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[hildeleoma]

I spent much of today clearing space in my room at Mum & Dads (I'll be moving back there at the end of September, before looking for a place of my own to buy - eek! - in the new year). I found so many things that I'd completely forgotten about / didn't even know I owned. The cast from when I broke my arm when I was three, for example (it was so

Comments

[chrismear]

I remember the barman in the Strasbourg youth hostel refusing to serve John because he didn't say 'please'. Ah, memories.

On the counselling thing, the hardest but perhaps the best part is talking frankly about stuff that you barely talk to yourself about. With some things, once you get past the initial hurdle of getting it out in the open, they don't seem half as terrible as you thought they were when you didn't want to think about them. If you see what I mean.

For me, the biggest breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about depression as something that was wrong with *me*, and started thinking of it as a physical problem with my brain. It sounds kinda naff, but I found it went a long way to distancing myself from feeling responsible for the problem, and feeling bad because I thought it was a part of me, and instead attacking it as just another thing to be fixed.

[hildeleoma]

You're absolutely right. At the moment I'm still in the stage where I'm identifying the real problems, which I think will certainly be the hardest part. The things that have come up so far do seem far easier to deal with than they did when they were just a confused mess in my brain!

It is very easy to see the depression as a failure or weakness in myself, not so much when I'm there as the atmosphere is geared to proving that belief wrong, but certainly in the "outside world". Getting there though! :o)