And again. And again. And again.

If there is one thing I do truly well, it’s disappointment. You would think that somewhere along the way I would have learned that expectations are premeditated disappointments. The way to avoid a helluva lot of disappointment is to stop expecting things to turn out my way.

Like, if you don’t expect to get roses on Valentine’s Day, then you’re not disappointed when you don’t. D’uh.

And if you don’t expect to get the promotion you really wanted, you won’t be disappointed when you don’t. So, why am I sitting here crying? Because I expected to get the promotion and I did not. Again. I’ve been turned down for this position twice in the last four years. I am pretty stubborn. Relentless. I don’t give up. I once ran the last five miles of a marathon without shoes because my shoes were killing my feet and I was not about to give up.

There are two ways to handle disappointment. The way I handled it before my last spectacularly awful major depression and the way I handle disappointment after my last spectacularly awful major depression. BD – before depression. AD – after depression. BD, I would have told myself that I am a total loser. I will never be good enough. I would have been pissed off at the bosses who chose someone else for the job and I would have been pissed at the person who got the job.

AD, I give myself some time on the mat before I get up. Today, after learning I did not get the job, I packed up my stuff and went home. I could have sat in the office, crying, explaining to everyone why I was upset but that would have upset me even more. So, I took care of myself. I packed up a bunch of stuff I was working on and went home. I had a good cry, talked to a friend on the phone and then worked from home. I get more done here anyway.

Truth is, I love what I do now. I would have loved getting the other job but the job I have now is pretty freakin’ cool. This is about my pride. Pride – one of the seven deadlies. This is about acceptance. This is about humility. Learning how to handle disappointment appropriately and take care of myself in these situations is the essence of good mental health.

What happened today will not take me down. There was a time – not too long ago – when it would have. I know now that it’s okay to stay down on the mat for awhile and catch my breath. When I get up I will be harder, faster, stronger and smarter than before. I will have a little more faith in my higher power – that if I let go of this disappointment, he will bring even better things into my life.

Then, I will get up again.

Businesswoman photo available from Shutterstock.

What the hell was I thinking? I wrote a while back about the effects of stimulants on the manic brain – like mine. It took me a few decades, but I came to the conclusion that caffeine is probably not the smartest thing for me to ingest. It seemed kind of stupid to feed a stimulant to an already stimulated brain. So, I quit caffeine. You don’t realize how addicted you are to caffeine until you quit. One word: HEADACHE.

Anyway, I was pretty tired the other day. Sitting at my desk, staring at the computer, trying to write a story I had been working on for months. I was seriously stressed.

So, I drank a Red Bull.

Have you ever seen a racehorse in the starting gate, eye wide open, bucking in the stall and hoofs pawing at the ground? That was me. I had not felt that way in a very long time. I knew the effects would wear off in an hour or so – so I got in my cubicle and avoided my co-workers and the phone. I know I can say things I don’t mean, in a way I don’t mean, when I am like that. Kind of like drunk dialing.

I the know the effects were probably exaggerated because I had pretty much eliminated all caffeine from my diet. I’m not blaming the Red Bull. I know better. Just like I know better than to drink alcohol – a depressant. I also know that I get tired every afternoon and that a brisk walk around the building or a low-glycemic snack will cure my overwhelming urge to drop my head on my desk and nap – just like in high school. Stupid is as stupid does, right, Forrest?

I have always been one of those stubborn, stupid souls who keeps putting her hand over the flame, thinking this time I won’t get burned. I used to chalk it up to being Irish but it’s just the way addicts and alcoholics think – when we do think.

So, I went to bed early last night and I will pack a snack and wear comfy shoes for a little walk this afternoon -  and not stick my hand over the flame at 3:00pm.

Photo by viZZZual.com, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.

That’s what it is like to be a newspaper reporter. Writing a balanced and fair story means you tick-off everyone in it. Just asking questions and doing research for a story incenses some people. But everyone wants the media to do its job – report what, how and why something happened. Ferret out wrongdoing or refute gossip. And you expect us to do it quickly and for little pay. Do you know any rich journalists?

