Thank you for such an amazingly raw and vulnerable share.

It resonated a lot with me - I think so many people fail to understand that clinical depression is not always a transient phase in our lives.

In my experience (I’m 35, and looking back, I’ve had this level of depression since I was 12), the bad days have got further apart - though maybe I’m only saying that because right now my anti-depressants are working well for me, and I’ve got things in my life to focus on that lift me up.

I don’t know about you, but when the bad days come, now that I’ve actually seen and acknowledged the better days, they can feel worse than ever! Simply because my benchmark for a ‘good day’ has changed…

I’m not a sci-fi fan, but the one genre novel I’ve read is Philip K Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ (it’s the book the Bladerunner movies are based on - not sure how accurately, as I’ve not seen them!). Anyway. In this book they have a ‘mood organ’ and they get to choose their mood at the start of every day. As a teenager, I was obsessed with this idea - and used to imagine being able to swap out my natural mood every day.

Years later, I now realise that waking up and not knowing my mood is actually a position of power. I get the opportunity to exploit that mood through the day, even if it’s not the mood I wanted. I use visualisation techniques a lot, and the only way I can test them is by having the bad days. So I guess I have come to see the less good days as challenges with myself, and I’m not sure I would want to be without them entirely [I’d definitely like less of them though, please, Universe!].

It’s taken me over twenty years, but I feel like I’ve finally made peace with the cyclical nature of my clinical depression.

Well. I’ve made peace with it on the good days - on the bad days, I’m STILL convinced that it will never pass and t’s never been as bad as this!

Sending love for your journey.