Ten years ago today, I was having labor pains at St. Peter’s Hospital. The television was on. Christopher Reeve died on this day a decade ago, my middle son was born in two days and my Mom died in fifty-seven.

That year began an unconscious depression that usually lasts from October 12th until December 8th. It’s a hovering cloud of darkness that overshadows everything else. It took me a long time to go from this is the first Christmas without my mother and my son’s first Christmas to this is my son’s first whatever. I’m not sure it left at all that first year.

I hadn’t realized the depression that I was in. Rampant mood swings, emotional outbursts of all kinds, hysterics, but somehow I managed to take care of my two boys. Of course, my husband helped, but there was no help for me. What was happening to me was that the dam broke and mental issues that have plagued me since childhood burst through. I wouldn’t know this until eight years later when things came to a head and I was finally diagnosed.

There literally is a rock bottom and I was down in it. There wasn’t always understanding but without the support and reassurances from a good friend, I don’t think I’d be here today. I got medical treatment and professional therapy as well as being hyperaware of what was going on in my head and with my body.

I don’t think you can say that there’s a cure for depression; nor many of the other mental ailments that are invisible but that thousands of people live with daily. For me there are constant checks and balances, awareness and coping tools that sometimes include hiding out and often include writing, an amazing positive for my mental health and in my life.

Next week, I plan on sharing some of these coping tools as well as others’ coping mechanisms. I find that a wide range of means of managing the unprompted reactions to each of our own mental illnesses gives us strategies for getting through those rough patches that often seem rougher when we have no control over them.

These tools give us that control, even if sometimes it tells us, stay in bed for an extra ten minutes or get up and eat breakfast and get a dose of energy.

Sometimes it takes a combination of things to get us into a beneficial place, and that place can last one day or a week or more. Or less, which is why it is good to have another strategy ready to try out.

On this tenth anniversary, I’ll share Christopher Reeve’s quotation from Wednesday because it really gave me valuable insight into never giving up. We can slow down for whatever causes that slow down, but never give up. That road will still be there when you’re ready to take that next step, and that will that he’s talking about doesn’t always come from a deep, inner place, but sometimes we need our strategies to get us to that place where we do summon the will. It’s different for each of us.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbably, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”

Dana and Christopher Reeve