It ain’t easy living on a perpetual deadline. We are very, very human but we are not allowed to make mistakes. When we do, even misspelling a name, we must correct and publicize it. Doesn’t matter that it wasn’t intentional or malicious – we fall on our swords and are labelled incompetent and biased. We are routinely threatened with lawsuits. And now, thanks to the gift of anonymity on the internet, nameless readers leave vicious remarks on our paper’s online edition.

Showing the slightest bit of emotion or sorrow is considered a weakness. We are expected to know a lot about everything and learn it quickly. Our industry and especially the paper we work for is incessantly maligned. Over and over we are reminded that we are working for a dying industry. We work ridiculous hours and are not allowed to take gifts or put political bumper stickers on our cars. Oh, an we are expected to be creative and write. Remember how hard it was to write a term paper? Well, we crank those out – sometimes on a daily basis.

This is my life. Day after day. Year after year. Decade after decade. I love what I do. I chose this occupation. I would not want to do anything else. But sometimes the stress and the pace gets to me and that is not good for my mental health. Just now, before I have even taking my morning shower, I got an email from an angry reader, demanding a correction.

A lot of people think I have a really cool job. They see journalists on television and think what journalists do is so glamorous and exciting. It can be. But the bulk of journalists out there – and I am one of them – cover the mundane. We spend countless hours in mind-numbingly boring school board, county commission, city council and zoning board meetings. We cover parades, high school football games and car washes. We call the parents of kids killed in car accidents. We scour hundreds and hundreds of pages of depositions and often find nothing of interest.

I’m whining, I know. A lot of people have very stressful jobs. I am not unique. I am damn glad that in this economy and dying industry I even have a job. Sometimes, I just need to say – or write – my feelings. Just spit it out. It doesn’t matter if anyone even reads it. I just need to get it out of me. I learned this exercise after my last major depression. They call it “journalling” and it really used to piss me off because the last thing I wanted to do on my time off is write. But I have to admit that it does work. It is good for me. It’s like working out. You don’t want to but afterward you feel much, much better.

Right now I just want to go back to bed. Pull the covers over my head and forget about the guy who wants a correction. I want to turn off my computer and cell phone and sleep. I am so tired. So very, very tired. I learned after my last depression that this, too, shall pass. When I am in a depression my brain convinces me that my life will always be this way – I will always be depressed. But this, too, shall pass.

So, I am off to the newsroom. I will deal with the guy who wants a correction and pray that today my editor will ask me to interview George Clooney instead of covering another boring meeting. A girl’s got to dream, right?

Stressed woman photo available from Shutterstock.

Cancer.

Both my parents died of cancer. Dad died first. The week after we buried him, Mom started her last round of chemo. Eighteen months later, she was dead, too. It was a really rough couple of years. I hadn’t wanted to think about this today but it seems I pressed the wrong buttons on the remote when I ordered a Pay Per View movie and instead of getting Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson I got a movie about a young guy with cancer who was a given a 50/50 chance of survival.

When I realized my mistake I changed the channel. A few minutes later I changed it back. No way was I going to waste $5.99 and I wanted to see whether I had made any progress with my cancer “issues.” It’s been 8 years since Mom died and I am terrified of cancer and don’t want to be around people with it.

I eat organic, use botanical skin care products and I take damn near every supplement they say will prevent cancer. I don’t smoke, drink, eat gluten, soy or dairy. I get a mammogram every year. I see the dermatologist twice a year since she found two squamous cell carcinomas and I use a chemo cream one night a week on my face. Mom died of colon cancer and I would have a colonoscopy every year if the insurance would pay for it.

The reason I have cancer “issues” is more than the obvious: I watched it kill slowly my parents. It’s what led to my last, horrible major depression. In my mind, cancer and horrible depression are forever linked. I stopped speaking to a girlfriend who got ovarian cancer because I couldn’t deal with it. She is a very, very strong woman – like my mother – and I did not want to watch it eat away at her like it did my mom. Her cancer metastacized, like my mother’s cancer but my friend is doing well now. I need to make a big amends to her.

