Personal Entry

I was cleaning out some old boxes and found my old diary. Well, not that old….but it feels like it was written a lifetime ago. I want to share a passage with you…

“Depression and I have been friends for many years. Although I didn’t know that was her real name. I say her because I gave the sad voice in my head a name, so I could talk to her. I called her Lucy. Lucy and I spend many nights awake wandering the halls of my apartment; tonight we are eating Chocolate Fudge ice cream we found in the freezer. There goes my diet, again.



Lucy and I have been friends since my freshman year of college. That year was really hard, I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years, my brother was in a car accident nearly killing him, and I gained more than the usual freshman 15; for me it was more like 45.
By the end of my first year I had ballooned from 135lbs to almost 190lbs. I was terrified of hitting 200…so far Lucy and I haven’t hit that mark yet, we’ve come close.
Now I am nearly 30, I have no boyfriend, very few friends almost none leftover from high school. I live on the other side of the country than my whole family, I moved for a job. A job that I am no longer satisfied with but can’t seem to muster up any energy to do anything about.
It was this realization that lead me to think that Lucy wasn’t as good a friend as I thought she was. She had been convincing me that this is as good as it’s going to get. That this job was the one for me for the rest of my life. And the more that I thought about that fact the worse I felt. I’d try and reason with her that I could do something else, but she was convinced that I could not.
I don’t tell other people about Lucy, they don’t understand her. She says she’s looking out for my best interests and keeping me safe. That she is protecting me. But now I have another voice telling me she’s suffocating me, that she’s holding me back and not letting me grow and breath.
This new voice intrigues me, I’ve never heard it before…although it sounds vaguely familiar. I will call her Betty. I hope Betty and I have more talks soon…”

I know it sounds crazy, like I have some major issues or a bipolar complex with me but you know what? Betty turned out to be right, she convinced me to get some help that my severe depression. I looked up depression treatment centers, I moved back to California with my family. And you know what else? Lucy hasn’t been around for a while. It’s just me and Betty and that’s fine with me.