The Shadow only wants you to see the never-ending pain before you, but the truth, however, is the same. After some time and some post-traumatic growth, we both can say, "Glad that light at the end of the tunnel wasn't a train!"

Depression isolates, alienates, and separates. It thrives in the darkness, severing connection for both the depressive and the depressive-adjacent ... And we indeed fell into a pit. But we didn't stay in that pit because we learned this valuable lesson--We don't heal in isolation but in community.

At 23, I had love figured out! As an English and German major in college, I had read the greats--Shakespeare, Goethe, Lord Byron, Fried, the Brownings, and so on .... As a Christian, I had read all the Bible said about love. I was steeped in the knowledge of love. My fiancée and I were in love and that was all we needed to make things work. Right! Right? Um ....

It was only later that I realized my soon-to-be wife was already in the throes of her own system failure as she sank into clinical depression, and the physical darkness and booming silence of those eerie Mississippi nights would soon manifest into our lives when we married just two months later. However ..., I ... learned how to combat the darkness of depression's shadow. There are thirteen lessons I learned from living with dark. Lesson #1 is ....