Everything about my mother’s cancer was surreal. She had never smoked and wasn’t much of a drinker at all. I saw her tipsy once – at my sister’s rehearsal dinner. She ate well, walked everyday, shoveled snow, hung our clothes on the clothesline and seemed to be unstoppable.

I was alone in her hospital room when she came out of surgery. The doctor came in and said the cancer was worse than they had thought. It had already perforated the colon and they had to remove a large segment. She would need chemo and radiation. That seemed to work for a few years but as she neared her fifth year – that magical milestone at which you are pronounced cancer-free – her cancer metastacized to her liver. More chemo. More radiation.

I flew back and forth from Florida to Michigan every other weekend. I was a couple years sober and divorced, still figuring out the single-working mom thing. Her father worked weekends and never took our 10-year-old daughter for the court-ordered, every-other weekend visit. On the weekends I flew up to see my mother she stayed with neighbors and friends. Mom was in hospice for nearly three months. It was the dead of winter, when the Michigan sky turns steel gray. I would sit by my mother’s bed for 48 hours, get back on the plane, fly home, pick up my daughter and go to work the next morning.  I was on emotional auto-pilot.

I was in my backyard in Florida when my sister called and said that Mom had died. I didn’t break down or sob. It was just over. I didn’t feel much of anything except – “Okay, what do I do next?” Plane tickets. Dog sitter. Call work. Call school. Get homework. Call attorney. Pack. And on and on.

We had a great funeral for Mom. Everyone was there. The grandkids all made something for her and put it in her casket. We put a Hooter’s sticker on her dress. The devout Catholic, first-grade teacher had developed a taste for Hooter’s wings in her final years. Daryl and Daryl were still digging her grave with a backhoe when we got to the cemetery. They screwed up on the length of the straps used to lower her casket into the grave. Let’s just say Mom didn’t have a smooth descent.

We divvied up all the stuff in the house we were raised in, sold it and got on with our lives. I developed a twitch in my left eyelid and knots in my neck muscles. My dog died eight months later and six months after that, a five-year relationship I had been in ended. Sometimes, out of nowhere, my heart would race. I had all kinds of tests done. My heart was fine. It was my head. Three months later I sunk into the worst depression I could ever have imagined. Finally, I agreed to get help. I was diagnosed with depression and later hypomania. I started meds, therapy and treating myself better.

But my cancer “issues” remain. The guy in the movie lived and it’s a damn good thing because I don’t know what I would have done if he had died. I cried and cried and cried – something I did not allow myself to do much after my parents died. Who knows, maybe I will cry some more tonight. As much as I hate it, crying makes me feel better. I think I made progress tonight with my cancer “issues.” My fingernails and cuticles are trashed but I made it through the movie and am glad I did.

Sometimes, life just ain’t easy. I will say a prayer to St. Peregrine tonight and ask him to keep me cancer-free. Maybe tomorrow I will get some Hooter’s wings. That would make Mom happy.

Me too.

Highlited “cancer” photo available from Shutterstock.

Source: Bravo TV

Sometimes the power of a bad example is as powerful as a good example. I’m thinking of Kim Richards, one of the housewives on The Housewives of Beverly Hills.

My daughter got me hooked on that show when she came home from college on winter break.  There was a time – not too long ago – when that little intellectual dilettante in me would have dismissed such a show as a complete waste of time only to be watched by the mindless, vapid masses. Thankfully, I shut that little dilettante up and now I’m watching all the re-runs – thank you very much.

Watching Kim’s slow, self-destruction over this last season is good for me. I am, like Kim, am a single, somewhat middle-aged, mother whose child has grown up. We are both trying to keep our hair blonde and minimize our wrinkles. I am not going to pronounce Kim an alcoholic, but let’s just say there was a day – before I got sober 13 years ago – that I would have partied with Kim in a heartbeat.

I am a dual-diagnosed alcoholic. Alcoholism is not my only mental illness. I also have hypomania – bipolar II – which I fueled for years with drugs and alcohol. Now, 13-years clean and sober, the memories of the drama and chaos that were my life when I was drinking are a faded. I am at the point in my sobriety when many recovered alcoholics begin to believe that they have licked their “alcohol problem” and can drink again. That’s where Kim comes in.

