the new year or something

Lots of things are wrong about me but something that isn't wrong about me anymore is that clinically depressed is no longer my baseline. Clinical depression was my baseline for about 45 years. The thing wrong about that is I didn't know. I didn't know I filtered my entire experience of me being me through a dark glass. Inside a dark lens, well, you don't even know it is dark.

I am not sure what my baseline is now but it is better, I think, than it was.

It used to be that when something happened to upset me, I would hunker down, assuming that misery was going to last and last and last. And then misery would last and last and last. Of course. You get what you expect. Or something.

Now, I'm muddled but in general my life is much better. I have a lot of grief. Everything about my life would be different if I had not been clinically depressed since I was about seven. Everything.

I would never have become a lawyer. I would never have had Katie because I never would have met her dad. I might have had and lost some other child, true.

I would have lived an entirely different life, one, I am pretty sure, that would have much less grief. I know everyone faces struggles in life. I don't suggest that I would have avoided heartache. It's just that everything would have been different. I'm just thinking about that. The new year or something.

I guess lots of folks engage in such reverie, the path not taken. Can we avoid our destiny? I don't think so. All the lessons I have had thus far in this life, they were lessons I needed. I guess I chose, sometime, to