing that I wanted to bring up is the difficulty that I’ve been facing in my recovery. As I’ve said before, depression is a normal human emotion, but clinical depression is a different beast entirely. What I dealt with was complete lack of energy or motivation. Multiple, and constant suicidal thoughts every day. Complete breakdown of self care. I just didn’t care what happened to me. I was so depressed that I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted to die, by any way possible. It might be hard to understand, but I didn’t want to inflict the pain of suicide to those close to me. However, in my mind, if I were to get hit by a truck, then I wouldn’t care less. It was a weird line that was drawn in my head. I didn’t actively seek death, but I wanted to die. Randomly, so that my mother in particular would feel the grief of me dying, but not of me taking my own life. I feel like a suicide causes more grief than just a random, unpredictable death. I don’t know, that’s just what I think, I’m probably wrong, but whatever. But the suicidal thoughts were rather annoying to say the least. They completely went against that weird rule in my head. I couldn’t take my own life…but I thought about killing myself all the time. I was so suicidal, that I would use suicide as an “out” to all the negatives in my life. Oh, I got rejected by my crush, just kill myself. Get into a fight with my mom, kill myself. You get the idea. That is probably the hardest part of my recovery. Granted, I don’t have suicidal thoughts involuntarily flooding my brain every second, but I can’t use suicide as a end-all solution anymore. I have to face my problems, head on, and try to solve them. I actually have to live my life and try to improve myself. That might sound pretty pathetic to you, but it’s something I struggle with, because I’ve never thought about it before. Like I said, I would just say I’d kill myself when anything went wrong in my life. Now I actually have to process the problem, think about it, find a solution, then act on fixing the problem. It’s a much more complex thought process now. And oddly enough, I try to live my life as efficiently as possible, and this new thought process isn’t efficient at all. I mean it’s certainly more healthy then just defaulting to suicide. I just am having trouble changing the way I think now that I’m not depressed. I feel like it’s something that’s not really talked about in mental health. What to do when you finally get control of your mental illness, and you start feeling better. It’s like, all these survival techniques that I’ve developed over the years, are suddenly useless information. I mean, I can certainly use it to try to help others, which is what I’m doing, but I don’t like having so much useless information in my head. Suicide was my answer to everything, and now I can’t use it anymore. It’s like you having the same parking spot at work for decades, then it becomes a handicapped spot. Like what do you do now? Obviously find a new parking spot, easy to say but more difficult in practice. Same with my mental health. It’s easy to identify my “depressed” thought processes, but much more difficult to change. Even that itself is harder. What I mean, is that I’ve been adverse to putting in effort to improve myself, thanks to my depression, but now I have no choice. Still adverse to the hard work, but I mean, what other choice do I have? Be depressed again? No thanks. So, I’m still pushing forwards with all my might on my recovery, but the old habits, and the occasional bumps are concerning. Depression is normal. My depression wasn’t, but the depression that I feel these days is. If you’re confused about that, read my article Mental Illness Isn’t Normal. I’m starting to write myself in circles, so I think I’ll wrap this up.

Depression and anxiety are manageable, you can get better. It’s once you do that’s the problem. You think the same way, but you’re feeling better. I guess what I’m saying is that feeling better is really just the beginning of the recovery journey. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but it’s probably a life long journey. Once you get better, you have to stay better. Life is just hard work, even more so for those of us with mental illness. So I guess we just have to buckle down and get to work. From my mind to yours, Alan Wolfgang, signing off.