A Brief, Autobiographical Retrospective in 2024: The Year that WAS.

I hope it touches your soul somehow, and that you can relate.

I was lucky enough to have landed in the home office of a good psychiatrist in the midst of my emotional breakdown at 20. I was suicidally depressed. In the beginning of my treatment, I saw my doctor 3-4 times a week. Thankfully, he made himself available to me as often as I felt the need for him. He was literally my lifeline at that time.

My dad foot the bill for my treatment. For that, I am eternally grateful. I didn’t struggle with gender confusion (this has been largely unheard of, prior to the whacky ‘Biden-time’ administration some of us haven’t actually felt certain we’d spiritually survive). Still, my thought processes and perspectives were not at that time, rational. Nobody’s are incidentally, when they’re deeply depressed.

One day, my shrink (Dr. Elliott Luby, in Michigan~ long-retired, now) asked: “Shari, if we could FIX this issue that you believe is making you so unhappy, that is, completely alter and eradicate it, might you discover anything else that makes or keeps you upset and unhappy?”

This was a turning point for me in my treatment. THIS is what we need good (hard to find) therapists asking kids who wanna mutate their bodies, while searching for the ‘magic key’ that unlocks their sense of “Happiness,” and forever resolves their inner pain~ or so they think.

My breakdown was the most excruciating experience I’ve ever gone thru in this lifetime. Just making it thru each new day was a monumental task. But that setback molded and shaped me in ways that nothing else could ever have done. It has greatly contributed to my growing genuine empathy for others struggling inside emotional and psychic agony, and gave me a far deeper sense of how to help them surmount that pain, and learn to THRIVE, rather than just survive.

Millions of humans are content to survive, because it’s all they’ve ever known. This is what feels familiar, natural and comfortable to them. They’ve become inured to feeling pain and disappointment. It’s simply what they accept as “normal.” If this strikes you as somewhat tragic, your emotional reaction to it is accurate.

My childhood was extremely unstable. All those difficult experiences I had while trying to survive those early years, cumulatively added up to my falling apart emotionally, at the tender age of twenty.

I’m not sure it’s ever just one event that causes deep depression in humans, though I wondered in the aftermath of my sweet dog Cleo’s passing, if I’d ever be able to move beyond that grief. I tend to think acute depression is due to a whole lot of little and large erosions to our spirit that finally take their toll on us. My mental image of this, is a home sitting near the shoreline of a beach, and each wave that comes undermines its foundation a bit at a time, until the house collapses.

We can no longer hold up under the weight of all those incidents~ oftentimes, not even realizing how bad it’s really been. We never had the benefit of a different frame of reference for “life,” because we had to become mighty and strong enough to survive all that shit~ which has germinated our seed for developing pathological Codependency traits. Been there, done that~ and wrote The Book on it, my friends.

Sometimes, the very worst things that happen to us on our life’s journey, turn out to be the very best things that could have happened, because they force us to heal and grow. And with any luck and some determination, we get to share our hard-won capabilities, cumulative wisdom, and perhaps innate talents with others in similar need.

Happy New Year, y’all… and while this greeting may be a bit premature, nobody has ever accused me of being conventional. :~}