A letter to explain

Dear depression,

This week-I'm going to kick your arse.

Depression,  you have taken too many years from me, reduced me to a shell, a puppet, smiling though I'm empty inside.  You've hidden, deep away, for months, then returned with a vengeance,  slapping my self control round the face and whispering bitter insults into my mind. You've tried to destroy anything good, everything good, til my Husband came along, stronger than you, and my friends, you cannot ruin my friends.  Because,  and hear this, they know what your up to. They know exactly what you're trying to do, and they said no.

And I say no.

So pills and sunshine,  fighting your exhaustion and rationalising your irrational. Ice cream, hugs, and loving arms. These are my weapons. And depression?  Believe me.
I will win. For I am never alone.

Forever free,

Meg.

Letter to the Brave

Brave girl,

I catch your eye in the mirror, make up half done, hair fuzzing like a mane around your ears. You don't look brave. Anything but. Your toddler bursts in demanding a drink and your smile snaps back into place, in a minute darling.

You aren't anything special, no stunning beauty, no weeping in the corner, no dragging the world down with your pain. So, why? Why is this averagely average woman brave? What could she possibly do? She laughs, she jokes, she cuddles her kids, even when her heart is hollow and her pelvis snapping in two. She got back behind the wheel when every frayed nerve was screaming not to. Last week she drove across a bridge of a doom, a bridge that she'd narrowly avoided a panic attack on just a few days prior. Before that, drove in rain so heavy she could barely see. This woman, this seemingly nothing, can look in the mirror and smile at the face looking back. She has turned her heart and is ridding herself of the darkness that invaded her soul. This woman is brave.

Braver than even she will ever know.

Concrete Words-The Tainted

For a while I was tainted. Now I'm getting over that and I have become a 'tainter', I break most things I touch and, am mostly always, sporting some cut, or bruise, from some clumsy accident.

In just a few short weeks I have dropped and smashed my very shiny, beautiful, new phone, dropped and chipped my husbands shiny new iPhone, broken myself building a lightweight, plastic climbing frame, and, as of last night, burnt the finger prints off my middle finger by touching a barbecue. A lit barbecue.

A large portion of these misdemeanour's is simple stupidity, my brain fails to catch up with my actions and pain happens. A smaller portion is my sense of super hero-ness. Lit barbecue? No problem for me, teflon hands! Pregnant with a dodgy pelvis? Walking 3 miles can only help, surely? Have a new, probably expensive, technical item? Dropping onto a hard floor from a certain height can only help it run better. No?

I do not like being a 'breaker of self and shiny things'. Unfortunately, as time ticks by and days roll forward my lack of spatial awareness and butter fingers only get worse. Especially as I have no fingerprints left.

Keep your technology away from me, please, unless you want to see if it bounces.