Happy Birthday sweetie! The years will keep getting better, I promise.

Your post sent me on a very long and unexpected journey down memory lane... to be honest, dysthymia is a beotch! I'm often reminded of a scene from a little known indie movie called "Off The Map" in which one of the protagonists is having a conversation with a visitor... they are sitting on the back porch under the New Mexico sky; Charley is suffering from severe depression:

Charley: Excuse the crying. I'm a damn crying machine. That's why I drink so much water. Won't have any fluids left in me. You ever been depressed?

William: I've never not been depressed.

Charley: Never not been depressed?

William: Never not.

Charley: You've always been depressed?

William: Yes, sir.

I saw that movie some 14-15 years ago, and there was something stunningly familiar about that brief exchange.

It's ironic, really. I've lived with this shit since I was 14... longer than you have been alive. I look in the mirror sometimes, and I'm not sure if the person looking back is 17 or 57... and maybe it doesn't matter. The irony is that people turn to me as "the stable one" and "the one who has life together." And yet? I'm still fumbling through the dark. But, like you, I have always been resilient as hell. Reminds me... I once started on a book with the working title "1000 Reasons to Wake Up Tomorrow," based on the reality that I must have used a thousand different reasons to not make this might my last...

It's hard... to see so much; to feel so much; to experience a world in 3D cinemascope on an IMAX screen when it seems like everyone else is viewing it in black-and-white through a pinhole camera. It's exhausting.

Kids give us good reasons to keep breathing. Keep breathing @jaynie...

Love & hugs from afar.