If you know me, you know I get headaches. Or, at least, I used to anyway. Now they are uncommon enough that I've begun to wonder whether they're just a slightly amped version of the kind of headaches that people normally get. I used to hate my head. The constant and random aches were oppressive, like those experiments where the dog just gives in to despair because it is randomly electrocuted and has no way of predicting when it will happen. I completely adored those who could relieve it, whether by a cool hand on the cheek or otherwise.

But then, there was a certain point where I think I just began to consciously accept the aches. I knew that sometime every morning I'd get slammed and have to rage against myself to keep my eyes open against the painful light of even a darkened room, otherwise I'd get in trouble for 'falling asleep' at work. I knew as I wrote papers late into the night that the leaden weight that my skull had become wasn't going to get any lighter...and I actually started smiling at it at some point. When it felt like a spike had been driven into my temple out of nowhere and made me toss my head, I'd let it have its moment, and when it passed I'd laugh it off. Just another ache. Somehow, some way I had come around to appreciating them, in a twisted way. They'd taught me how to deal with pain, with unwillingly shifted emotion, to work under pressure (literally, in a sense).

But, something I've never admitted till recently, because, frankly, I was ashamed, was how closely bouts of depression were tied into those aches. For the longest time I held an intense scorn for myself - where do I come off claiming 'depression' after what I'd seen at the hospital? I told myself to stop being an idiot and not to bitch about moping around. But, with clearer 'vision' lately, I can see how my aches combined with that dark water inside me, that murk that would well up in my consciousness and leave me lying in bed, staring at the ceiling for hours, or clutching myself in the middle of a crowd with tears in my eyes. Though my mentions of this thought have been almost universally rebuffed - I'm an upstanding young man with nothing to complain about, after all, how could I possibly be depressed, and if I am, get over it, it can't be that bad, and all that jazz - I'm past the point of caring.

I've finally come to start accepting it, just as I came to accept my aches; hell, the depression is a lot like the aches - sometimes with stimulus readily apparent, sometimes not, arriving against my will, and not leaving despite my will. An interesting aspect of it that I had not realized is that depression isn't an emotion - rather, it is something that affects emotion, and that seems a somewhat profound thing. Anyway, part of my accepting is just huge changes in personality, not in an overt way, but more subtle - a veil over my eyes falling away, it feels like. Part of it is meditative practice - at my first depression when I was younger, I'd sit and stare at the city lights for long periods of time, and just try to stop thinking. A later time, I began to slow my breathing to as close to stillness as possible as the rain fell on my skin, and began to find relief...but then lost the practice when things 'got better again.'

This time, however, I've begun to research, to learn, to train...I'm trying to take those old unconscious impulses towards meditation, where I had no idea why I was doing it, little say what I was doing, and direct them with purpose and help this time, and I'm finally coming close to smiling at 'my old friend' depression, the same way I did at the headaches. As much as I feel some impulse to regret what brought on the depression or my old reactions to it, I don't, at heart; lessons learned, I suppose. So here's to the people in my life from now on - some part of me will always be in minor key, I feel, but I'll be all the brighter for you from now on, nonetheless.