A New Journey Begins

I am depressed.

What a way to start a blog right?'

I am not going to get into the why I am depressed, but I have been severely depressed for a little more than a year and a half now, and I have looked into a lot of ways to try to gear myself out of it with no avail. I initially tried non-prescription serotonin boosters, and then started different anti-depressants. I have tried therapy. I have tried "thinking happy thoughts," or coming up with a daily list of good things that I like about myself or good things that happened to me that day. Nothing really works, my brain unfortunately recognizes the lies of the therapy and happy thoughts, and anti-depressants seem to make matters worse.

A few weeks ago, I started to peruse some TED talks and bumped into a few that were talking about things in different ways and how they helped the person through difficult times of their lives. And the common theme in them, I felt, was this base base idea... of do something with your life!

Ok, first of all this seems pretty cliche. I cannot move forward without admitting that to myself, and anyone that may be reading along.  Sure, do something with your life. We've been told that by parents, and teachers, and pastors, and pretty much anyone from a very young age. But when you are young, and hell even now, you take that concept and take it to mean what you do for a living, and that isn't what I mean here.

What I mean is do important things, things that you aren't going to get paid to do, that you aren't necessarily forced to do, things that you want to do and give you a sense of accomplishment with your life, regardless of monetary or outside forces. Do something(s) that make  YOU feel accomplished.

When you are dead, and look back at your life. What is it that you are going to look back and be proud of that you did? Invariably this will have nothing to do with your work or that you made a lasagna when you get home from work. Although person depending, maybe it will.

And so, I return to this base idea of a Bucket List.

BucketGeek.com was originally an idea I had several years ago about  completing the best 1000+ things in various categories. I had lists of 1000+ movies, tv shows, music, books, video games, places to travel... all things I wanted to complete. And to some degree I was successful with these lists, but invariably they were everything that was wrong with the general building of Bucket Lists.

First of all, some goals were too general, some goals were too easy to feel any sort of accomplishment, but more erroneous than any, the basic concept was inevitably not possible. The amount of hours needed just to invest in reading 1000 books is HUGE. That ultimate goal to complete that list would have been a great accomplishment! But each individual book was not much of one. And ultimately the idea failed because I was never going to really see the accomplishment, all I was really going to do was feel bad about not doing it.

And so I am here to re-build my bucket list to be not only have more attainable and realistic goals, but also goals that feel like I actually accomplished something. And that I actually DID something.

I am only a few weeks into this journey so far. And so far, I have accomplished none of my goals. But just the ideas that I am coming up with to attain this Bucket List concept... is already making me feel better with life. I am excited about life and trying to tackle these goals and hopefully, once I start attaining the goals I set forth with.. I will feel even better.... maybe, even happy.