Changes...But Life Is Still Beautiful

This is a photograph I took a few weeks ago in the park near my house.

And as the leaves changed color and fell from the trees, and the weather suddenly flipped the switch to cold, dark and rainy, my mood got exponentially worse. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder and it has been exceptionally hard to get any sunlight. I need to find a light box. My brain needs the equivalent of a light box. There is so much going on at once that it has been overwhelming. This year alone there have been many changes and surprises that have come my way. Some have been happy, but they have been significantly life-changing that it's affected me profoundly. As any expert will tell you, even happy life changes can be stressful. In my case it was being contacted by my half-brother and also being contacted by a cousin I never even knew about and also finding out about my Maori heritage, finally discovering which tribe I belonged to. And to top it off, it turned out that when I was doing a course about archiving history last year at university, the local museum was doing an anthropological study into the bones of a burial site at Wairau Bar. Unbeknownst to me at the time, those bones and artifacts belonged to my ancestors. My cousin contacted me when the re-burial ceremony happened and said that they had done a sacro-cranial reconstruction by computer of one of our ancestors. I saw my own eyes staring back at me. It was a very emotional moment.

Adding to this is the fact that it is my senior year of my Bachelor of Arts degree. The past two years have been very certain- I had a certain amount of courses to do, I also had a job at the university. But this is it, this is the curtain call. A lot of my friends are doing a fourth Honors year because they are not ready to leave. But I really, truly am! I want to work for a while before I go back and do my Masters degree. And I may be able to graduate early by merit of extra points I accumulated due to my prior courses in Education as part of an unfinished Bachelor of Teaching and Learning.

So things have been overwhelming. I have been trying to see my way through a fog of depression but I'm proud of myself being able to compartmentalize the symptoms and function as best as I can. I had my final day for the semester before the exam period today, and I am going to be working hard to get back into a routine of healthy eating and exercise in order to get myself back into peak physical and mental condition. Life is beautiful, despite being overwhelming. It is beautiful because I have hope, something I didn't have many many years ago.