April 2008 Archives

I've told you about my guardian angel, but does she really exist????? I can prove it in this video. Here she is, taped live!, to tell you about her second calling, which is reaching out to fellow depressives as she has done with me. But I'll let her tell you that herself.

Sometime in her 30s, Ann decided to be authentic and tell it like it is. She has inspired me to do the same, to go public with all my foibles and frustrations. After you listen to her, you won't want to be anything but yourself, in all your colors.

Thanks to all the Beyond Blue readers who weighed in on the combox of my post "Group Beyond Blue: Public or Private?" or at the discussion thread at Group Beyond Blue.

I was confused that I called up AOL Co-Founder Steve Case, who is presently founder and chairman of Revolution Health.

I said, "Steve, do you have a thought on which way we should go?"

Actually, it didn't really happen that way. I was invited to an hour-long conference call with him, along with eight other health bloggers, last Thursday, and he said something that made me think about our group. When describing AOL's history, he said that the first nine years consisted mostly of people lurking around, unwilling to really dive in and connect. Once that happened, somewhere around the ninth year, AOL mushroomed and became the leader of the online world (at least during his reign).

On another housekeeping topic, I wanted to let you all know that we are not going to hold the fifth Self-Esteem Forum in May. The first four were very successful. However, there were too many folks who didn't follow through on the commitment of penning a letter of affirmation. Larry and I split that responsibility for the first two months, and then I bailed and let Larry write all of them the last two months. Now that he has a job and a girlfriend (The nerve! Really! To get a life!) he can't keep up with that responsibility.

So we are going to brainstorm (and I would very much like any input you have!) about how we might go about this in a better way.

One idea I have is that we have a committee of letter-writers to compose those that slip through the cracks. Or perhaps to pair people off, instead of doing the round robin we had, so that the assignment is to get to know each other and become pen pals of sorts.

I also think monthly might be too often. Perhaps we should hold a quarterly forum, so that people have the chance to really get to know each other in order to write sincere letters. My thinking is that we should take the summer off, and then resume in September with a new format.

Again, your feedback is appreciated!

I thought it would be helpful to remind readers where the idea of a Self-Esteem Forum came from, and the history of my self-esteem file....

Back when I was camping out, roasting marshmallows in the Black Hole, my therapist assigned me the task of listing ten positive qualities about myself. I came up with two: I had a well-proportioned nose and thick fingernails.

At the lowest point of my depression, I was convinced that I had absolutely nothing to offer the world: that my husband deserved a wife who could load the dishwasher in under an hour and drive herself and the kids to the grocery store--one that carried half the weight, not added more--and that my kids needed a mom who could cheer them on from the sidelines of their soccer games, not one who rushed to hide behind a tree because she couldn't stop sobbing and shaking like a person with severe Parkinson's.

Everything I attempted flopped, in my professional as well as personal life. I would compose a sentence on the computer, read it, and delete it. After a few months of this torture, I stopped writing altogether. I canceled my column on young adult spirituality for Catholic News Service, declined invitations to speak, and turned down opportunities to write for magazines I had been trying to break into for years.

Because I was incapable of finding anything of value in my DNA, she told me to ask four friends to make a list of my strengths.

Thankfully they identified more attributes than my nose and fingernails.

I printed out those e-mails, and filed them a manila folder I labeled as my "Self-Esteem File." Every time a person complimented me or said anything remotely positive, even "You don't smell today,” I added it my SEF, which grows every time I get a complimentary note on a message board of Beyond Blue.

I don't think I've made a video in which I exposed myself as vulnerably as the one on my self-esteem file. It gives you an idea of why these letters of affirmation are so important to me.