The new normal

I opened up blogger to write a poem today.  Of course, what I found when I arrived was the post I wrote in January while I was healing and starting to finally feel like a "normal" Emily again.  As you would suppose, I cried when I read it.  Cried to remember the pain, the loss, and the journey back to me.
I will never be who I was before.  I have known what it means to "lose myself" and learned that it is the worst feeling.  I have learned compassion, I have learned "it is what it is" and I have learned how to let go.  Elsa, the most annoying Disney princess ever conceived, is of course the bearer of my theme song.  I have learned to let go.  Of my pain.  Of my fear.  Of other people's choices.  Of judgment.  Of my children (the most difficult of all).  Of everything. 
I am happy to share that I am off meds and therapy now.  I still go to my group meetings, but I made it off meds!  It was a very challenging process; I didn't realize that going off the meds brought back the symptoms of depression and anxiety.  It took me two months to get them out of my system.  I am now fully functioning at my new normal.
I sometimes wonder, "Would I go back and change this journey I have taken as a surrogate?"  I would not.  If the price of growing three families, carrying five children, and growing love is this journey I have walked, I accept the pain with the joy. 
I was taught as a little girl in church that I was sent to earth to choose for myself the path that I would walk through this life.  I am most thankful that I have been able to choose for myself to walk the path that I walk. 
This last year, as I struggled through depression and back to myself, I taped a poem up on my computer at work.  I think I will put up a new one this year, but this poem has become part of my soul:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. 

William Ernest Henley

*Italics and bold on the last line added by me.  And this poem, written to describe life, for me was about depression and finding the strength and support to make it out.  My counselor said that depression was like a rut, and I was a car trapped in it.  All I needed to do was to keep turning the wheel, trying different maneuvers to get out, and eventually- POP!  I would be able to drive out.  That is the picture I kept in my mind as I journeyed, and now I see the car is free.  I am free!!!!!!!