My own very personal storm

In Frozen, Olaf, the funny snowman, gets his own personal flurry to prevent him from melting in the sun.  Some of us were born with our own personal weather system. Having dysthymia is like having a personal weather which might not be so cute as personal flurry.

If your baseline is dysthymia and you have recurrent major depression, your life probably sucks.  A gloomy day is a good day and before you take one breath, voila! you are in a storm of one kind or another.  You can’t breathe, you barely can keep your eyes open.  You can’t see clearly.  You always walk against vicious winds.  Hail, lightning and heavy rain overturn what you know, and knock down what you hang onto.

You see your friends and wonder why they can move so easily; why they can read in the torrent of rain; why they can laugh in the sand storm without feeling choked while you taste the deadly ash of volcano eruption in your mouth even though you close your mouth so tightly shut that your face start to hurt.

What is wrong with me?  Am I weak?  Am I lazy?  Am I stupid?  Or what?  I am trying to do what they do as hard as possible, and still I can’t catch up.

What I didn’t know was my friends lived in a different land, where everyday was a normal weather day: sunny with some cloud, and slight chance of rain.  They have storms, but after a couple of days, it returns to normal sunny days.

What I didn’t know was that it takes a courage, endurance, and focus of athletes of extreme sports for us just to live a day in such a severe internal environment.

Once in a while, I experienced a beautiful day with blue sky as high as eternity and it scared me because if I would ever enjoy the weather, if I would ever even slightly believe it was real, then I would be punished multifold.  The storm shall follow and strike me down, on hands and knees, with my face in a gutter.  So I held my breath, close my eyes tight, and made myself hard.

So if your personal weather sucks, it’s not your fault that you can’t move gracefully.  And your friends who live in a normal weather land could never imagine how it is to be you. (They won’t survive in your personal weather.)

I hope you will find your way to change the weather.  It is possible.  After decades, I’ve changed my weather.  Everyday is just an ordinary weather day and it’s beautiful.   Even when a hurricane hits me, I now know it will pass and that I will breathe easily tomorrow.