You Are Not Alone

My sister's sense of humor is notable.

For it's quirkiness, for her straightman to your clown, for the fastest barb in the west. She changes her ringtones to suit her, and your, mood. For a while her phone rang with the dulcet lisp of her 4 year old (now 7) chirping "Oh shit, it's Daddy again" and a few moments in lifetime ago "You are Not Alone" by Micheal Jackson. Not because she needed a pep talk - but because , dammit, with two kids, two jobs, sports events, dance practices, and being the pied piper - the woman was, is, NEVER alone.

Which isn't my point at all. Nor will it even point to where I'm going next. It was just the title that struck me today.

Because I have a dirty little shameful secret that's not so shameful or secret.
I have - as I have said - something akin to jealousy for someone. For two someones in fact, but truly for one, someone I don't know.

I stumbled across her blog a year? Two years? ago and I read her, and another - man - almost exclusively. I follow a few of their friends via their blogrolls, I click, I loiter - but it's these two that I read religiously. Because they amaze me. I like them. I like them as people, I like them as writers. I like the way they think, I like who they are. I like the way they parent, the way they participate in life, and I like - very much - what they have to say, how they say it and how they frame it for the world around them.

When things go wrong (as they sometimes will...) I hide from these two writers. Why? I have no idea. I think because what consumes me is so small, and then I read them and feel smaller. They don't know if I read, if I'm looking, if I'm "listening" but I hide nonetheless because I realize that I'm petty. I'm less when I should be more. And just the narcissism of not bothering to READ someone elses viewpoint because you are too consumed with your own, is, for me, shameful.

So I've hid. I've avoided their blogs because they make me feel ashamed for not being a better version of myself. Their world expands while I'm consumed by narrow. And in trying to insulate myself from...pain for lack of a better word...the pain of being embarrassed, I shutting myself off from something that could instead inspire me.

So I struggle with that. the "Getting Over Myself" aspect of it. I get mad that instead of coming out I retreat in.

And then one day, I wake up stronger - and decide that I don't suck - that I feel human again, so I drag out my bookmarks - and I find them again.

And today I read that one of my two. Is. Depressed.
Chemically so.
And that she struggles too.

And I know that I walk through my life undiagnosed. I know that my issues are chemical, I know that it gets dark, then light again, and I fight it "on my own" but really if ever there were a candidate for medication, it would be me. And I think this hereditary battle is one that has been with me for so long that I can't conceptualize a life without it. But I know that the wagon wheel turns, that the ferris wheel of life has ups and downs, and that in the end, this too will pass - both the bad AND the good. So I push through. Sometimes head high, sometimes head down. Sometimes I stop other times I'm running. But most importantly, I move forward. And imagine my surprise when I saw that the blogger I very likely admire most - feels - ,in some ways, similar.

You are not alone.

So little blogger gal just so you know, I admire you in more ways then this post has words. And thank you for sharing.