Let’s talk about love.  Love comes in various forms:- love for parents, love for a spouse, love for a child, love for a favorite fruit pie etc.  I consider myself a very loving person, except for one area of love – love for myself.  This is an area that just doesn’t come easy for me.  I often feel inadequate and not “good enough” – this and other lies that my depression makes me buy into.

I am currently going through therapy to talk about various issues from my past, some of which directly contribute to my depression.  On thing that seems to come up is the guilt I carry around within myself, the guilt that tells me that I have failed people, the “if I had only” statements that play around my mind.  “If I had only” made more of an effort to reconcile with my brother, maybe he wouldn’t have felt so alone.  “If I had only” kept in touch with my best friend, maybe I would have had a chance to say goodbye to him.  These thoughts are hard to deal with, and my depression feeds on them like a ravenous wolf, fueling it and making it stronger.

So, how do I break the cycle?  In a word, forgiveness.  Forgiveness towards my childhood abusers?  Forgiveness to the bullies who mercilessly taunted and hit me all through my school life?  Forgiveness towards those who should have protected me, but didn’t?  These are all valid, but not the biggest one.  All of these are heads of the same beast, the anger and shame that I carry around because of things that were done “to” me.  They were not my fault, yet I carry the burden of them because I feel like I somehow could have stopped them.  Again, the “if I had only”s surface…

How do I start this?  Compassion.  Compassion for the abusers who, in their own way, we’re just as broken and wounded by their own demons.  Compassion for the bullies who were playing out a script handed to them from the generations before, afraid to look inside themselves and the anger and fear that drives them.  Most of all, compassion for the scared, weak child that I was, and the troubled man that he became.

It’s an ongoing process, but at least it’s one that I have l started.  Once I started to forgive, a weight started to lift.  I no longer feel quite as angry as I did.  I will never forget what happened, and it doesn’t mean that I will open up and blindly trust those people again, but if I can get to a point of forgiveness those memories won’t have the same weight to them that they once did.  When we hold on to the bitterness and shame of past events, all it does is poison us and make us sacrifice the joy of the present – which is all we really have in life.

There are so many wonderful things I my life, a wife who loves me, family that cares for me, a job that I love, and many others.  It’s time I started learning to enjoy the blessings…

I want to start off this blog with an apology.  If I unfriended you from Facebook, I am sorry – it was not personal.  I have already re-friended most of you, and explained to some of you.  I recently had a slight “meltdown” with my depression, not a major one, but enough for me to end up unfriending a bunch of people on Facebook, mostly people from my past.  I have been wrestling with some old issues lately and old wounds got re-opened.  Certain emotional splinters that had buried themselves deeply over the years are starting to push their way out, and it ended with me not handling it well, ultimately cutting myself off from a large portion of my past.

Unfortunately, this is an old pattern of mine, which my wife calls “Turtling” – I pull my neck in and withdraw into my shell, hiding away from the things I don’t want to deal with.  I am learning, with the help of my family, to stand my ground and not retreat, but I am human and I sometimes fail.  This blog has been a helpful tool for me, and I hope to continue posting on a regular basis.  I hope and pray that the people who are my true friends will understand when I fall, and those that can’t handle it, I understand if you need to take a step back – no hard feelings.  I know that I will get through this, it will take time, but I will.  Even though the storm is blowing, and the sea is choppy, I have Jesus in my boat – I know I will get to the shore.

On a lighter note, I found some new podcasts to listen to lately that have been really helping me feed the right wolf.  They are “The BadChristian Podcast” and “The Mental Illness Happy Hour”.  The first one is a group of Christian friends, (mostly members of the rock group Emory) who talk to people from all walks of life and portray a very real, honest portrayal of Christian life by people who recognize that they are not perfect (the name comes from Bad Christian, Good Savior).  The second one is by a very funny comedian called Paul Gilmartin and is about dealing with depression, as well as other mental illnesses that people struggle with.  I am only episode 3 in so far, but I like what I hear.  Both of these podcasts use comedy to address serious issues that we deal with, I recommend both.

