Depression and Choosing Joy

 Many people myself included suffer from Severe Clinical Depression. This is a disease. It is not related to sadness. One cannot snap out of it. It saps your energy and drowns out the better angels of your nature. It is a chemical imbalance that cannot be cured alone without medical help. However, medicines alone are not the silver bullet. My psychiatrist has told me I too must fight this illness. Many of us who are struggling may be suffering from some form of this but do not know it. We are not without hope. So what advice do I have to offer?


Never believe that your life is without hope. This week I want you to focus on hope and action. Many people out there have overcome astonishing odds to achieve amazing things. Many of them suffer from depression or illness and disease. Do not let the disease define you.

So this week I want you to set some goals. Things that you want to accomplish. Little things. For me it will be to clean my living room so it is I am able to have people into it without being ashamed. This to most would not seem like a big goal. For me it seems daunting. With my seizures I have to crawl a lot to do chores. I need to vacuum and move things and I don’t have much energy.


Pick a small goal. Split the goal into 5 tasks. Make sure you can accomplish these tasks within reason but they will stretch you some. Do one task each day. Getting help is allowed and encouraged if you have a loved one or partner. Share this burden and goal with them. When you begin the goal may seem daunting but do not let this stop you.

Concentrate on the daily goal. When you finish your daily goal, rejoice in the fact that you finished it. If you do not finish your daily goal, Rejoice in what you did accomplish. Do not let negative self-talk ruin your hard work. You overcame a lot to work toward your overall goal.

At the end of the week look at what you have accomplished and rejoice and CHOOSE JOY! You have overcome. You have done something to improve your life. Even if you have not finished your overall goal you can continue working next week as we will have no working homework next week. You still need to CHOOSE JOY. You have overcome something. You have decided to do something that makes you feel better about your situation. Big or small this is an accomplishment.

Love yourself for you are worthy. 

My Scripture verse this week comes from 1 Corinthians 13: 4-5 “4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

Do not keep record of what you see as your failings or wrongs. Rejoice in what you did right, Heavenly Father will be proud of you as I am Proud of you for trying.

Choosing Joy each day is not easy. This path is hard. But it is a path you can and will be able to follow as I am following it. You are not alone. I at least am travelling with you and

 I CHOOSE JOY

Relaunch Day

Good afternoon followers of I Choose Joy,
 I apologize for the long delay in posting. I will explain. When I posted my first blog I was so proud and showed it to my wife. She praised and encouraged me on the post itself. But then said. It looks a bit dark. You need to break up that wall of text with some pictures or something. Black and white are not really Joyous colors.

Being a well condition Husband Unit 101 with the take constructive criticism module installed I looked at the page and agreed with her. I also have installed the HTML, PHP, Joomla, SQL, Dreamweaver, Java, and several other programming packages that she had to send me into the shop for an entire year to have installed.

Some of these packages had not been used for a little while since I have had the Seizure Virus and the Customer Service Doctors cannot seem to fix it. Nonetheless I went about trying to fix my page. There was rust on those gears. I encountered a new entity called Google that apparently has the Blogger race enslaved. Everything must be done to the Google Entity standards. They speak a strange language called Googlian. It does not seem to interface well with established language protocols that this Husband Unit 101 knows.

They will let you bow under to their enslavement by using their own "Templates" but I was not about to become another slave to Google. So I soldiered on. I found a manual on speaking to the Google machine. It took me almost a month to break free from the shackles of this totalitarian regime but I have finally done it. Husband Unit 101 with the help of Rust EZE(Dr. Pepper) and Oil(Love from Wife) and Hard work has a new joyful looking page.

I promise Joy Chooser that in the future you shall no longer have to look at walls of text. There will be pictures, Flowers, Bunnies, and Zombies, Gotta have an occasional Zombie. Just so we are prepared for the Zombiepacalypse.

Love and Blessings,
Dravensworth

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