The New Door is Opening...

I am in the midst of a life changing event — retirement (or as one friend put it ” the beginning of my community activism period”). As a person with a depressive/anxiety disorder, I know that in my experience, major life-changing events, which in the normal scheme of things may involve serious grief, would make their first stop at the depression/anxiety station.  In other words, I could not go through the grief cycle without there being a distracting, and emotionally paralyzing, overlay of my disease.  Past experience (for example, when my mother died) has taught me that I was going to go through grief at a more intense level and in a much longer-lasting way than other, “normal” people go through such passages.  Feelings of hopelessness and longing to join the dead were very strong.

For me, retirement is the end of my public life as a lawyer.  This brings up a lot of anger, because it had become hard for me to work because of health issues.  Moreover, now, at the beginning of my “new life,” I am dealing with my third new type of cancer (I seem to grow things).  The first cancer (melanoma) was in the early 1980’s.  I was told to wind up my affairs and prepare to die.  But for reasons no one understands, I survived.  However, the tension during the first ten years after I was given a death sentence triggered my now-lifelong companion – depression/anxiety disease.  The new cancers are highly treatable, but I still go into a serious anxiety period right before cancer checkups as well as after them.  Couple this with guilt around surviving melanoma, it makes for a messy cocktail.

When I was younger I used to say, “You can have it all: career, cancer, condo and children,” but I didn’t include depression/anxiety in that ironic mix of “desirables.”  But at 60, I can no longer hold it together.  The kid got married, and the public law career had to go.

For the last 10 months, I have been in serious grief for the life I had and the life that I wanted (in particular, more children –especially, a girl to talk to0), because I was not able to have any children after the melanoma episode at age 31.  Luckily, I had a son already.  He does his best to give his parents attention, but his wife’s family comes first.  I can hardly complain, because it was that way in my own marriage.  But it is still not great to come in second.

Also, I longed for a more fun career.  While my career was successful, it was so in a quiet way.  I had wanted to be a trial lawyer, but that became too hard when I was dealing with a new baby and cancer.  Also, I then realized that I could never leave my job, because if I did so, I would lose my health insurance, and given my cancer, I was uninsurable.  I know objectively that my story is not so sad, but depression/anxiety knows how to twist every event into a negative tale.

So now it is ten months in, and I am slowly dealing with the SOS (some old shit) and looking at ways to have a new and interesting life.  I retired on December 31, 2010, and I am hoping and praying that I will have a my new life in place to start the new year.  That is depression/anxiety management in action.