354. Turning Point: Write about a point in life where things turned for the better or worse.
The depression that rooted in the pandemic lifted 3+ years later on my 60th birthday while in Tanzania, Africa. I have had depression that lasted longer but this bout was a tug-of-war struggle on all fronts.
Before my birthday, we traveled through Namibia, South Africa, and visited Zanzibar. The day before my birthday, we started our safari and had visited our first national park where I had my first sightings of wild animals, complete with watching and listening to an elephant rip down a tree for a meal. We had a lovely dinner the night before and enjoyed the local liquor so after all that loveliness, when I woke up on my birthday, I had an overwhelming rush of peace and gratitude.
I experience depression as a black hole that I’ve fallen into and have to crawl my way out of. The hole is in a forest that lightens as I walk out of it into the sunlight. The visual I had on my birthday was that of a drone watching me at the rim of the hole, pulling up as I walked out of the forest into to bright desert; desert is a good thing in this scenario. As I burst onto the bright plain, the drone rises further to show me dancing/running from the dark forest that now appears as a small patch in the otherwise vast expanse. There may have been a Taylor Swift soundtrack to this visual but this mini brain video summed up how I felt leaving depression behind.
