dream

Depression comes, depression goes, and I often have no idea why. Sometimes, I suddenly break out of it through mysterious dreams that wake my whole spirit up. Those are the unexpected blessings, no more to be explained than the sudden recurrence of this illness. There are frightening dreams as well when I may be wandering […]

Dreams of depression have often marked moments of crisis or breakthrough to recovery in my experience, but it has been many years since I’ve written about them. Here is a revised version of a post – actually a journal entry – that reminded me how mysterious the cycles of the illness can be. Depression comes, […]

Dreams are what they are, and I won’t try to explain them in rational or symbolic terms. The feeling of this one was all good. It came as recovery was at last getting to be the real thing. After a long and baffling night I was running back to my hotel room. I was feeling […]

Some Rights Reserved by Elena Acin at Flickr Insightful comments by Stephany and Jane are helping me get to another stage in dealing with depression. In a previous post I started wondering if there might be a very different way of imagining and experiencing this illness. Could there be a way of adapting that started […]

Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber at Flickr When my mother died, I didn’t know what I felt. Throughout my life, I had been struggling to shed the influence of her searing and shaming words, her anger, at times rage, above all, her depression during my childhood. How many of us spend adult years still […]

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 […]