Sometimes you don’t know you’re lost until it’s time to find yourself again. You wake up, look around and nothing feels familiar. You’ve got to get back to yourself but you have no idea when you left. Everything is strange and new. The world feels fragile and so do you- but you’ve got to keep going. To stop here would mean to lose that thread of pieces.
When depression has carried you away from all you know and love, how do you get back- or move forward?
Whether you are aching to return to the self that once defined you or are looking for the way forward from right now, you’re standing at a pinnacle.
Looking back through your life feels terrifying when you’re emerging from the fog of depression. However, it may be the key step in identifying what you’ll bring with you from your past, and what you will leave there. Maybe you’re a list maker or a journaler. Think about the ways you best process your emotions then use those tools to look back at the before times.
Through the lens of your after, reflect on the connections and relationships you held dear, the time-fillers you enjoyed (and those you didn’t) as well as your experiences and how they are stamped on your memory. Processing the things you’ve lost and making space to grieve them will lay the foundation for rebuilding- or rediscovering- yourself after depression.
Notice what once mattered, and what still does. Spend time with the way each of those things that made up your identity before depression and reflect on how they impact you. Do they feel heavy? Do they make you feel anxious or sad at the thought of them? Just because it existed in your pre-depression life doesn’t mean you have to carry it into your next chapter. Still, narrowing down and identifying what made you, you before depression will help you center on where you’ve found yourself now.
As Lewis Carroll says, “Begin at the beginning” which sounds simple enough. When you’re not sure where you are now, finding the beginning is a challenge in itself. It’s a step all it’s own: Where are you now, and how far are you from where you want to be?
Here’s a good place to begin: passion. Identify the things that matter to you and what those look or feel like. Spend some time with the things you identified as core to your pre-depression self, and think about those feelings in your current headspace. Do they still fit into your life? How do they feel? How might that look?
Experiencing depression can quite literally change the chemistry of our minds and the landscape of your thoughts so maybe they don’t feel the same as they did. Figure out what still sparks your passion now, whether it’s something that you held as valuable before or is an entirely new feeling for you. Identify your feelings—both good and bad—and make a list of what you need more of, what you need less of, and what absolutely has no place in this version of yourself that you fought so hard to arrive in.
Once you’ve got your list, it’s time to use it. That will look different for every person, and may even look different from moment to moment. It’s okay if you have several lists, or versions of the lists that need conditions. Life is a gray area, and making space for that early on in the process of reclaiming yourself is a gift you can create to carry into the future. You do not owe the world a black and white version of your shades of gray reality. You simply owe yourself authenticity in whatever form you can accommodate just now.
Does that mean the support of a counselor to execute the things you’ve identified? Maybe it’s calling you back into education to learn a new skill, or toward a career change. Have you recognized spaces in your relationships where you need to change the way you express yourself, or the things that you accept?
It’s time to rewrite the way we engage with not just the world, but ourselves. Listen to the things that feel wrong just as carefully as you listen to the things that feel right. Pick up the pieces of your past that still carry weight and passion in your world, and notch them into the things you’ve learned as you’ve fought so hard to become this person right here, right now.
You didn’t quit when things got hard. You got lost but you kept going. There is more work to do, but undoubtedly, you will do it beautifully and we will be here to help along the way.