Kim’s behavior – even when she is NOT under the influence – reminds me how I used to think, behave and rationalize away all the stupid, thoughtless, self-centered and self-righteous stuff I used to say and do in my drunk years.

I had forgotten how much chaos we bring into other people’s lives. We’re late. We don’t show up. We cause a scene. We look like crap. We pick inappropriate people for our relationships. We hurt our family and we damage our kids. We blame it on everyone else. When Kim missed her flight to Hawaii for her brother-in-law’s birthday, then missed the boat for a day of sailing once she finally got there, she shrugged it off: “Everything happens for a reason.” Yeah it does, but it never dawns on us that the reason is our drinking.

When her sister, Kyle, confronts her about it several weeks later, Kim – looking totally wasted – gives her sister the old “Hey, I can’t live up to your expectations of me! I’m sorry I can’t be like you!” There’s also the old “Hey, you’re the one who is upset. I’m fine. Get over it.” Then there are the flat out lies: Kim drinking champagne in the back of a limo, then 10 minutes later telling another one of the housewives that she’s staying sober.

Oh man, that was soooo me. Kim makes me appreciate my sobriety. I watch her relationship with her sister disintegrate, just like mine. I watch her make poor choices in her relationship, just like me. I watch her and realize how staying sober has been the best thing I could do for my depression and bipolar. I don’t look down on Kim at all. But for the grace of God…you know?

Sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her and tell her to sober up. I want her to know how great her life would be if she would just surrender, listen, take suggestions and ask for help. Find a good therapist. Find a good psychiatrist. You can do this, Kim. Just remember, you are setting an example and the power of a bad example is just as powerful as a good example.

Death Row, Florida State Prison

I was a cub reporter and was morbidly thrilled to have the opportunity to cover an execution. The little motel where I stayed in Starke, Florida was excited to see me, too, and had posted “Welcome Christine” on its roadside marquee. This story would be the crown jewel in my growing collection of clips – mostly stories of last night’s school board meeting and car wrecks. That’s how I looked at it.

On a personal level, I was hoping the execution would finally settle my doubts about the death penalty. I was brought up Catholic but having covered a few murders, I was not convinced that the death penalty was unjust. I was on the fence. I had heard of reporters who had fainted or barfed covering executions. I did not know how I would react.

Here is what happened: I didn’t react. I felt nothing but the adrenaline rush you get when covering a big story. I knew I should have felt something, but I didn’t. Maybe that is why I don’t think about David Funchess much.

Until last night. I was watching the movie The Green Mile, with Tom Hanks portraying a prison guard on death row, when David’s death came rushing back. I was just sitting in my chair with my dog when the movie’s first execution scene came on and instantly every muscle in the back of my neck went into gridlock. The clenched muscles pulled my head back and I got one of those shivers down my spine like you hear about in cheesy novels. I thought of Funchess.

Why was this affecting me like this after 26 years – most of which had passed without a thought of Funchess. Another, horrific execution scene came on and I got the same spontaneous reaction. Why?

I had never been the kind of person who discussed her feelings. We just didn’t do that in our family. You kept your feelings to yourself. We had several emotions and that was it: happy, sad, neutral, pissed off and seething. We displayed these feelings but didn’t talk about them. My dad was an alcoholic – not at all affectionate towards my mother. He was way more affectionate towards that dog than any of us. We had a white elephant, too. It just sat in the middle of the room and we pretended not to see him.

It wasn’t until I started coming out of my last and worst major depression that I started “dealing” with my feelings. I hated it. Thought it was stupid. I could see no logic is reliving the past and dredging up feelings I had not felt the first time I went through it. But when I was told I needed to learn to “feel my feelings” in order to prevent another major depression, I jumped at the chance.

Within in hour of my nurse practitioner telling me that I needed to “deal with my anger,” I was at a junk yard with a baseball bat. When my therapist urged me to go to a treatment center to resolve “family issues” – I went. Feeling began oozing out of me. Then they spilled and finally I regurgitated decades of repressed feelings. It was painful and incredibly uncomfortable. It left me exhausted, crying and shaking at times. It felt like someone had taken a potato peeler to my soul.

