And so the story begins.

Hello Chums.
Well, Wednesday marked a year since my grandma died.  Surprisingly I had a peaceful feeling about it, and I think it's because it was time to let go.  I think that sounds a little harsh, but she had been fighting cancer for 3 years and it was beyond painful to see her that way.  She had nothing left to live for, and I mean that in the best way possible.  Of course her family misses her more than words could explain, but she lived an epic life.  It was time.  I'm not sharing this to have a pity party, but to celebrate her.  We all love you and miss you grandma and we know you're up there watching us.

I think grandma dying represented a lot more than her physical death.  It represented a lot of things that died inside myself, whether they were good or whether they were bad and needed to go.  Now hang on, this isn't gonna be a morbid post like I've already made it sound so don't leave lol.  And I wanna explain this, this being my depression, to help other people who are going through the same thing, because they shouldn't have to go through this and if they are going through it they shouldn't have to go through it alone.  I also wanna share because it's just a huge part of who I am, and it's a lot of what this blog will be about.  Moving on--So a week or so after grandma died is when I started going to counseling for my depression, or rather when I found out I had it.  I wasn't depressed because my grandma died, it just happened to be shortly after her death when we found out.  At first I was way excited to go to counseling because at that point the depression wasn't bad and I had a tremendous amount of hope that we would be able to get rid of it.  The first couple months of counseling were awesome and I made a lot of progress.  I started seeing my counselor less and less because we thought it was gone forever.  LOL wow were we wrong.  About mid October I started feeling kind of depressed again and I had no idea why.  I didn't think much of it because I thought 'oh well I'll just go back to counseling and it will be fixed.'  Wrong again.  It only got worse.  It turned into the deepest, darkest, and most twisted way of life I had ever known.  It physically hurt, it made me physically sick, and I didn't know if I was gonna make it through.  There were a lot of things about this time around that just utterly confused me.  Before, the depressive episodes would only last a couple of weeks and when I started to feel better it seemed to happen overnight.  I didn't feel like I actually did any work.  I would just wake up and be ecstatic.  And at the beginning there was no fear of it coming back and no fear that it would last forever.  But the second time around, all I could ask was why.  Why did it come back?  Why is it so much worse now?  Why won't it go away?  If it came back after such a long period of being happy, what's stopping it from ever being gone?  What if I'm never happy again?  That was all I could think about.  My mind just went in circles and circles with those questions.   This had gone on a month now, and the anxiety got worse and worse each day.  Then the pain turned into numbness.  I had never felt numbness to that extent before.  Some people say felling nothing is better so at least your not sad.  And I have to strongly disagree.  When you're numb you can't be happy, you can't be mad that your not happy, and you can't be sad that your numb.  Sometimes you try and cry just to feel anything at all.  I can't describe how horrible it is to look out at everything you're blessed with, and not be able to feel a single thing.  I thought I would feel better that I at least wasn't depressed anymore, even if I wasn't happy.  Still wrong.  Feeling all the pain in this world is better than feeling nothing at all.  So at this point it had been two solid months of confusion, pain, numbness, sickness, anxiety, cluelessness, and fear.  One thing I began to wonder about, and something that began to eat at me was why hadn't I felt God's presence?  Why didn't I get even a little relief out of prayer or digging through scripture?  Why do I continuously pray just to have no results?  But I kept reading and praying and tried to keep the faith alive.  And my goodness, am I glad I did.
I'm gonna stop there though, that's only half the journey.  Night kiddies.