By, Carol M.

I am an addict and a depressive. I wish I were manic depressive, but I have never experienced the up, just the down. Getting to the “almost OK” has been a struggle all my life. My first attempt at suicide was at eleven. Depression is a disease. In many ways it’s like addiction. Something goes wrong with your thinking, and a lot of it is chemical changes in the brain. When you use, people say, “control yourself.” When you’re down, the same people say, “snap out of it.” If I could have just snapped out of either one of these disease, I’d have done it long ago!

Now that I’m clean I don’t seem to have as many bouts with depression as I did, but when one comes, it hits like a sledge hammer because I’m used to having my head screwed on a little straighter. At first it seemed like it must be my fault and I wasn’t being sober “properly” (what ever that is). Now I’ve come to realize that being depressed is just something that happens to me, like catching a cold. Sometimes it last a couple of days. Sometimes it lasts a couple of days. Sometimes it lasts a couple of months. I have no idea why it hits or when it’s going to. What I have learned is to accept it.

I read Page 449 in the Big Book and when “it” hits, instead of trying to figure out what I’ve done wrong, I just accept that here I am experiencing depression again and try to do what I can get done (it really saps the energy) and put off the rest till later. I say my own versions of the first three steps over and over almost like a mantra.

“I admit I’m powerless over depression and my life is unmanageable.”

“I’ve come to believe that a Higher Power can restore me to sanity.”

“I turn my will, my life, and my depression over to the care of my Higher Power.”

It works.

Published in A New Leaf – March 1991