I went for a walk today when the weather was a bit better, but it didn’t help my mood later on. At the moment, I am feeling frustrated, angry inside, and like I am feeling the effects of SAD, which, trust me, is not altogether uncommon in the Pacific Northwest.

Depression hasn’t hit me so deeply yet, but has in the past.  Four or five years ago, I was thinking about suicide on a daily basis- I knew I wouldn’t do it and I never will- but my dark thoughts permeated through everything I did. I confided in the people around me about my feelings. It didn’t help as you might think- they freaked out and couldn’t understand why I would think about dying. For a large portion of my depression, I just slept and did nothing; I turned to the web for help, but didn’t find the solace I was looking for. I was jobless, living with family, and had almost no hope.

I started taking classes in the small town I lived in at the community center with some truly amazing women. On average, the participants in my writing class were around 36 years older than me, had blue-ish hair, and were much more liberal than anyone I had ever met from their generation. The class was called, “Writing about Your Life” and it was empowering for me in many ways- I not only got to hear their life stories, I got to share some of my more interesting Bipolar stories with them, which was something I had never done before.

I started volunteering at the local library. At first, I felt like I hailed from the “Land of the Living Dead” at the counter checking out books. I pretended to be friendly when all I wanted to do was go home and sleep. It got better, but not as quickly as you might imagine or as much as I would have hoped. The books surrounding me did not have the osmosis effect I had imagined they would.

I called my doctor on my phone every day to check in with him about my medication, which was not doing its job- I wasn’t balanced and the fact that I was still thinking about death all the time was my first clue. Slowly, he raised the levels of the anti-depressant, being careful to prevent me from slipping into mania.

I started volunteering at two schools- the elementary school and the community college. Most of the volunteers at the elementary school were moms there to support their kids. They couldn’t understand why I was there. I could- the kids made me feel better and I enjoyed my time there. At the community college, I tried to help Adult Education students with their writing- this, again, did not always go as I had intended (teaching students to write about carving a Jack-o-Lantern apparently not being my forte), but it gave me a perspective on those who weren’t as fortunate as I was and who were trying to make their lives better.

Slowly, I came out of the dark and started to find my way back to myself again. The medicine helped, but that was only a part of it. Doing the things that were most important to me made all the difference.