Well, today’s the day. I am officially forty years old now, and thus, I am dead.

Obviously not in any literal sense. After all I am still here writing this, and unless I have become a very literal ghost writer, that sort of implies I am still around and my bucket is, as yet, unkicked.

But the pre-40 me is dead, dead, dead. I have decided to treat turning 40 years old as the demarcation point between my previous life and the life I want to lead now.

This date shall serve as a big thick heavy black line across the ledger of life, and everything before the line will be nothing but a terrible dream, a long illness from which I am recovering, and when it is gone I will be ready to go back to living my life as it was supposed to be, before I got sick.

My therapist recently reminded me of some advice I have given to myself (and others) many times : I am not my illness. I am not merely a depressive.

Sure, I have been sick a long time and it’s kept me on the sidelines of life. But I am no more my disease than a person with long term cancer.

I am a normal, healthy, valid human being who happens to have contracted a nasty illness called depression in my early twenties and have suffered from it ever since. But it no more defines me than my shoe size or my eye color.

It is very tempting to cling to one’s diagnosis. After all, before your diagnosis, you had no idea what was wrong with you, and being able to name your demon is almost infinitely better than not knowing.

After that, the diagnosis becomes the identity that you desperately need because of the way depression has of suppressing your true identity. It seeps into all the empty spaces the disease leaves in your psyche until, eventually, it becomes hard to remember that things were not always this way.

You were not always depressed. You were not always sad and fearful all the time. You didn’t always hate yourself. That is the disease talking, not you. You are a real, valid, worthy person with a disease that happens to be good at making you feel like shit.

But you are not shit. You are a wonderful person who happens to feel like crap right now. And no matter how long your disease has been around and no matter how long it lingers in the future, that will never change. You and it are separate things.

Remember the last time you had the flu. Sure, you felt terrible. Sure, it kept you from being an active part of the world for a while. Sure, you had to do things to manage your symptoms and speed your recovery. Sure, the symptoms were often really gross and disgusting and there were times when it felt like the damned thing was going to be around forever.

But you knew it was only temporary, and that all you had to do was take care of yourself and endure the symptoms and eventually, it would all be over and the experience would fade into just another bad memory of something that almost feels like it happened to someone else.

Remember what that was like, and hold on to that experience. This too shall pass. Depression is an illness and not a part of who you really are.

And no longer how long it will last, no matter how long it has lasted, that will never change.

So today, the old me dies. The sun has set on the previous version of me, and risen on a new and improved version without the accumulation of errors and memory faults inherent in the previous version.

But don’t worry, my faithful public. All the features that you know and love from the old version will be retained. The changes will be mostly under the hood stuff. Mostly to fix that tendency of the mood and self-worth subroutines to crash one another. That is definitely not a feature. It’s a bug.

This suicide of mine is purely metaphorical. All the wonderful features like my sense of humour, my wit (not the same thing), my kindness, my gentle spirit, my empathy, and most of all that big old brain I lug around with me will all be there.

But I plan to expand my ambition, my imagination, my courage, my enthusiasm, and uninstall all that tired old bullshit about being worthless and useless and a drain on others and blah blah blah.

I am a wonderful person with a hell of a lot going for me. Other people would be tickled pink (and spanked red) to have all the neat brain powers I have.

So I am not very good at physical things. I am clumsy and uncoordinated and there is a missing gear somewhere between my hands and my eyes. So what? That is a tiny thing in this modern virtual world. There are more ways to make a living (or at least a life) using only your brain and a computer keyboard than ever before, and they continue to grow.

All I have to do is go out there into the warm and sunlit world and get myself noticed. Obstacles will be circumvented, navigated, and even, if absolutely necessary, bulldozed over.

I am wicked awesome and it is time I embraced that fact, held it close to my heart, and made sweet, sweet love with it until it and I are one.

Time to shed my skin and bask in the sun till I dry out. Toss out all the heavy baggage I have been lugging around and travel light, with nothing to hold me down.

There will be depression. There will be fear. There will be doubt. There will be times when I feel like just giving up.

But I will never give up. I will just keep on believing in myself till my dreams come true.

This, I swear to you, to the Universe, and to myself.

Time to be born!