The Down Side Slide

(photo: A hug at the right time is a life line)
I got a call yesterday out of the blue from a new friend inviting me to tea.
It was a life line.
Since Monday, when the balmy temperatures of last week dropped to the negatives and kept going, I’d been slipping into a depression. Like an avalanche, once started, the Down Side Slide gathers momentum. Little things go awry and spilling the milk gains import. I know this, but it hasn’t happened for a while. I slipped onto the slide before I knew it.
The handrails are hard to grab, especially when you’re in a new place just making friends and without an office job to get you up in the mornings. In the same way as blowing a small ache up into cancer or arthritis, it’s what depression is really good at. By Tuesday I was convinced I had Alzheimer’s and life as I knew it would just cease to exist--although I would not.
I was researching an article and ran into a site that offers brain games to improve your cognitive powers with a free trial to measure your progress. If you like it, you can keep your brain nimble; for a fee. I tried it. My scores were so low as to be alarming. OMG, did I have it and not know? How would I know? I was convinced my future was to watch the world close in and reduce my joy to the next meal.
The universe sent this dark, jagged, negative energy back. Car pool partners who may have brought fresh air into my gloom cancelled. Bills arrived with no cheques. It took 15 minutes to scrape the ice off my car so I could see to drive. The open road became a black tunnel.
Then the phone rang. My friend explained she’d arranged to have a mutual friend over and my name just popped into her head. She always listens to her inner voice.
That’s the same voice that tells me to take an umbrella when I leave the house on a sunny morning—and means I will come home soaked 12 hours later if I ignore it. Of course it’s connected to others, I just didn’t think about that. There have been times in my life when the depression was so strong I retreated instead of grabbing the life line. Thanks to a very special therapist, lots of help from friends and soul-searching, I am thrilled to say I welcome help. I can’t do it alone. And I have friends.
Today, the temps are still below freezing, but I hopped on the treadmill, got the blood pumping, speculated that the website could, perhaps, adjust the results to make folks on the trial score very low to, maybe, encourage (or scare) them into signing up. I have my list of Things I Must Do, which includes a Thank You to my two friends.
Depression can hit at any age, but I think the older we get the more susceptible we are. Threre are a whole bunch of very real scary things that might happen to us, the very biggest being we will die. The trick is to keep living—and enjoying life—until that happens.
One good way is to help others stay off the slide.
Cheers
SLI