I lost my mother back in 1999 from lung cancer. But that was good for everyone since she'd spent most of her life in one institution after another suffering from a severe form of bipolar disorder. There are some lifestyles worse than death. Living with untreated depression to the point where you slip into full-blown, often violent psychosis is one of those lifestyles.

What did that have to do with me? I was her son, convinced nearly to my own demise that my mother had been shown the rawest of raw deals and needed a hero to save her sanity and her life. After decades of self-flagellation, denial, alcohol, drugs, heartache and my own trip on several psychotherapist's couches, I finally turned the corner. I finally felt like I knew what I needed to do to stay healthy and keep my life out of a toilet I found myself compulsively trying to flush it down.

Just in time to have a career I had worked for 13 years to build get yanked out from under me in a lay-off that was more about political skulduggery than incompetence on my part. What followed was three years of uncertainty, dead-end jobs, deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, excruciating criticism from myself and others, and, finally, knocking on doors for the local cable company. In neighborhoods where people buy dogs because they can't own a gun anymore -- in Texas. After dark. I had a BS in MIS and found myself selling crap to people who were used to buying it by the truckload.

But it didn't end there. It got worse.

My wife and I lost a grandchild after we got back together just after she decided not to divorce me. Then her kids moved away and got into more trouble leading to one of her twin sons dying in a head-on collision that really wasn't entirely his fault. He had been driving down a large interstate and had every right to expect that no one would be coming at him from the wrong direction.

I'd say between the working in jobs that I was overqualified to occupy, but unqualified to do well in, and dealing with bosses who had no patience with me, nor any clue as to what my life had been like, the deaths and the miseries that visited themselves on me would have been well worth trading a thousand deaths for. One just can't survive that kind of adversity.

*twinkle, twinkle*

Now I have a kick-ass job -- the best in my life so far -- a nice car, an even nicer motorcycle, and a fresher attitude and outlook on my life and my experiences thus far. Oh, and I'm in grad school now, too.

I'm not entirely sure what the trick was for me because I was trying them all at the same time. Well over 1500 resumes and maybe six interviews. In three years. 13 years of unbroken employment and then, poof. The grad school thing was a key ingredient, I'm pretty sure. It energized me and gave me hope for a new day.

The antidepressants weren't it because I'd been taking them all along and not taking them only makes things worse for me.

The therapy and ripping my self-loathing personality to shreds didn't accomplish anything but give me my life back in time to really *feel* the pain and the humiliation of outgrowing an occupation surrounded by people more negative than myself, but having THEM tell me before I really realized what was going on.

The longing and the desperation, the unpaid bills and the threats from bill collectors, the knocking on doors to hear people lie to me or stumbling into a busy businessperson's office only have them chew me out just because they felt like it was my turn, the food stamps, the public assistance, the depression, the gloom and the doom -- all of these things needed to be experienced and processed in order for me to appreciate what I have today. My parents both had a taste of bitter, grinding poverty, but I had never known such things. I was too busy making my life out to be worse than it actually was out of some misplaced sense of guilt that I couldn't identify and couldn't really own -- because it wasn't actually mine.

Want a really intractable problem? Try owning a problem that is someone else's to solve. Healthy people never know such conundrums, but it was a compulsive lifestyle since childhood for me.

So start by giving yourself permission to be sad and disjointed. Then throw out the booze and the drugs and start exercising regularly. Just walk someplace safe. It doesn't have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be for long. Just move and reward yourself for doing so. Be gentle with yourself and patiently DO what you know needs to be done. Don't think. Don't feel. Just Do.

You will find gratitude in all the imperfection and the misery. Then you will get more than you ever thought possible to be or to have. How good can you stand it? That's where you will go if you simply persevere and do the next correct thing to do today.

If you want to feel better, be willing to stick it out, delay gratification and keeping doing the right things. Doing good leads to good feelings.

Sometimes we just have to act our way into right thinking.