Depressed? Me?

I’ve just come out of depression, an experience that I have always dismissed as a kind of indulgence. Now I know better. For eight weeks, my world looked dreary and bleak; I felt enthusiasm for nothing. I knew something was wrong and as I writer, I researched my state. I felt as though I’d pricked my finger on the spinning wheel and was about to enter a 100 year sleep. I might have succumbed, except that as a 45 year old single parent prince charming wasn’t likely to come and rouse me with a kiss. And so I fought of a fatigue that felt like it wanted to swallow me. Then, I discovered an explanation for depression. When you worry, your brain processes this worry through dreams. When you dream you don’t enter the deep recuperative sleep that you need. Hence, you wake up the morning, brain foggy with a load of tangled night images and utterly drained. This made sense. It was one of those Oprah Ah-ha moments that I’d been trained to recognise and pull out of people’s biographies. Then, I remembered my yoga nidra training and the teacher explaining that 30 minutes of yoga nidra is equal to eight hours of sleep.
I pulled out my cd’s, went through the 30 minute guided mediation and I swear, the next morning, the fog had lifted. It felt like when you go on holiday and it rains for the first week and suddenly the sun comes out and you can put on you bikini and go to the beach.
I’m so grateful for my depression as it has taught me humility. Before I felt that depressed people were somewhat wimpy, self-indulgent types. I now know better. I’ve always prided myself on my stoic optimism and it really took a fall.