Photo Credit – stewart charles – Fotolia.com I’ve fallen back into a prolonged dark period after a few weeks of energy, buzz and a bright outlook. That’s the way it goes, riding one wave after another through it highs and crashing lows. I need (and I mean need) to write what I’m doing to counteract […]

It was more than a decade ago when I stopped believing my own fantasies of finding happiness by leaving my marriage. I could see that those dreams were only substitutes for taking a hard look at who I was. Depression, though, made that difficult task even harder by convincing me there was no one worth […]

In reading over the many responses to The Longing to Leave series, I realize those stories only get at part of the picture. Like many in the midst of depression, I wanted to blame my marriage for what I was going through and fantasized about leaving. But at the core of that fantasy was an […]

Part of my recovery consists of putting two and two together, in this case, connecting depression and stress. I’ve learned to see links between things I’ve done and felt that I never knew were connected to depression. Blowing up in rage, feeling extreme anxiety, even panic at meeting a group of new people, deep fears […]

A four-word comment from Stephany has set my mind going. “Hope is not love.” she writes in reference to my last post on the difficulty of sustaining a marriage in the midst of major depression. At the end of that brief story I used a house-building image in talking about hope, and I think that’s […]

I went to a wedding once, and the pastor had a simple message for the young couple before him as well as the rest of us packed into a beautiful church. “Marriage is survival,” he began, and the crowd of two hundred answered back in laughing groans of recognition. That statement is true of any […]