The Year Was 2010 B.B. (Before Blogging)

I've been posting this month about the value and the anchor that blogging is in my life. If you've ever clicked over to my About Page, I tell you about four or five times how blogging saved my life. This isn't hyberbole. I feel so very fortunate to have a computer, to have google searched the Top Bloggers of 2008 that were featured in a Time magazine I picked up four years ago, and to be writing this post today because of blogging.

With that first click onto a Top Blogger Blog in 2008, I stepped through a portal that took me into a level of friendship, companionship, support, and was three fourths of the reason I was able to make it through what would happen to me two years later, what I have come to call The Great Depression of 2010.

I had read blogs for about two years before I decided to begin my own in 2010. In those two years of visiting the few blogs I came to depend on, I had no idea how many thousands more existed. My online world then was limited to a few emails for school and work purposes, and my handful of blogs that really became my contact with someone I felt a connection with.

Details aren't important, but there were many stressors in my life in 2008. I know I was able to survive the depression that grew out of the anxiety and panic that had been showing their punky faces on a daily basis because of the early blogs I had found. No one person should be expected to carry the burden of another, and with that same reasoning, no one blog/blogger should be all things I needed. I had the humor bloggers I followed that kept me from forgetting how to laugh, and there were the important balancing ones for me: the blogs that understood the overwhelming emotions I was enduring at the time. They were in the same space as I was then, and were working their way through and lighting the path ahead for me. They let me believe light existed on the road ahead. They took me along as they searched for happiness, new states of mind, survival. These bloggers became the Never Surrender! heroes of mine.

From one of the humor blogger sites I followed in these Pre Blogging Days, I found a blogger that became my solid wall to lean on with the road we shared. I followed a blogger home, Britt Reints, because of the comments she'd leave there; she spoke with truth, as well as with grace.

One post of hers (read it, it's fabulous) in particular, had me visiting her words again and again over the long winter. It was about how very difficult, exhausting, all encompassing it was to learn to survive with depression...but, still, even with all that energy expended, she would never quit. She'd keep on going, no matter how empty her tank felt.

I found my strength on her site, which is now called In Pursuit of Happiness, because there is something about not being judged, not being told to just take a happy pill, not being reminded how people have it worse than you, that makes you decide to take up your own shield and spear and blow your conch, charging into battle.

Britt, for all that you've done for me and so many others, over the years, I thank you.

You are one of my Great Depression Slayers of 2010.

 Thank you, Britt. I love you.

Big P.S.: please read Britt's About Page. You'll be blown away by her sincerity and determination.

 ----------------------------------------------------------
**This blogger was one of the handful so implicit in my making it through the winters and the seasonal depression they bring, before I began my own blog in 2010 and became a part of this incredible online community. During this month, I'll be highlighting the bloggers I call "The Great Depression Slayers of 2010." To the crucial ones I clung to before I began blogging, the ones that pulled me through, I thank you.