I learned…learned and learned and learned. A part of depression for many women was anger turned inward. Codependency had completely distorted my ability to respect myself. My anger came out sideways – usually as passive-aggressive sarcasm – because I did not know how to appropriately deal with it.

I still have issues with “feeling my feelings.” Sometimes my eyes well up when I am speaking about something dear or funny and people ask “Are you crying?” I have learned strenuous exercises to release my anger. My favorite is lifting a weighed ball over my head and slamming it as hard as I can on the ground. I tell people how I feel – especially my daughter – who seems to have and emotional radar detector to tell her when her mother is not right.

I have spontaneous emotions, like I did last night, in the middle of my living room watching a movie, and I let them out. I am not ashamed of my feelings. I don’t try to hide them. I recognize them and deal with them asap because I now know what will happen if I do not.

And I’m not going there if I can help it.

Prison photo available from Shutterstock.

So, last Saturday night when I walked into the newsroom for my occasional, obligatory weekend shift and my editor said, “I’m going to rock your world, I knew it was going to be an interesting evening: “You’re going to Mar-a-Lago to interview the governor and his wife,” she said.

Mar-a-Lago is the palatial, oceanfront estate and swank club owned by Donald Trump on Palm Beach. I’ve been there a few times. Once I rode my bike to a fundraiser luncheon and waited in the valet line with the Bentley’s and Roll’s. Amused the hell out of the valets.

Anyway, I went home, put on the LBD (Little Black Dress), lipstick and my red, patent leather, pointy-toed stilettos and headed over to The Donald’s. The thing about these $500/plate galas is you realize, immediately, that rich people – the top one percent of the ten percent – really aren’t that different from you and me. They have money. Lots of money. But that’s it. They are still people – human beings. We may think they are insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots but I am no longer willing to write them all off as insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots. They’re people who just happen to have a lot of money. A whole lot of money.

I used to hate rich people. I carried a huge chip on my shoulder for decades. It started when I was 7 years old and we moved from a small, rural town in northwest Wisconsin to a wealthy suburb in southwest Michigan. These kids belonged to country clubs. We belonged to the Elk’s Club. The girls wore monogrammed sweaters. I taped the holes in my uniform with masking tape. I didn’t like these kids. I was not as pretty, didn’t have their wardrobes or their trust funds. As time went on the resentments grew.

My senior year in high school one of the girls in my class had a tea at her country club for all the girls going “out east” to school. She was going to Smith. I was going to Detroit – which was east of our community in southwest Michigan but apparently not “east” enough. I did not get invited.

You would think the last place I would want to live is Palm Beach but that’s where my career took me. I got married, had a little girl and went right back to work after 6 weeks of maternity leave. I resented having to work. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mommy. I started hating stay-at-home mommies. During the summer I dropped my little girl off at the town’s recreation center for camp. I was dressed for work. The other mommies were dressed in their cute little tennis outfits and sported monster diamonds on their manicured wedding finger.

I grew more and more resentful. More spiteful. I became the victim. I compared myself to them. Some days I would snicker at them, thinking they were so vapid and I was so deep and intellectually superior. Other days I shriveled and told myself what a loser I had become. How dare they be unhappy with that much money!

These resentments festered and stewed for years. As I aged, my resentments did, too. They lived in mansions with gardeners and cleaning ladies. I had a 70-plus-year-old,  1,200 square foot house in what used to be a crack hood. They drove Lexus SUVs and wore Lilly Pulitzer shifts. I looked ridiculous in pink and green. And on and on and on it went. In reality, these women had done nothing to me. If it seemed like they wanted nothing to do with me it was because I was throwing off some really negative, self-righteous energy.

Finally, I crashed. I had experienced a few major depressions before but this one was a doozy. I finally admitted I needed help. I couldn’t work, couldn’t eat and couldn’t read or write. I started on antidepressants and within a couple of months my depression slowly lifted. But my nurse practitioner told me the meds were not enough. I needed to get rid of all my anger.

