I just completed the first chapter in my memoir. Well, it’s not going to be the first chapter you read if you read it in order, but it’s the first part that I wrote about. I’ll put it all in order later.

So, how do I feel? In a way, I feel good. I feel like I had been carrying a lot inside I never really had an outlet where I could share the darker corners of my memory. I mean – when would you even tell people about the shit that happened in your past. It’s not like you’re at the dinner table and you squeeze it in between “this roast is so juicy,” and “can you please pass the peas?”

I never felt safe enough to even tell my closest friends about the horrors of my past. My psychiatrist, whom I’ve had for over 12…

When I originally considered writing a memoir about my treatment for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, I thought that I would just be telling people about my experience. What I didn’t know was how much I was going to learn about myself in the process.

I talked to my physicians, submitted requests for my medical records and dug up my old journals. Then I sat down and read those journal entries, page by page, trying not to be judgmental about where I was mentally, and something happened. I began to see my experience from the outside – out of the chaos.

I can appreciate the mental state I was in. I lived there for almost 20 years. I was fixated on death and dying and failed to see the beauty that was all around me. I couldn’t see it. My depression had too strong a…