When I first started university, I started a blog. Not the one that I have in my signature -- that one I started last year, and it's just about my depression -- but a different one to let people back home know how I was doing. At first, I liked writing in it. I put in all the things I was doing, I talked about my classes, just sort of chattered away the way I talk to my friends and family at home. But I found it increasingly difficult to keep up that happy chatter, and as the depression took hold of me and I started isolating myself more and more, I ran out of things to say. Eventually, I stopped writing in it altogether, because the thought of pretending to be happy made me feel physically sick, mostly because it reminded me that I wasn't happy and that I was a complete failure and to pretend otherwise was to be a liar. I still lie a lot, mostly because I don't tell everyone about my depression, and I probably never will. Instead of "I'm doing great" like I used to when I was depressed, I now say "I've been doing fine" or "I'm loving my life." I'm not loving my life because my life only began again over the summer, when I finally got past the worst of my depression. Getting past depression doesn't mean that your problems suddenly disappear. Getting past depression just means that those problems aren't your undoing. That's how it is for me, anyway. My best friend, who knows everything about the depression and how bad it was, says that it's scary how convincing I am whenever people ask how things have been for me and I say great. It scares me too, and while I know it's nobody's business what's happened to me, it still makes me feel horrible to lie. It makes me feel like a failure to say I've been happy when I haven't. Logically, I know I'm not a failure, that I couldn't help getting depressed, but I still wish I'd been stronger somehow. That I didn't have to lie so much. That I wasn't different from everyone else.

Now ... now I'm lost. I don't think I'm depressed. I'm keeping an eye out for the symptoms, now that I know what to look for. But when you've been living your life in the dark and step out into the sunlight for the first time, you're going to be blinded for a while. I have no idea how to live anymore. I spent so long being what I termed a "breathing corpse" that I can't remember how to go about the business of LIVING. And it terrifies me, because if I don't figure it out, if I keep living my life the way I did when I was depressed, it's only a matter of time before the depression comes back too.

I'm not happy. I'm not depressed, but I'm not happy either. I'm just ... in unfamiliar terrain. I have no idea what to do next. I have no idea how to pick up where I left off. I've lost all sense of myself, and I feel like I'm trying to get my bearings in a brand new place even though I've been living here for the past two years. I'm so far behind. I have no idea how to catch up to everyone else who's been alive the past two years, not half-dead like me. I'm not even sure that I can, and if I don't ... I'm not sure I want to think about what that means for me, either.