I'm looking back now, and how good it feels to know the heavy creature has finally rolled off my chest.

I forget that God has gone before me, his feet tread somewhere ahead so I could follow in them if I didn't have the bravery or the strength to strike out myself.

Even when I haven't forgotten, sometimes it just doesn't stir me. The truth knocks off my bones like a dull rock and I just sit there, wishing it could crush or even just dent me, but it doesn't. I sit in a sermon and feel like I'm almost lip-synced with the pastor, I know the right answers so well - and I believe whole heartedly in the answers. But no one fleshes out the meaning that I really need at the moment. They explain for an hour and a half that Jesus was the Passover Lamb, which means that he was killed so death would pass over us. Jesus died to save us from death, yes! But here I am dying, and I need him to save me like I know he was sent to do, and no one goes there. They show me the spread on the table, the explain what the feast is for, but I have no utensils to begin eating and I know there isn't anywhere else I can (or want to) turn to sate my hunger.

My joy is even greater to see emotion restored now, to see feeling blossoming inside me again at the sight of something natural, or the sound of another happy voice rejoicing in good things about the world - but only because it would have done nothing to me a few days ago.

I want to know more about depression and become a good responder for others, because to walk around in it is a horrible thing. To sense that your real self is a stagnant, black bathtub of water bleakly filling the inside of a shell - a shell that knows how to smile and sound normal and participate in the vanity and pointlessness of the world alongside everyone else who are happier but no less vain in their doings. Not paying attention to the pointlessness of what they are doing maybe, not aware, or just not bothered by it at the moment.

It's a perspective that feels like death and I am fully aware of my lack of power to fight it. You just have to wait it out and trust in a different kind of way.

I laid in bed this morning, knowing I should have been up long before to get to work on all my tasks, but a twisting started in my stomach and my whole consciousness pricked with fear. Not again, go away! I knew the physical sense of panic very well by then and was so scared to watch all my emotional progress ruined. But something assured me of God's over-knowledge. I've made a safe place for you to suffer through this, I thought I heard him whisper, and it comforted me.

You'd think I would want to hear that my sense of the world's vanity, my dissatisfaction with it and my despair about the whole endeavor was unfounded. That I was just seeing things wrong and now I'm corrected...instead it was good to know that my experience is honest and right and that I am still safe in such a place. Even if I felt no actual comfort and still knew the grip of bleak, plain existence, I could still know I was being watched and guarded.

I'm guarded now, the sun won't harm me by day or the moon by night, and eventually this valley of shadow will give way to another kind of topography. I'll get the chance to lie down next to still waters and really be satisfied by the pasture. For now all I need to know is that the valley is a real place, but he is just as real and his rod and his staff are there.