Patience

I wouldn’t consider myself to be a patient person, however I’ve had to learn that quality in the most frustrating and painful way possible.

Towards the end of this month it’s 5 years since I was diagnosed with depression.

What depression does to you is strip away everything that you once knew about yourself.

I’ve often compared it to a mind wipe where you have to patiently put all the pieces back together, but have no knowledge on just how to do it.

You have to trust yourself and remain patient that the person you once felt like you were, you will rediscover and be once again.

In December this year marks my 10th anniversary with a suicide episode.

I carried that secret for almost 5 years without a sole knowing.

It was a secret I thought I would carry to my last breath and I would have done had I been mentally stronger.

Yes you have read that right.

Had I been stronger, no one would have ever known about that one night.

I would have continued to live my life throughout the torment and daily struggles, just to keep everything under wraps.

The hardest thing anyone can do in life is ask for help and admit mainly to yourself that you aren’t coping.

It’s not hard to see and recognise just how much my life has changed inside 5 years.

I often say I’ve achieved more in those last 5 years than I have across the 37 years before it.

I’ve learnt so much about who I am, who I could be, the potential I have and how I inspire others just by being myself.

Despite everything that I have learnt, the mental toughness I’ve rediscovered to the new passions I’m discovering, the ability to know who I actually am, found right in the depths of my core being.

I’d swap it, I’d swap it all.

I’ve said my suicide episode haunts me and so it should.

It’s something I would never do again, I shouldn’t be alive and I nearly wasn’t.

I’d swap it all to go back to the days whereby the pain didn’t exist, to not have the painful, dark memories that are constant reminders on how close it all could have become.

As the 27th December is fast approaching, it does mark a landmark year, but also a landmark year that doesn’t mean anything.

It’s a day I’ll never ever forget, but 10 years or 10 days it doesn’t mean anything, because it doesn’t change anything.

It’s a moment in time, within my own time, whereby fine margins have the ability to draw on life or death, like a coin settling itself on one side or the next.

The 27th December will always be a date remembered as vividly as my own birthday would be.

It’s the day my life changed forever!