Sorry I've Been Gone So Long

Hey, y'all --

I'm sorry I've been gone so long... but I promise I'll make up for it and try to post more often.

I've just come out of a 3 week long depression. It was really bad, but I learned a lesson, one I want to pass along to you. I've still been seeing my therapist every week, and she taught me this.

She says your outsides reflect your insides.

Here's the case in point. Having bipolar disorder, when I get depressed, I just don't clean my house (because I'm too depressed), and I let everything just go to pot -- I let everything get messy, I let everything pile up, and then I look at it and it's just too much -- it's too overwhelming to me. So I don't do anything about it. And it just gets to looking worse and worse. And I get to feeling worse and worse. And it's just this vicious cycle. The worse the house looks, the worse I feel inside. See my point? My outside matches my inside.

If my house looks cluttered, I feel cluttered inside. If my house looks messy, I feel messy inside. If my house looks overwhelming, I feel overwhelmed inside.

So here was her advise. Just take one little part. Just one little area, and work on that. Not all of it, because that would be overwhelming. Just one little part, concentrate on just that, and clean that. And eventually, just one little part at a time, it will all get done. And it worked!

Now my house is all clean, and it looks wonderful! And now I feel clean inside, and not only did the depression go away, but I'm happy! I had lost sight of what happy feels like. Not manic, just plain happy. You wouldn't believe how wonderful this feels. I had gotten to the point that I didn't know if I would ever feel this way again -- the depression had such a hold of me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you, because I know you have bipolar disorder too, and I'm sure some of you are facing the same thing I did, like your outsides reflecting how you feel inside, and being so depressed that things just get so overwhelming to you that you feel like you're in this vicious cycle. If you have, I'd like to hear from you.

There's an ideal that says that men identify themselves with their jobs and that women identify themselves with their homes. Boy, it sure proved true in my case!

Remember that God loves you and so do I,
Michele