if nothing ever went wrong

The thing about depression for me is the shift in the horizon line. You're traveling along the flat ground like everybody else, and suddenly you end up alone at the bottom of a steep valley. Silent, cool, and windswept.

I have learned not to stop walking. But had I been running or skipping before landing there, well, that's all over.  

The climb out is slow, and it hurts. Gravity is harsh. The steps take you over colorless stones, around leafless trees, and flowerless shrubs. The ground is mushy and damp, not slipper, but stubbornly weighted. 

Each journey out is different. Months, weeks, days, hours... as different as the reason for falling in. There are commonalities, like the questions that float as storm clouds: "When is my real life going to begin?" "What is the point of all this?" "Does nothing matter?" "Why does nothing makes sense anymore?"

It's that feeling of deep failure or wasted time or inadequacy, false shadows—a threatening storm to avoid getting caught up in. A sky of doubt distracting you from moving forward.  Dark, swirling weather is not to be encouraged or crossed. 

You walk, looking as if you are standing still. Seemingly getting nowhere while working harder than you think yourself capable of doing. Walking without reason, without true direction, and nothing seems to change.

Yet slowly, almost unperceivable light begins to leak in. Dark grays fade to watery blues, green pebbles appear, and the slope begins to break, giving way to flat ground. 

One foot in front of the other over rising over the edge like the sun summiting the mountains at dawn. Filling the darkness with light and color all at the same time. Then the beauty of it is gone, spread thin across the day, diluted and mundane.    

You find yourself out of the valley, back where you started right before you fell in. Standing among the pieces of your life. Gather them up, shake them off, and move on.

It is the contrast that makes my world so sharply beautiful and bitter-sweet. I am born over and over from the valley of darkness into a world of light.  

I am a collector of these moments, both light and dark. They are the fountainhead of the words I write. I find inspiration in the broken, the beaten, and the abandoned. You can't come home if you never leave. There are no cures without the disease.  

And there wouldn't be any good stories to tell if nothing ever went wrong and everyone always lived happily ever after.

~mlb