A little over a year ago I hit a phase where I was so depressed that I felt like dying. I tried to tell my H goodbye and I told my T that I just didn't feel like living but I didn't feel like talking about it because I just couldn't imagine what she could do to help. It was a kind of existential depression where life itself felt meaningless and I just wanted to fade out of existence.

At the bottom of that pit, I came up with two ideas. The first was that maybe I needed to acknowledge that there WAS a side of life that was ugly, painful, unfair, meaningless, etc. and just because I was experiencing it didn't mean that I was doing anything wrong, nor did it mean that there wasn't a different side of life that was beautiful and meaningful. That just because I couldn't TASTE any of the meaning or joy in life didn't mean there wasn't any, only that I was currently feeling the meaningless aspects, and maybe at a future time I would have a different experience. I decided I would TRY to accept the painful, empty, ugly parts of life instead of shoving them away, and hope that I would later feel the easier parts as well.

The second idea was that JUST MAYBE the reason I felt so little meaning in life right then and so little motivation to do anything or even keep living was that I was too afraid to try to do the things my conscience asked of me and that would have felt meaningful, because they seemed too hard. So I made a deal with myself. I set myself 8 very specific goals and decided I would try as hard as I could for the next three months to reach for those goals. If at the end of three months, there was no progress in feeling less depressed, then I would give myself permission to contemplate suicide again, but not before.

The 8 goals if anyone is curious were:
1. (physical fitness goals I won't detail here)
2. Organize my house
3. (personal business goals I won't detail here)
4. Do public speaking for a wider audience
5. Start a group I want to be a member of
6. Make a friend in my city
7. Have a successful garden
8. Complain more and make my voice heard more

Amazingly, after committing to this bargain with myself, my depression started lifting in a matter of days or weeks and I found myself reengaging with life with much less conscious effort. At a certain point, I stopped tracking my goal progress as carefully. But looking back a year later, I can see that while I didn't complete all of the goals, and many of them didn't go how I expected, I did make at least some progress on all of them. I have partially begun on the fitness goals, my house is much more organized, I've done public speaking in two new settings, I started a class I wanted to be a part of, I made several friends in my city (although they weren't the kind I expected), I successfully started a garden, and I think I have made my voice heard more generally. I also did some new and exciting things in the course of the year that I wasn't even expecting. The biggest one is that I officially got into T school and I will be starting in January! So I guess that is one of my next adventures that I will be moving into in the year to come.

So a year later, I don't think my view of the world has changed much. I still see so much about life that I don't like at all! There is still so much that is ugly, unfair, meaningless, and generally horrifying, and sometimes I'm not sure why I would want to be alive in this universe or participate. But I think *I* have changed. I've stopped focusing on how the world is or isn't and started focusing on how well I'm living up to my own conscience and values. Am I showing courage or am I copping out? Am I doing and feeling the hard things or avoiding them? And the result is not that I feel any happier, but that I feel more alive, not like I'm standing on the outside of my life slipping away, but like I'm right in the center marveling at everything. I still don't understand what is up with this f'ed up world, but for some reason I've accepted that I'm here now in the middle of it and I'm pretty much OK with that. I guess what I realized is that I can't fix the world by refusing to be part of it, so I might as well stick around and do the best I can to change what is in my power with the time I have.

Over all, the last year has been a journey worth making and I'm wondering what the next one will bring!