soul

Writing is a way of reclaiming my mind from depression, but there is a darker side to it called resistance. I won’t call it writer’s block because the same thing stands in the way of any purposeful activity or major life commitment, including the process of recovering from depression. It usually begins only after I […]

Yes, there are such things as comedies about depression. Sort of light, often romantic, oddly funny, definitely quirky, and probably not for everyone. Perhaps depression has given me a strange sense of humor, but laughing at a deadly serious illness helps me from time to time. You need to have a pretty good imagination and […]

Some Rights Reserved by capsicina at Flickr A friend sends out a poetry email every Monday, and here’s what he sent this week. Pablo Neruda, toward the end of his life, was invited to read in Caracas, Venezuela, in the great national theater there. The theater was filled with people celebrating him as the icon […]

Understanding what work means for my sense of personal identity, for a basic acceptance of who I am, has been a central issue in making progress in recovery over this past year. Yet it seems strange that both my identity and feelings of self-worth should so depend on what I do. I spent a long […]

Reading Catatonic Kid’s post, full of poetry as all of hers are, about how she experiences the disparate parts of her mind, I started thinking once more about what it is that holds me together when so much within seems to be breaking apart. I work every day to keep myself in a mindset of […]

Recently, Melinda wrote a post about the role of forgiveness in her recovery and the difficulty she has had in forgiving her unrepentant father for abusing her in childhood. Reading this made me aware that I wasn’t very clear in my own mind about the meaning of forgiveness. It is always mentioned as an obligatory […]