The following testimony is  part of an ongoing look inside a person who is in recovery. The Anonymous author will continue to share with us her self and her personal struggles, as well as victories gained through her belief in a power greater  than herself.

“They say avoid emotional complexities in early days of recovery. I had come to the same conclusions on my own. The worst thing on earth for me was to be pushed back into the mood swings and terrible depression, but the fact that I didn’t have a “conventional”   type of relationships did not stand in my favor. After a year in recovery I came to believe true relationships don’t have to be a strain as long as people involved in that be straight and frank.

But my non-conventional type of relationships tied in a bit with the question of “Models” and coming to conclusions  of one’s own…I didn’t have “new models” myself earlier in life, so I was at the mercy of things in   society (or unworkable things from my family background), but wrongly enough again  I was believing in unconventional  type of my relationships without pressures.  It’s possible to work out “one who really is” and what one really wants from life…to see more fully what one wants to avoid and what to cultivate. The best way to become “Full person” while avoiding pitfalls.

With me, in my own life any sense at all of an alternative Model for living really arose when I found my Depressed Anonymous meeting. Before that looking back I was always searching but inevitably perhaps I usually met up with the wrong (unstable, rebel without a cause) sort of people, so there was no one helpful to talk to.

I had faced problems …like “who am I” and “what’s the best way to live.”  My inquiring spirit hasn’t been for books alone.  I was driven to books as one way of finding answers to these bigger questions of “how to live”, it’s an ethical question, so I tended to be “a moral”  person,  but not in the usual and social or religious rules sense.

My longer family trajectory, from rural surroundings to the “big city” added to my confusions for :finding  “true model.”  It was my parents who made this (very painful, disruptive journey (they had come from rural, peasant society to the big city).

So there is this big generational difference and I personally have  had to face the kind of problems that were around here in my country in the late 2oth century, the sort of thing one can see on the Lowry’s paintings: poverty, misery, oppression.

My family always had to try to “make ends meet”.  There is not much room for thinking through one’s values, working out “who am I” in such circumstances, but miraculously Hafez (Persian poet) smiled on me. I was allowed to make mistakes, to be unstable for a time. What matters is the basic human heart, the rest of my life will be an “upwards ascent.” That is why it is better to ‘hit rock bottom’ to have the severe problems early on, then things can get better.

Life after this ‘rock bottom’ is not a bowl of cherries as they say in meetings, but it’s a damned sight better that it ever was before and one could insure against non-recurrence of more severe problems by continuing with this search for ‘change of model’, by following some kind of ‘program for living’.  May God bless us for the courage we’ve had searching to be honest with ourselves. Not many people are in our league.”

–Anonymous

We are grateful for this testimony and pray that it may touch others as it has touched me.

We look forward  to more pieces in the story that make up her journey out of the prison of depression