Julio's Musings

I’ve mentioned to some people about the time I came close to cutting my wrists. It was a dark time, to say the least. I was looking through some of my notes from when I was in counseling and I realized that something I’ve neer really mentioned much before is about when I decided that living was a better thing than dying.

This was in early 2004, a time that, looking back now, seems like decades ago. I had struggled with depression for a couple of years and it almost seemed as if it would never go away. It was a feeling of being so stuck and not knowing how to get out of it (a feeling that would return 6 years later). One day, I decided that I couldn’t do any of that anymore. It was so hard on my mind and my life that it needed to end. So I had a choice: either work towards getting better and make myself not so depressed or succumb to the depression and just die (figuratively or literally, it didn’t matter). I decided to live. It was a harder choice than one would think, but it was a choice I thought was best. I had a good family, a two-year-old nephew and a less-than-year-old niece, good friends, and potential. What the potential was for, I didn’t know at the time. I just knew it was there.

So living it was. I decided to focus on some things with school, to fix and regain an important friendship I had let go of, and to just find the things in life that would bring happiness. It was a very up and down experience, at one point seemingly filled with nothing but down. But even when things hit bottom and I had a relapse of anxiety and depression, I knew that I had to live. I made that promise to myself. That led to my cousnseling of last year and my happiness of now.

Life is full of so many choices, and I’ve made many right and wrong choices. The only choice that really mattered, though, was my decision to live. The problem many people have with depression is that everything seems much bigger and dire. Decisions, even some that may be simple, become a huge hassle and a cause for anxiety and more depression. When you get to that point, the best thing to do is to simplify it. Do you live or do you die? When you make that decision, everything else can be easier. Choose to die (and, again, by die I don’t necessarily mean a literal death, but even just giving up and letting the negative take over completely) and, well, you don’t have to decide anything ever again. Choose to live, however, and you’ll find which decisions are legitimately important and have the ability to make the best choices. They may not always work out, but choosing life will help you handle it.

It’s not always easy. This whole anxiety/depression-type thing is something that I’ll always have to deal with; a battle I’ll always be fighting within myself. Even so, I’ll be okay because I chose to live all those years ago. I chose to not fall into the thinking of dying last year and got help before it happened. It was an easy decision, even if it took me a little time to make it.

I’ll end this now with some lyrics from a Kelly Clarkson song:

“I’ve been stuck in a storm before. Felt the winds raging at my door. Couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find a way out. Somehow my clouds disappeared. Somehow I made it here. Maybe just so you could hear me say the sun will rise. When you’ve lost your light, the sun will rise. It’ll be alright.”

Life isn’t easy. I sometimes have a love/hate relationship with it. But, as I told someone recently, those tend to make the most interesting and best relationships. So choose life.