* Connection *
When I was putting this blog together, the first topic that came to mind as essential to recovery was connecting. It was a main theme that ran through the journals that were my first source for these posts. Connecting meant that. First, I had to reconnect with my own feeling, always so remote and unreachable during the worst periods of depression. I had to be able to feel again and to do that I had to open doors shut firmly against even sense impressions of the world around me. Most fundamentally I had to accept myself again as a whole person. I had to feel the strength come back to my own body, see the colors in things, hear the words people spoke, laugh, grieve, feel lonely, want to be part of my family again. Reconnecting with my own feeling, responding to daily life, I could begin to restore deeper connections with some people. I often went through all this quiet quickly, sometimes waking up one morning and feeling human again. At other times, I had to use all the tricks I'd learned just to get started. Hard as most of those periods of recovery were, they were lost in depression before long and the whole process had to start over again. What has the encouraged me more recently is that the pull from loneliness back into connection has been so much fuller and more complete than ever before. This push - pull idea is a useful reframing of experience. Partly because it suggests that there are forces moving in depression and loneliness that go far beyond my own boundaries. That is another reminder that I'm not so alone as I imagine when isolation seems most complete.