What anger?

I started seeing a therapist and she helped me see my anger and resentments. These feelings triggered chemicals in my brain that made my depression worse. The more resentful and angry, the greater likelihood that my depression would linger or get worse. A lot of learning, journaling and a trip to the junkyard with a baseball bat helped with my anger. But those pesky resentments kept popping up – especially toward rich people. I had no idea how to deal with that.

It was explained to me that my resentment toward rich people was the result of me passing judgment on them. Always looking at what they had and I did not. Or what I had – a career – and they did not. I had never identified with them.

“Of course I haven’t identified with them because we have nothing in common!” I yelled.

“But you do. Even if it is nothing more than the fact that you are both women, mothers or both just got soaked in the rain – focus on what you have in common – not what separates you.”

And the clouds parted and I felt like the little grasshopper at the feet of the Kung Fu master.

Of course, this was not as easy as it sounds. I sucked at it for a long time. It seemed like all I had in common with these women was anatomy. But I stayed with it and the more I focused on our similarities the more similarities I noticed. I began initiating conversations with these rich women and they were perfectly lovely, kind and generous. I actually felt compassion for the ones who were not – the bitchy ones who tried so hard to act better than. I realized they are exactly like I was – always comparing – never identifying.

So, there I was last Saturday night with the richest of the richest mingling about. The governor and I talked. I interviewed a former ambassador who was simply stunning in her LBD. Of course, her diamond earrings were probably real but hey, we both wore LBDs and kind of had the same earrings.

I left before The Donald showed. I have interviewed him and met him several times before. Actually, I sat behind him in church last Easter Sunday. I’m a kneeler and he is not. So, every time we kneeled during the service my face was in the back of his head and that hair of his is seriously weird. But I digress.

I really can’t think of anything that The Donald and I have in common. Of course, we’re both homo sapiens and we both went to church on Easter Sunday – and that’s a start.

Red high heels photo available from Shutterstock

Am I an idiot or what? I went to my nurse practitioner today and told her about my little refill snafu. She writes me scripts for three months worth of each of my meds. I send them to my insurance company’s pharmacy  and, voila, three months worth of meds arrive in the mail. She explained that I don’t have to wait until I am almost out of my meds to send in the refill prescriptions. I told her I knew that. She shook her head. I know. There is no excuse.

I like Pat, my nurse practitioner. I see her every three months and have been doing that for about five years, unless she changes the dosage.  Then I have to call her and visit her every week for awhile. Kind of a pain in the butt but I trust Pat with my life. She saved me, along with my therapist. You gotta trust the person writing your scripts. This is very, very important. It’s not like the kind of trust you put in the doctor who writes you a script for a Z-Pak and a couple days later that infection is gone.

I am talking about the kind of trust you put in someone to whom you have given your brain. Literally. You have to really, really trust this person because you have only one brain. We’re not talking about kidneys or eyes and ears. You lose one of those and you can still live. But you have one brain. That’s it.

No one really knows how antidepressants work, how long they will work or whether you need an  monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), tetracyclic antidepressants (TeCAs), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. So, you have to trust that the psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner writing your prescription knows what she is doing.

In my humble opinion – and this is only my opinion – you should only take antidepressants from a doctor or nurse who has some kind of specialized training in prescribing these drugs. Would you allow your family doctor to write you a prescription for an Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s medication? No. You would go to a specialist. So, why would you allow a doctor who has little or no training in treating illnesses of the brain write you a prescription for a medication that no one understands how or why it works?

I trust Pat. She knows her stuff. She’s not just a nurse. She is psychiatric nurse practitioner, which means she is all about treating mental illness all the time. She doesn’t treat people for ear infections, broken bones or yeast infections. For Pat, it’s depression, bipolar, OCD, ADHD and anxiety. She is good at it. I trust her with my brain and that’s saying something.

This time I waited so long that I have run out of one of my meds. Today is my third day without it. I called the prescription service and they said they sent it four days ago. Hopefully, it will come today. Still, I am going to see my nurse practitioner first thing on Monday morning.

