Beyond Blue

You sure do learn a lot about a person’s personality and temperament when you assemble a gingerbread house. And even more when you make 14 of them. I’m thinking about patenting this activity as a tool for diagnosing the different kinds of mental illness–obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, eating disorder, and bipolar disorder–because all of them…

My old self is definitely back, because only she would be foolish enough to volunteer to organize David’s Christmas party. I’m investing in life again, which is truly a miracle. Last year I missed the Christmas party because I was afraid I would have a panic attack and be stranded at the school, unable to…

Now here’s an image worth a holiday chuckle: a dozen naked women in the gym locker room rushing to get their pants on to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” “I wish they would just kill the music,” one woman says, and we all laugh. For the moment the gym is my support group. These women,…

Three-year-old Katherine was demoted from an angel to a star in her preschool Christmas pageant. It called to mind the pangs of devastation I felt in the fifth grade when I lost out to Marci Simons for the part of Mary. Maybe I needed some re-wiring in my brain back then, or maybe I was…

Speaking of angels, I received a care package from my guardian angel today (the woman I met on a train–see next post). For Christmas my angel gave to me: $90 to get a massage (since she apparently reads this blog and in an earlier post I vented about the arrogant massage therapist who told me…

I met my guardian angel on a train from New York City to Baltimore, a train I had to sneak onto because of an Amtrak strike. With people standing in the bathroom, in the café car, and in the aisles, I searched for some open space. A woman in her 50s with platinum hair and…

Because it has been two months since my last posts, here’s a refresher on why I’m writing this blog: Some people are born with smooth lines; others have jagged edges. Some find contentment in a cup of tea, others stay restless their entire lives. Guess which one I am? “We would never learn to be…

There is a reason violet follows blue in a rainbow. At the heart of depression’s “blues” is a time of waiting–symbolized by the color purple during Advent, the liturgical season preceding Christmas. It’s appropriate, then, that Beliefnet is launching a blog about depression and anxiety at a time when Christians around the world are preparing…

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