When you have finally come to the end of your long road, you will look back and see a completely different picture of your life. Understanding your life in a more complete way will change everything you thought you once knew. Your self-healing is dependent on you being honest and true to yourself and those you allow into your life. You've made mistakes in your life and there are probably quite a few things you wish you could do differently. You've screwed up time and time again, hurt people, hurt yourself, made promises, broken dreams, and the list goes on. Only now you know why.
Here you find yourself, after all the work, and you've begun changing what you need to about yourself. Yes there are consequences for our past choices, but any guilt and shame needs to stay with them in the past. There may be hard conversations you have to have with family and friends. You may find there are relationships you need to walk away from. It could be that you need to take a different direction in your life and a move is in order, or a career change. You have been accepting the depression as a part of you, living in it to learn yourself and who you are capable of being, working to find ways to bring joy and emotion to your life, and creating boundaries and bridges to help those around you relate to you better. These are, all alone, going to bring changes to who you are as a person in this world. Together, these changes are going to transform you completely and the world you are currently living in may no longer work for you.
You owe nothing but the truth at this point to the people in your life. If your world is unwilling or unable to accept who you are and what you need, then it was never your world in the first place. Leave it behind and find where you belong.
After a childhood filled with abuse and neglect, a decade long marriage of agonizing challenges, hard work on a college degree, and 6 years of therapy, I was ready to change my life. My ex did not join me in the healing process and over time I did become a very different person than he married. We tried, but our marriage did not make it. My entire world fell apart because I wanted to "get better" and I was facing starting all over again. You hope your family will be there for you when you need to break down sometimes, but for the most part, mine was not. Resistant to accepting that I needed to change for me, they began the same patterns of attack to pull me back in to the negativity, cycling through emotional manipulation, criticism, and passive aggressive disapproval. But see, I knew more about myself now. I knew I had always allowed them to do this in the past to get what they needed from me. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power, and I now knew that I had been enabling their sickness as well as my own and I could choose to love them the best way I knew how. I broke the cycle and walked away.
It's terrifying to start over and be on your own. But once you realize you can let the guilt and the mistakes from the past go, and commit to YOU, then only you define the meaning of success or failure in your life. There is no "one way" to live life. There's only "your way," and how that "way" can work in the world. The reality is, if you are not being true to yourself in any circumstance, you cannot offer anything true to the experience. Your life is yours. What you do with it, what good you leave behind, depends only on you being the best version of yourself. You are not responsible for the world, you are only responsible for what you put into it.
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