Prescription: Surrender

My life has not always been the increasingly wonderful and miracle-filled experience I am having today; no, for many years, forty-nine to be exact, it was daily depression, emptiness, fear of judgment by others, simple and complicated unhappiness, and something everyone in the world has felt at times: loneliness, alienation, lack of love. Except that my aloneness and sense of not being loved were part and parcel of being awake! So, naturally, I thought frequently of going to sleep and at times of going to sleep forever. Even when I was a preschooler, people noticed my unhappiness. I was recommended, for psychiatric care when I was fifteen, but that somehow didn't seem to take place. Finally, when I was twenty-two, and in medical school, my first serious depression arrived. I started crying for four days and I never stopped.