Today was a therapy day, the first in two weeks, and so I guess you know what I will be talking about today. Slow cooker recipes!

Prepare it in the morning and eat it in the evening!

OK, for this easy and economical recipe, you will need to brown two pounds of stewing beef, add three cup of bacon broth and a cup of mandrake root, then dance around a blazing bonfire naked with obscene Celtic poetry written on you with the blood of the Old Ones….

Woops, sorry, wrong recipe. That is for…. something else.

Actually, I will talk about what went down in therapy for a change.

I was talking about how hard it is for me to get over my horror at contemplating how I am pushing 40 and have done absolutely nothing with life, no job ever, no relationship ever, no nothing, just endless video games and Internet.

I told him about how I can not get over how pretty much anyone would consider someone who had gotten to the age of 38 (39 next month) without ever having a full time job or supporting himself to be a great big loser to beat pretty much all losers.

And even outside of that, just the realization that I am approaching middle age, half my life gone forever, and I have nothing to show for it… even just that realization is like an enormous weight pressing down on me and holding me down, and how I just did not know how to sift that enormous weight off myself so I could move on.

And my therapist suggested that what I was experiencing was grief for the lost 15 plus years of life that depression has taken from me, and that what I needed to do was to mourn them. Take the time to think on them and what they meant to me and experience the loss, and then eventually, find a way to let go of them and bury them in the past where they belong.

And he is right. That is exactly how I should treat this problem. Especially the thinking about it part. I have mostly avoided thinking about it because it horrifies, shames, and depresses me and if I think about it, it give me self harm type thoughts.

So I thought there was no point thinking about it, it could only end in badness. But if I think of it as grieving, then suddenly there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Grieving ends. You might not know when it will end, but eventually, it ends. You bury the dead and move on. You do not forget them, but you let them go, and go forward with your life.

And that sounds pretty good to me. It means I have to spend a lot of time thinking about something which is very painful to me, but I think I can do it if I feel like there is some kind of point to it all.

Of course, oce I rid myself of that burden, I will have to face what lies beyond, and who I would be without it, which might be far harder than the first part. That is the other big thing we talked about this morning : identity.

One of the problems with having a life like mine, with nothing to hang my identity on but my depression, is that I really have no idea who I would be without it. Depression has been with me for so long that I am not sure I know how to separate myself from it. And the idea of going into the future with no defined identity whatsoever is terrifying. (And sort of exciting, in a way. )

I honestly think that issues of identity are the biggest barriers to the personal change people crave. We reject things which do not conform to our sense of ourselves, things that do not “fit” in our image of ourselves, even if those are the very things we want the most in life. You cannot change who you are until you change your idea of who you are, or at least, who you can be.

Luckily, I have been slowly developing an idea of who I could be without the depression and social anxiety holding me back, so I would not be heading into an identity vacuum were my mental illness to disappear into thin air like smoke tomorrow.

In fact, in my better moments, I am pretty sure that I have it in me to be a pretty amazing guy. Funny, sweet, charismatic in a quirky way, lovable, intelligent, creative, and one heck od a good cuddler.

Sure, there are a lot of attributes I do not have. I will never be particularly neat, or good with my hands, or organized, or decisive. (Or will I?)

But I have a lot of assets. I could really make a name for myself in the creative fields. I am not the useless pathetic individual my depression (and the voice of my sister Catherine from so long ago) tells me that I am.

And one of these days, I will get myself straightened out enough to silence the chaos of choice multiplication inside myself, take some decisive actions for a change, and somehow get myself to a place where I can do myself some good and connect with like minded people.

There is probably a lot of soul searching and therapy between me and then. When I can remember to have it, I have faith that if I continue to unburden myself of the deadened, leaden weight of old frozen emotions and continue to try to unlearn the bad thinking in order to make room for the good, eventually I will simply rise from my grave and simply walk away with it, the path pleasant and clear in front of me, and my grave filled instead with my dead forgotten past.

And I will never look back.