I’m starting this web diary to help myself focus.

With depression, especially the way mine manifests, it’s not always clear how I really feel or what I really think.

I tend to have a bad habit of morphing myself with the opinion of others and/or the dominant culture and values that are around me, and suppressing my true beliefs so well that I don’t even realize I am behaving in a way that is contrary to how I actually believe!

Eventually, usually in a disfunctional way, my real beliefs come thorugh subconsciously. I end up appearing pretty darn fragmented and scattered; in worst cases, I look like a liar, and/or extremely labile.

So, God-willing, by writing here I hope to get more in touch with my Essential Self. In Sufism, we talk about how when we are disconnected from our higher power we become fragmented, and when we are connected to our higher power, we are emancipated from this fragmentation and are integrated into our Essential Self. This is being Human at it’s best, and God-willing I will be doing this.

Some entries, I am just going to vent. Feel free to just skip over those entries, as they will basically just be bitch sessions.

I find it's better for me to write out negative emotions, than to carry them out verbally. A lot less conflict happens this way, and I usually end up being able to sort through my psychological noise and find the meat of what I really need to communicate.

Effective communication is so difficult to accomplish when one is depressed. Negative emotions keep getting in the way. It's so frustrating to me, because the result is that no communication happens. The person I am trying to communicate with gets bombarded by my emotional outburst (anger, attempts at manipulation, etc) and therefore is unable to even hear what I am trying to discuss.

So, I find it's much more effective to write while I am emotionally charged, and then sort through things to figure out what I want to communicate, then give just that to the person, in writing, so my emotions don't get in the way.

Oh, BTW, I am really good at understanding and articulating general concepts, and horrible at the details. Please forgive me ahead of time for this flaw!

More soon to come…..