Skip to main content

The Seventeen Year Depression

 


It came in late July 2008, I began to realize I had a near seventeen year depression. It started as if my soul knew the future arriving the next month in the summer of 1991. And years of my life would be embroiled in a wicked hell bound torture fest, that I wouldn't recognize. What kept me from realizing this for seventeen years was, in my being extremely busy. 

I had built a successful business.  I married Mr. Right. We adopted two children as infants and were now a happy family of four. I was able to work at my healing through running distances. We lived in suburbia, surrounded by trees, fresh air. A somewhat secure, safe location. The house we saved for and bought after 14 years of marriage was manageable. We had so much more than I could have ever imagined. Especially,  considering where I came from. I smiled a ton most the time, according to reliable sources. Coupled with a wicked sense of humor and great self-deprecation. 

Realizing all this, I knew what had brought me low, deep down. I'd not expressed it, ever.  I was ashamed that feeling tortured would be considered ungrateful. And I would have none of that.  But finally I realized this in June of 2008, after all those years. In 2008, it was the self-empowerment of self-defense, and fighting that made me feel once again, 'Alive'. Really Alive. 

Alive that no one understood who hadn't known how to get so deep. Alive where you feel the macadam through your running shoes, as you run on the streets. 

I don't feel bruising the way others do. I don't care in vain as others do. I feel differently. 

Oh, that seventeen year depression came originally as I was once again mistreated by those who ruled the medical community. 

It was as if they enjoyed their misdiagnosis of me. They screwed up again, and on July 31st, 1991, just as I was climbing out of the six foot hole in the ground, that they'd prepared for a small woman who made them feel even smaller. Due to their thinking, they lacked some form of ethical bravery or manhood upon a glimpse of me. 

Yes, a strong-willed small woman brought out the raging inequities of certain men who wielded power over lives. And it was to do harm,  unwittingly. And I knew it. I said nothing. I was metaphorically trained in diplomacy. 

And the crowning achievement of those men to keep a 'nothing' down and dead appeared to fail. Yet, the depression was hammered in deeper with each passing month, and then years.  The physical crippling placed squarely upon my freedom to feel all but pain, no one could witness nor understand, that which was clearly present in my realm. 

So here I was in 2008, the lone woman welcomed into an all men's fight club, originally for self-defense,  because a rapist, a predator I had put away was getting out fifteen years earlier than he was sentenced to. I knew I was in trouble.... 

And so, a month into the 2008 self-defense training the feeling of joyful Aliveness arrived, as I prepared for another private self-defense session. Phil Dunlap, my self-defense and eventual fight instructor said, "This makes you feel Alive. I get it." And he did. 

He told me, "The world is against you doing all this." I agreed. Because I chose that I could do 'all this'. And that, attaining my new feeling of being 'Alive', had set me free.---Jody-Lynn Reicher 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Completion of Humanness

Completion of Humanness As we arrive to the completion of the first year without Norman, I had decided long before he'd passed that I would continue to do things certain things he liked yet could no longer do. I decided I would not take a day off of fitness.  I would run at least for 500 days in a row. I began that in early 2020.  I'd not be concerned with the distance I'd run. It was the very thing I convinced Norman and the thing that mattered to him, from the very first discussion we had August 11th, 1981, was fitness. I loved that he was a College Boy. He loved that I was a Marine. We tickled each other's soul with such admirations. Later fitness continued as an old discussion from 1994 ...getting outside and to run no matter what. I would say to him, "Run 200 meters, then 400 meters. If it doesn't feel good, stop. Turn around and walk back home and know you did your best. That is all you can ask of yourself." I said this,  knowing he would get dow
2 comments
Read more

In My World

As I finish putting away the week's groceries, I contemplate other's lives. Aside from my two daughters,  I consider what may be other's lives.  How they have conducted their lives over the past two years.  This is a thought not unusual for me to have. Yet, it occurs more often than not. Especially  now, as the population is probably feeling ever more irked. Regarding perhaps. their illusion of any lack of their freedom. But isn't that what life is about? The illusion of who we are. What we are about. Where we stand on the planet. Who we love. And who loves us. Our significance. Couldn't we imagine if this were all just an illusion? Sounds like a "Twighlight Zone" episode, perhaps. My aim here, are the thoughts of reckoning. I'll explain why I'm claiming such a thing. For about twenty-eight years of a career in dealing with injured athletes,  pain patients, chronically ill and the terminally ill. I found that there were many people who lied to
Post a Comment
Read more

It's About the Soul And...

  ...perhaps the soles of our shoes. My father-in-law used to say the feet are what soldiers depend on, as we do food. He said that to me in 1985 as I stood in his home office.  My husband, Norman was a shoe guy. And it was all about the soles on the shoes.  For me, the way I have stayed on my feet was soul deep. Sometimes praying every step of the way, to not fall over out of exhaustion. The approximately 170,000 miles of running, many of which Norman had witnessed or known of. He wondered how I stayed standing working on my feet all day. Only to come home, and go for a second run at midnight at times.  Often Norman would give me a lecture on good shoe care. It was about the soles of the shoes. He'd point out stitching on a shoe that was done wrong. Therefore commenting, "...giving a shoe less time of wear on this earth."  He'd remark quite often. "You have to buy good quality shoes." I have to say, there was absolutely something comedic about his shoe obse
Post a Comment
Read more