The Ticket

If you think depression is something that ‘disappears’ forever after counsling or healing or by taking medication, you’re highly misinformed.

It may be gone, but there are days it doesn’t feel that way, triggering you back into a 2, 4, or 24 hour funk. 

If you think it’s something that intelligent people or Christians or people from well put together families don’t encounter, then you haven’t gotten close enough to know anyone or you haven’t experienced the “we don’t talk about XYZ/Bruno/fill in the blank” in your family. 

Like anything else in life positive or negative, depression rewires your brain. And sometimes those wires don’t always reconnect the same way once you’re healed. I may still have to keep working on myself, and I have healed, but pieces don’t always fit the same way once broken. It doesn’t mean I’m less of me. It just means I put my pieces back differently. 

Depression and its aftermath are smart as an octopus. It seeps into the smallest crevasses you didn’t know still existed in your soul. It knows your insecurities and preys on and latches onto each one with every bit of its 8 tentacles. Give any of it an inch and it takes a thousand miles. 

It haunts you along with every other big or little T trauma from your past—robbing your time and tears and sleep. 

It’s a liar. It makes you think you’re one bad day away from another and another and a tunnel with no way out. It has you believing you’ll never make it out alive. That you’re not really out. That you’re still depressed. That you’re stupid. That it’s your fault. That there’s something wrong with you. That’s this ledge is better jumping off of than being saved from. 

I maybe 6 years in the clear, but I promise you I still lose my shit at least once a month. Some nights I cry myself to sleep praying I’ll wake up not in a fight with my own mind. 

There are many things I am reminded of daily, though, that tell me, Amy, look forward and keeping moving because you’re rocking this life. You’re doing MORE than ok. You’re trying. You’re still putting in the work. 

It’s sunrises and sunsets. It’s my friends and family. It’s my beautiful and weirdo dogs. It’s getting lost in books and music. It’s workouts and runs and weights. 

But mostly it’s my imagination and dreams for the future. My foresight is not broken anymore—and that changes everything. I can imagine myself in my past. I mourn things and people I’ve lost, which I hate doing.

But I can imagine my future. I know what and who I want in it. I have a dream board and bucket list and hope. 

And that is my ticket out.