Before I started to blog, I was stuck in a quagmire of self pity and resentment. Most of you know I’m a survivor of abuse and hence suffer from depression and PTSD as a result of my abusers’ mental and emotional shenanigans and mindgames.

Even though I disconnected from my abusive ex-husband almost a year ago, my negative thinking patterns remained. Every day was the same as the one before; I was bored with my life and bored with myself, and felt like there was nothing else to look forward to, ever. I felt like I had lost my writing ability, creative vision and intelligence. I tried praying and it wasn’t helping very much–because the faith in myself and my future wasn’t there. It just seemed like a waste of time.

For a long time I had wanted to blog, but several things were stopping me: first, I was terrified to find out I may have forgotten how to write (since I hadn’t written anything besides a forum post in years). Second, blogging seemed like something you had to have computer or technical savvy to do. People told me WordPress and Blogger were hard to use, and I assumed they were right and that I was too stupid to learn (because I really truly believed I lost my ability to learn anything new). Finally, I couldn’t seem to get motivated. I was stuck in a rut and wanted out of it badly, yet couldn’t seem to pull myself out of the murky quicksand of my own ennui.

I really thought there was no place for me in this world and that I was simply too old, too tired, too dumb, and too boring to make any sort of meaningful impact on the world or even on just a few people. Actually it turned out I wasn’t any of those things–people with depression and PTSD often feel this way about themselves.

I thought about suicide because the prospect of just getting up every morning, going to my boring, low paying job, coming home, spending a couple of hours on other people’s websites before turning into bed, then having to repeat the same thing the next day and the next day and every day for the rest of my life until the pain of illness and old age finally took over was something I just didn’t want to face. But as depressed as I’ve been, I’ve never seriously entertained the idea of suicide because, well, I’m just too scared of it. Death scares the shit out of me. Not so much the state of death itself, but the process of dying.

But guess what? I was already dying. I was walking around like a dead person, spiritually and emotionally numb.

But writing has changed all that.

One day about a month ago, some spark of motivation came out of nowhere and momentarily penetrated the stagnant murk inside my brain. I don’t know if it was God, or the better part of myself doing it but it doesn’t matter because there it was like the beam from a lighthouse first seen in a stormy sea. Rather than ignore it or tell myself I’d act on it later, I didn’t even think about it, I just obeyed it. I opened up my laptop, found WordPress, and immediately set up my blog. It was much easier than I’d been led to believe, and by my third article I felt like I knew what I was doing.

There’s been no turning back, and I feel so much more alive and optimistic about my future and what I can contribute to the world. Blogging is certainly helping me, but maybe I can even help others too. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a purpose, a place in this world, and that I’m here for a better reason than just marking time until death and have more to offer than just providing an example to others of how not to live their lives (which is something I used to really believe).

But writing is a discipline, and sometimes I have to talk myself into it. It was hard at first to commit to writing one post a day. But for the most part I’ve not only managed to write a post a day, but sometimes two or three a day. I find that rather than being a chore(as I had feared), the more I write the more I want to write, and the ideas just keep coming. I thought I had no ideas. I was so wrong.