I'm Feeling A Lot Better

I've been writing this blog for three weeks now, and I have to admit that when I first started writing it I thought that I would be the only person to read it, or maybe a couple of friends would also read it if I told them I was writing it. So you can imagine how happy I was when the counter clicked past 200 this morning. I appear to have a number of regular readers.

I know that the Jobbing Doctor is one, because he kindly put a link to my site after he had read one of my early posts. He now has me on his blog list as "from the other side of the fence" and has linked my post about what it's like to suffer from depression as a shared item. The Nice Lady Doctor also reads my post and has made a couple of nice comments about things that I have written and of course that is much appreciated. Yesterday I had a comment from a blogger in New Zealand, so I am truly reaching an international readership.

So what has this got to do with me feeling better? Well, I've been to see my GP this afternoon, and it is the last time that I will see him as my GP because he is about to retire. I had been for my daily constitutional and I had ended up at the surgery about 40 minutes early for my appointment. I didn't mind having to wait because I had a book with me so I could read to pass the time. But I was lucky; he called me in to see him 30 minutes before my appointment time and we had a long chat about things. He asked me about how my psychotherapy was going and we chatted about that. Then we got a bit side-tracked and we started talking about the Internet, about websites, and about blogs so I admitted to him that I had started writing one about three weeks ago. I also told him that my readership seemed to be increasing as the days went by and that I found writing these posts quite therapeutic. My readership is going to increase again because he asked me for the name of the blog so that he could have a look at it when he had finished surgery.

He said that I appeared to be looking better than usual, but admitted that how I look physically often bears no relation to how I am actually feeling and then I realised that I was feeling better. For the first time for a couple of months I feel as though there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not sure why this is, because I have something coming up that I am actually quite worried about, and yet here I am feeling quite jolly. Maybe it is because I am getting somewhere with the psychotherapy, but I have a sneaking feeling that it is sitting and writing this blog, and the lovely comments that I am getting, that have helped me turn a corner.

As I said yesterday, nobody who has depression wants to feel the way that they do, and no amount of people telling you to snap out of it, or look on the bright side, can lift that weight that you feel pressing down on you. It is amazing that a simple message from somebody who you don't know can lift your spirits and help you on the road to recovery from the depression that you are in. Even though you know you may slip into the hole again at some time in the future, the fact that somebody is there across the ether who appreciates what you have written and takes the time to tell you so can make all the difference in the world.