Its been a strange year. My 30th year. Can’t say it was the best. Probably one of the most personally challenging years of my life. All while two of my closest friends went through the greatest challenges of their lives. My problems seem to pale in comparison to what they went through, but I feel like we have all grown exponentially… at least for me, finding strength and inspiration in them. It was a year of growth and acceptance…
Well it’s interesting how this came up, but no longer important. Earlier this year I was asked what my five favorite things in life were. Embarrassingly, I really struggled with this. Not so much because there aren’t things that I enjoy, but because I started to realize that the things I valued so much in life had been absent from my life for a very long time. There wasn’t much I would get excited about. “Fun stuff” became something to break the monotony, or something to past the time, not something joyful.… I knew that I had been just going through the motions for quite sometime. That I was no longer striving to create joy in my life. That my spirit had dimmed and I was not excited by anything anymore.
I guess the wake up call, or the bottom, came when I slipped into severe depression after I coming off oxycodone. I had surgery in spring that I had been putting off for several years. I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant but I don’t think I really thought about how hard it was going to be… and drug withdrawals were really never on the radar. Of course, the withdrawal was not the sole source of my depression but it certainly had my mind in a weird place. I even got prescribed antidepressants, however because of an insurance snafu I didn’t receive them until 10 days after they were prescribed… in the mean time a friend gave me a book that opened my eyes a bit. By the time I finally got the antidepressants, I was ready climb out of the hole on my own. I never took the pills.
Rebuilding:
It is not easy to pick yourself up, especially when you have been sliding for years. I guess I just realized that I didn’t want to live a lackluster life and that only I could do something about it. It is a struggle everyday and I am not out of the woods yet, in fact the woods may always be in site. Depression is a self defeating disease, because only you can drag yourself out of it. Pills and counseling can help, but the onus is on you to find a real solution, not just a remedy for the symptoms.
I let go of a lot things this year that I had been carrying around on my shoulders. While some baggage never goes away, I’ve been better about not letting it weigh me down. I found forgiveness in others, in life, and most of all in myself this year. I didn’t do anything or say anything to anybody… just loosened the grip.
Heroes:
There was this guy that wrote an editorial column for the local newspaper when I was in high school and he had written a story about one of my friends from MDA camp. It was such a nice article that my grandma and I became instant fans. She would save the paper for me whenever he had a column. It turned out that he was good friends with one of my high school teachers and word got back to him that my grandma and I were fans. So one year in his end of the year article he put a special thank you in the column to me and my grandma for reading his column every Sunday. I will never forget how special that made us feel… so in keeping with that here are my heroes of 2008:
Thanks in every way.
Rose and Jo
Big Guns
Mom
Ytram
Eric
Casey
Sarah
Jess
Mike
Jim
Stan
Larae
The Avett Brothers
The Two J Whaley’s
Christina & Anna. The randomness of the circumstances that brought us all together are fascinating to me… the experience can never be choreographed or duplicated again. We will never forget you, and may you never know or understand what you did for us.
I don’t believe in fate, destiny or a higher power (in the religous sense), but I am intrigued by those ideas, especially when something random happens to me. I know that doesn’t really make sense, but I can’t really clarify either. I believe in energy. I believe opportunities present themselves all the time, you just have to be open to them… and to be open you have to be in control of yourself. I believe in universal checks and balances. This was a turbid year, but the waves have calmed and balance is returning. In the last part of the year I feel like the universe has paid up on some debts it owed… or maybe I just reached my hand out to accept.