12. Diluting Depression

We are feeling pretty good today after a blip yesterday. We felt kind of down but a few things brought us back up again. One, meditation for 45 minutes. Boy did that help. It just seemed to dilute the depressed feelings until they went away almost completely. We also read more of “Nonviolent Communication” by Marshall B Rosenberg. That helped a lot. Reading about having compassion for yourself, getting rid of the “shoulds” and the “supposed to’s”. Finally, going for a bit of a walk and then going to the support group. That was the best part. It’s amazing how often we go to group feeling somewhat apprehensive, not sure of what kind of mood we are in and whether we are feeling too vulnerable. But even when we do feel really vulnerable we still end up leaving feeling good and supported and safe.

There are almost always tears there but there are so many moments of laughter too. And either way, these things seem to connect us all. We cry and laugh together. We carry our worst fears and all the bad feelings but we carry all the best stories too. The ones where we triumph over our illnesses. The ones where we fight back or find acceptance in where we are at this moment. We teach each other what we have ourselves experienced. And we all do our best to help each other. Sometimes we don’t do the right thing like we did yesterday. Here we are learning from Rosenberg’s book about how important it is to simply validate another person’s experience. But no, what did we do? We started telling someone what they should be doing, or what they should stop doing. Thank heavens the person told us outright – that’s not helpful! We weren’t upset about it but later we realized we had done the very thing that Rosenberg said not to do. Sheesh. But that’s okay because we learned. And that’s what’s really important. We did not fail. We made a mistake and we learned from it. We didn’t feel guilty or ashamed or embarrassed or mad at ourself. That’s progress for sure.

Today we are going to fill in all of our names in the different groups. The more in-depth information will come at a slower pace. So you can go to the right side of the page and look us up. We thought maybe a lengthy list of alters would bore you but looking at our stats seems to say you were interested. Hmmm .... we wonder why. Oh well, that’s your issue. Our job is to keep writing.

We have also been organizing our notes so that we can see what we have told you and more so, what we promised to tell you. Trying to keep track of everything and it’s quite a job. But fun too. Othel just loves it. He’s an organizer at heart.

So read on. And thanks for listening.