I have never been this reckless before with my medications. I always – ALWAYS – take them as prescribed and I feel good, even great, most of the time. I’m waiting for withdrawal to kick in. Last night I had an incredibly vivid and terrible dream. I was in a building – seemed like a hotel – and it was stormed by some guys who were going from room-to-room shooting people. Everyone was trying to hide. I was under a table covered with a long tablecloth. Another woman was with me. The shooter pulled back the tablecloth and killed her but did not see me. I woke up with my mouth hanging open, feeling like I had been in such a deep sleep for so long that I could not move. And now I am feeling a little manicky. I’m not bouncing off the walls but, man, do I have some great ideas!

Seems like I deliberately self-sabotage myself. I know I should do something and I don’t. Like returning phone calls. Seems like no big deal but I deliberately don’t return certain calls. I’m not talking about calls from bill collectors. I’m talking about calls from friends who just want to say “Hi.” Same with being on time. I get up plenty early but I putz around till the last minute, then rush to make a meeting. I get there on time but it’s like I need the rush to get me there.

But this medication mishap is serious. I know that – still I let it happen. Never again. This is just plain stupid and in the words of the philosopher Gump, “stupid is as stupid does.”

The nearest bird count to me is about 25 miles south of Lake Okeechobee – that big round thing in the middle of your map of Florida that has enough alligators to shoe every Floridian with two pairs of loafers and a belt. The bird count site is 20 miles from the nearest gas station. You really gotta love birds to stomp around this God-forsaken, alligator-infested 15-mile diameter circle all day counting birds.

I asked the woman to tell me about the most special bird she had ever seen at one of these annual bird counts. She paused and then said the Everglades Snail Kite. This raptor is on the endangered species list and if we gobble up any more of their habitat with condos they will become extinct. She said she cried when she heard the bird “vocalize.”

You’re probably wondering what the hell does this have to do with depression?

One word: Passion. You have to have something in your life that means so much to you that you would stomp around a God-forsaken, alligator infested 15-mile diameter circle just to hear or catch a glimpse of it. Something or someone that is so dear to you that you cannot imagine living without it. It could be your dog, making cupcakes, fishing or hearing an endangered species “vocalize.” It is your passion. It is your anchor to life.

My daughter is my anchor. During my last major depression I flat out told my therapist and nurse practitioner that if anything happened to my daughter – if she died – I would be “out of here.” I meant it. No question. My love for her – along with a lot of therapy and medication – pulled me out of my black hole.

I no longer feel that way. I have many passions in my life now. I realize how important it is to have passion in my life. I have gone out of my way to find people, places and things that inspire passion in me. I am passionate about the corals and fish I see when I scuba dive. I am passionate about dogs. All dogs. Even those yappy, accessory dogs that fit in a purse. I am passionate about my home, my health, my writing and my sobriety. Passion is my mental health insurance.

When I came out of my last major depression my therapist asked me what made me happy. Really happy. Of course I said winning the lottery. “No,” she said. “What would really make you happy?” I scrunched up my forehead and pursed my lips and thought about it. “I dunno.”

And the clouds parted…

Depression robbed me of my passion – except for my daughter. I needed to find passion. Lots and lots of passion. Not just the hot and heavy stuff of Spanish-language soap operas but the kind of passion you feel when you lose track of time because you are so enthralled with someone or something.

This was not an easy task. It has taken years. My entire world has been transformed. What I once thought was selfish – doing things that would make me happy – I now see as thoughtful and considerate (“If mama ain’t happy, nobody is happy.”) I now know  that self-sufficiency is selfish. Every time I refused to let someone help me I denied them the chance to feel as good as I do when I help others. I slowly learned that everyone is not entitled to my opinion. And on and on…

I never laugh at someone’s passion. The combined uniqueness of all our passions keeps us alive. For example, I don’t know why anyone could be passionate about urology but thank God there is a doctor out there who is. Same for the researchers who devoted countless hours attaching little electrodes to rats’ heads so they could test the medications that have made my life so much better. God love ya.

So, my wish for you this new year is that you find passion in your life. Embrace it. Enjoin it. Dig your claws into it and never, ever let go.