No, it is NOT okay if you pinch me because I’m not wearing green…

The end.

Just a quick post.  Started the caffeine reduction today, it went well.  I mostly drank Chai Green Tea this afternoon, the sweet, spicy taste helped to alleviate the coffee craving.  I’m watching to make sure that my depression stays in check – the last thing I need is for my system to start crashing.  I’ll keep you all appraised on my progress.

Recently, I had been noticing a pattern of fatigue in the afternoon – more than the normal post-lunch slump.  It has been seriously screwing with my state of mind, making it very difficult to get through an afternoon of work.  As a software developer, I need to be able to focus when I am working.  Putting a 1 where a 0 should be (or an INNER JOIN from a to a, instead of a to b – for you developers out there), can be disastrous.  Coding while fatigued has caused me many hours of pointless bug-hunting in the past, so I try to keep a certain level of alertness.

Add to that, the affect that fatigue has on my depression (and vice-versa) I decided to try to figure out how to address it.  One possibility is coffee.  Not the drinking of it, but the effect of crashing down from it afterwards.  I have been a big coffee drinker for years, but lately it has increased when I am at work.  I sat down and worked out how much I was drinking, and concluded that I am averaging 6-8 cups a day.  That’s an average, some days it is a lot more.  I know, I know – I can hear the eye-rolling from here.  It seems like it would be an obvious thing, but when something has been such a big part of your life for so many years, you develop a “blind spot” to it.

So, I made a decision to drastically cut back on my caffeine intake.  I still allow myself my coffee in the morning, while I am getting ready for work, but as soon as I get to work I am limiting myself to tea.  This is a lot harder than it sounds, as the habit of drinking coffee at work is tugging at me psychologically a lot more than physically.  So far, so good.  Of course, that’s easy to say when it has only been a day 🙂  I am trying to avoid caffeine withdrawal by weaning down slowly, but if Georgia starts mentioning that I am chewing the wallpaper and throwing the cat, you will know why.

Part of my tea drinking is also going to be switching from black tea to green tea, both for the lower caffeine and the health benefits.  I have a selection of different green teas chosen, from Pomegranate to Chai, so hopefully I will find a few that I really like.  I am more than open to suggestions if anyone knows of some really good blends…

Oh, and did I mention that I hate daylight-saving time…  fraking time changes…. losing an hour’s sleep… grumble, grumble, grumble…

The title pretty much says it all…

Welcome to my new blog.  Not sure quite what I am going to talk about in here, it will probably end up being a “stream-of-consciousness” kinda thing until it forms a shape.  If I commit to writing every day, I might just make something good – or at least something okay….it will definitely be a thing of some kind.

Finished reading the book “Jumper” (by Stephen Gould) today.  I had previously only seen the (rather lackluster) movie, but I got the eBook in a Humble Bundle, so thought I would give it a go.  I loved it!  I looked it up online and there are 3 sequels out, so I will buy them at some point.  I have so many books to read right now, I can afford to wait.  I was given “The Long War” (sequel to “The Long Earth”) for Christmas.  It is from one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett (co-authored by Stephen Baxter).  I was also given the complete collected stories of Sherlock Holmes.  Combine those with the dozen or so eBooks I have bought in bundles lately, I have lots to catch up on.

I have gotten behind my reading lately – mostly due to my addiction to Candy Crush 🙂  I have decided to lay off the game (level 821 is probably far enough…) and do something more creative with my time.  Hence the reason I am starting this blog, it is part of my “make a thing” each day pledge, inspired by the “Radio Free Burrito” podcast by Wil Wheaton.  He talks about creating something, not expecting it to be always awesome, but letting the thing be what it is.  Sometimes the doing is more important than the end result.  Just “make a thing” and let the love of doing it be it’s own reward.  If it turns out well, there is a good chance it will find it’s audience.  For now, this will have to be good enough…

Watch this space…