Step 8

An innocent invite from the past has thrown me in a spin.

I feel like there needs to be a 12 step program for Depression as surely there needs to be a time when I confront the ones I have hurt, confused, used during my breakdown.

It is very much like recovering from an addiction – an addiction to a life of bad choices and meaner consequences, destructive patterns and fruitless dreams.

In retrospect the fall was dragged over many years and there are many people that came along for the ride. Not always people of great significance but people, breathing, feeling people nonetheless.

I’m ashamed of the fall and the people I used to break it.

Yet I can’t step back – I can’t cross that line again not even for a sorry for what I did, said, thought, not even for a handshake of forgiveness… if that is indeed coming my way.

People can be the habit, the trigger to beliefs, feelings, and actions. If after all that I have lost and all that I have fought to regain how could I possibly walk back into a life I left behind? It’s not possible – it is as if my past needs to be erased in order to survive my future. I need to kill the addiction, wipe the patterns, re-learn to act, live, think, breathe.

I’ve been caught in these circles for too long, round and round and round the same shit, same mistakes, and same reactions. I can’t be the same person and if you knew her then that’s not such a bad thing.

I could make apologies in this public forum but neither of us needs that in order to move on and that is what we all need in the end anyway, isn’t it?

To move on

Step 8 is to make amends for those that you have hurt during the time of your addiction.

I don’t see any of you anymore – I can’t remember the names of you all but I’m still haunted by every one. I won’t seek you out but I will make amends.

I will recover

That is my amends.