:: :: a different kind of lost :: ::

As I have started feeling better, cell by cell, I’ve found that even though my days are easier and my depression less severe, that depression is harder.

The first few weeks, it was easy: my emotions were fighting one another like toddlers rushing out the door to the playground, all trying to be the first one out. I easily sat with my mom one day while I was home and made a long list of all the things I was feeling: sad, out of control, overwhelmed… I was a smorgasbord of bad mental stuff.

But now it’s harder. I don’t know what questions are still beating insistently through my veins.

If there were an MRI for depressive thoughts, I’d love to take one because I just want to have all my problems on the table so I can just deal with them. How bad could they be, lurking in there? What’s going on inside me still that won’t give me access?

And how can I start to excavate my depression’s hidden secrets? How do I know where to dig? How do I know what questions to ask myself? Where do I go from here? I feel lost, but in a different way than before. Before I felt like I’d lost my self, like I’d never ever know myself again. Now I feel like I’m lost in the labyrinth of my own healing. I don’t know where to go next. I don’t know how to keep getting better other than to just keep waking up every morning and waiting for it to happen.

It’s weird to resign myself so fully to something, but also kind of wonderful. I can’t force my healing. I can’t speed it up. I can’t know how to get better until I know how to get better. It’s almost cruel, yet sort of freeing.