The Harsh Toll of Living with Depression and how I got free
My name is David; I’ve dealt with depression all my life in one way or another. Most of the time the depression has been mild and has had no major effect on my life. But at times it’s been severe and it’s cost me a business, jobs, relationships, and nearly cost me my life. Roughly fifteen years ago I started down a path of deepening depression. The consequences of which cost me dearly as the fabric of my life frayed and fell apart. The black dog of depression dragged me down to an almost unrecognizable version of myself.
My confidence had been left in pieces and at times I would simply stay in bed. I say at times, but what I mean is more than I’d like to think about. I feared interactions with people. It was all I could do to concentrate on accomplishing simple tasks, let alone lead a productive and social life. I was letting customers down and not finishing my work. Social situations were painful and left me feeling I had nothing to offer the world. The vision I had for the future that once was full of excitement for the future had dimmed into bleakness.
Don’t scale back your life
I began to scale back my expectations of my life. That was on the positive days; the days I felt I had a future at all. At the time that things started to get bad I was working a full-time job and simultaneously building a wedding photography business. Things were going well. I’d honed my skills; gotten comfortable in business and had plans to make it my full-time job. But the darkness of depression robbed me of everything. Both my full time job and my business required a lot of social activity and a lot of concentration. But I simply didn’t have the energy anymore.
Many years after this free fall had begun I found myself out of work for nearing a decade. My life had just come to a complete stop. Depression was everything left. My mind circled looking for answers and finding dead ends. Memory was failing and for every step forward I would take five steps back or simply forget what had helped. Hope was lost. The pit of despair had consumed me. I contemplated suicide all the time. It was always there in the back of my mind.
The Power of Never Giving up
But I’d not given up entirely. I continued to research depression, it’s causes, and its treatment. Over these past fifteen years I’ve tried many things to get relief. I’ve made lots of mistakes along the way too. Through long hours of studying and contemplating the answers I finally made some breakthroughs.
Step by step I began stringing the things that helped together. My results were getting better. The linchpin was when I realized that despite figuring out steps that were helping, they only worked if I remembered them and acted on them daily. My memory had become untrustworthy. I wrongly assumed that I’d lost at the genetic lottery, so I was always going to be limited by memory problems.
But I came up with the hypothesis that depression must effect memory. A bit of research confirmed it. There were several studies making the connection between depression and memory loss. The memory degradation wasn’t permanent, but I did need to compensate for it. The answer was to write down “The Plan”. To start with The plan was simply an incomplete letter I wrote to myself and stored in my phone as a reminder. The reminder helped. Especially when my mind was overwhelmed with turbulent thoughts and fears. That letter to myself became the plan by which I got free from depression. If you follow these practical steps you will find relief as I did. It is the culmination of the steps that worked and that linchpin of reminding yourself of it daily. It’s very easy to follow and you can start now. Stop living with depression and get free.