With Christmas all unwrapped for another year, our attentions will soon turn to the next milestone on the calendar, New Year’s Day. If we haven’t already, we will begin to outline our New Year’s resolutions for 2013 and plan out some goals we hope to accomplish in the next 12 months. But before we leave 2012 behind, maybe it’s a good time to look back and contemplate a bit on the past 12 months. 
 
I came across a website, thoughtquestions.com, that poses one thought-provoking question each day. The questions are wide ranging, and actually make for good journaling prompts. Two of my recent favorites are “What makes you irreplaceable?” and “If not now, then when?” 
 
The site offers some reflective questions for the end of the year. Among them are, “What memory from this past year makes you smile the most?” and “What could you have done better this year?” 

I pondered those questions for myself, and found them rather challenging. First of all, my memory is so poor that looking back for poignant moments is a bit frustrating. Even the negative recollections don’t carry much emotional impact for me in retrospect. So what makes me smile? I would have to say my best memory of the year is the family get-together that I hosted just last week. Maybe that’s cheating since it is hardly old enough to count as a memory. But having my loved ones together and having the wherewithal to be able to host something like that meant a lot to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. 
 
As far as what I could have done better this year…  Although I had a lot of struggles this year, my overall sense is that I did pretty well with handling them. There is, of course, always room for improvement. I could have exercised more, eaten more healthfully, cleaned the kitty litter boxes more frequently…

I landed in the hospital this year, lost my job, suffered two sprained ankles and continue to face financial challenges. But despite the “bad” things, I still feel I have been fortunate this year.  All in all, I am pleased with how 2012 turned out for me. Maybe this is where a poor memory comes in handy. 
 
I can put 2012 behind me with few regrets. So it’s on to the New Year and coming up with new resolutions. Another plus side to the whole memory thing: I forget my resolutions soon after making them, so there’s no guilt come March or April when I haven’t even started acting on them. 

Maybe I should resolve to improve my memory next year. 
 
Naw, forget it.

Maggie

How would you answer the questions? Leave a comment.

In a previous post, Writing It Down, I talked about how I used to write a humor column for a community newspaper near where I lived when my daughters were quite young. I have kept the newspaper clippings of the column for over 20 years now. 

Recently I misplaced those clippings and was very sad because, as I have noted before, my memory is very poor and I don’t have a lot of recall about those days. The clippings serve to jog my memory about what it was like then. I feared that the clippings were lost forever, but I have come across them again, right where they should have been, just stuffed under some other things so I couldn’t see them. 

The timeframe covered in the column was truly the “good old days” for me. I was on a much appreciated hiatus from depression – for the most part – and I was finding tremendous joy in my young family. The articles I wrote are not about depression; far from it. But I am enjoying rereading them and decided to share them on this blog in a “Friday Flashback” series starting this coming Friday. It won’t be a long series because I didn’t write the column for very long. I don’t recall why I stopped. 

So how does my reminiscing about the past relate to “balancing life with depression?” It probably doesn’t, not for anyone but me. For me, the articles are a strong reminder of a time when I felt a strong sense of purpose and had vivacity and felt a pure joy in living. It’s been a long time since I have felt that way. 

Of course, I am significantly older now, and my circumstances are quite different. I can’t go back to the good old days, nor do I want to. I’ve done a lot of living in the past 20 years, some of it pretty good, some of it about as dark as it gets. These articles are an inspiration for me to seek new happy experiences. I know it’s possible. I’ve been there. 
 
So please bear with my self-indulgence, at least on Fridays for a while. Some of the articles will be revised to protect the “innocent,” but otherwise they will be presented as written. I hope you are able to enjoy them as I do, and I hope that they may inspire others to take a look at their lives and remember the good times; and to look forward, realizing that there are more good times to be had. It’s so easy to get tunnel vision when we are down, not being able to see anything but the hole we are in right now. 

I know all about holes, and am grateful that I am having an opportunity to come up for air for a while. I want to ingrain my good memories into my mind so they will be there to draw upon when I next need them. And I really don’t mean to embarrass my daughters, but they were JUST SO CUTE! 
 
They will understand when they have kids of their own.
Maggie

“I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.”
― Phyllis Diller

I helped raise two beautiful daughters, and they are the joy of my life. They were very easy to raise. When my youngest daughter wanted a pet, she was easily satisfied with the spider that was hanging out on our back door. When I promised the girls a ten course meal one time, they were thrilled with course number four: a baby carrot with three holes dug into it by a potato peeler into which I inserted three carob chips. Voila! I had created a taste sensation that we named “Three Men in a Boat.”  The other 9 courses weren’t much more advanced than course number four, but we had a good time.

At a young age, the girls learned to dress themselves. It didn’t matter to me if they wanted to wear sweat pants in the summer or polka dots with stripes. It was all good. They cringe now when looking at old photos, and accusingly ask me why I ever let them out in public looking like that. Personally, I thought it was cute. 

The sad thing about raising my daughters is that there is quite a lot that I just don’t remember. I don’t know if I just naturally have a sieve for a memory, or if I was just in too much of a funk to pay attention a lot of the time. My own childhood is the same for me; very few memories. I truly believe that it was my depression that disabled me from appreciating what was going on in the moment a lot of the time.

For a while, when the girls were young, I wrote a biweekly column for a local newspaper and would tell little stories about the girls and our family life. It was a small paper with a readership of maybe 700. Of course that’s roughly 350% more readers than I have now, but still, no big thing. I saved the articles and have enjoyed rereading them because they help me remember the fun we had. They are my memory. Recently I tried to find the clippings and cannot do so. It will be a great loss to me if I am unable to locate them. I think the need to remember is playing a big part in why I am writing again. I don’t want to lose my memory of my time right now, my time when I am actually happy. 
 
My daughters are still very prominent in my life, and I really don’t think they have much room to talk about how I let them dress as children – not when they, as teenagers, chose to wear Converse sneakers with their prom dresses. (I loved it.) And as adults, I am still very proud of them. How could you not take pride in how you raised your daughters when they grow up to be nicknamed “Mad Dog” and “The Terminator” by their coworkers? 

At brain school (outpatient treatment) we were encouraged to journal as part of our therapy. I don’t know that I will ever go back and read those entries. But I think that writing helps us pay attention and be a little more reflective about our lives. It helps us get in touch with ourselves. It doesn’t have to be deep, thank God, and it doesn’t have to be  lengthy. It just has to be real. I would encourage anyone and everyone to write. It does the soul good.

For me, it’s been long overdue. 
Maggie