It doesn’t seem like being alive is as hard for other people ask it is for me. It just feels like there’s some kind of secret to life I don’t know. Like I’m doing it all wrong.
Glennon Doyle
This is month 18 of my current depressive episode.
Are you getting tired of reading about my struggles week after week?
No one in my family keeps up with my blog, not my mom or my siblings. I think it’s because they need space from the intensity.
This is my 100th post. I will keep writing because I hope that it is making a difference. I need the people who battle invisible illnesses to know they’re not alone.
I don’t have the secret to living life unscathed.
I can’t process feelings as quickly as others.
I fight guilt and shame almost hourly.
I feel things so deeply that it can become paralyzing.
I have a spotty memory.
I am healing but it’s taking so long.
..
Be well, be kind, be patient. xo cassie
i will grow from this 
I read every single post, Cassie, and am so grateful for your example of ending the stigma, choosing to fight every damn day, trying new treatments (big and small), being honest about the hardest days/moments as well as the ok days/moments. Lots of love, Meredith.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you Meredith. Love you ❤️
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also over here reading and keeping up with you and sending you all I can through the universe. I feel like what your are doing is so important period, but right now even more so. What our world is currently experiencing is making things hard for a lot of people, especially those who fight any mental health battles. You’re strong and brave and I’m so glad you’re sharing. ❤️❤️❤️ I hate that you have to fight 24:7. But know that while you do, we are all in your corner cheering for you and thinking of you and your beautiful family. ❤️
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you Kelly ❤️
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m quite new to your blog, not new to chronic depression. I read when I’ve energy to catch up with the WordPress community ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
I understand, thanks for reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I go through fits and spurts of reading your blog – but I always circle back to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Cassie, your honesty astounds me. I hope and pray you find peace and radical acceptance of your intrinsic worth on this earth.
My father, who is a writer, sent me a book this Christmas called /One Long River of Song/ by Brian Doyle. Have you heard of this name? It’s a collection of essays, most of them around 1-2 pages in length so v. digestible and heart-wrenchingly well-written reads. Do you know when you feel as though the prose you’re reading is in fact poetry? Allow me to give you an example that made me think of you just the other day:
” All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of a difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, and in fact the vast majority of things you do right will go utterly unremarked. /Humility, the final frontier,/ as my brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives, simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is ultimately more valuable or rich or famous or beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true about humility.
“This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, /is/ love. That could be. /I/ wouldn’t know; I’m a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.”
Please know that I’m rooting for you, Cassie. We all are. ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person