The DU Lounge

Re-paving your neuropathways. It's key to mental health imo. It's helped me through all the obstacles and challenges I've personally had in dealing with life as it is, and what I wish it was.

It helps to handle the fear... filters it down to the moment. Ridding the pain from the past and the anxieties of the unknown/the future.

Focusing on what makes us whole, what makes us inspired, what makes us ourselves again is our choice. If we focus on the negative only, of course it may take us down. What we spend time doing, reading, talking about, listening to, etc... will take up space in our existence. I'd rather gear the former, toward what space I do have. It's not infinite, and I "just choose" because it's in my power and no one else's to do so. We have so much more power over our well-being than we think. We underestimate our strength, most certainly. If we know this, we must remember this, tell ourselves this, when we most need to hear it. I'm a staunch believer in this.

I look at it this way, if someone told me 35 years ago what I would go through, I would've jumped off a bridge. There is NO way I would have believed I could handle it. Now, here I am, fucking wiser, helping others when I can, grateful for almost every challenge I faced, as it made me who I am, and I am loved (including forever loved by those who are no longer with me), and I am good and kind. I am not as bubbly as I once was lol, but that is actually something I am specifically working on. Getting back the spirit I had .. and I'm getting there! If I didn't choose to do this (intentional action), I would never reach my goal.

We really can do it, even when we have stages in our lives that are harrowing, heartbreaking, feeling more lost than we've ever been, not knowing what to do next. These are stages. They pass with time and they do change. Change is inevitable.
When I'm in that kind of hell, change is a blessing and it can be counted on. That gets me by too. Oh and I can wait it out, cuz it takes our given choice to reach our goal ~ of having joy again, living life instead of just existing in it. Nothing is more worth waiting for.

I've battled chronic depression for almost 30 years. I've had my worst time of it in the very beginning. I fought therapy at first, in fact I didn't believe it could change how I felt. I didn't realize it would help ME change how I felt. So it was me who did it, but by the support and education from individual and definitely group therapy and for many many years. I did a serious dive into this and I worked my ass off, clawing my way out of a black hole, with a dense black cloud almost lying squarely on top of it.

It's not ever been as bad as it was then, but I had a few close calls where I was approaching another major setback and I knocked down the doors into the next group & into individual therapy. It took maybe a month or two to heal and move forward. I was stronger for it. It's a process, for some like me, we may need to do this from time to time, but forever. Still.. nothing is more worth it.

I feel, and I have seen through experience, that the struggle and the tools I use in which to battle it, gave me the beautiful stretches of time that have afforded me some of the best times of my life. Now that's saying something.