Challenge. Something that really made you grow this year. That made you go to your edge and then some. What made it the best challenge of the year for you?

Best. Worst. Hardest, Only.  In the end, I’ll remember 2009 as the year I came out alive.

Following directly on the heels of my last post - my moment of peace in January - I came back to Minnesota and slowly started to fall apart.  The winter is a blur for me, thankfully, but everything came to a head at the end of March, on a day when my mental state deteriorated enough that I ended up crouched in the fetal position on the floor of my cubical, shaking and hyperventilating.  It was possibly one of the most frightening moments of my life.

At that point, I finally admitted that I needed help.

Help was a challenge for me.  I’d been raised to believe that “everyone gets a little sad sometimes, but you get over it.”  That I was entirely in control of my own mind, that I could change myself and my feelings if I was strong enough, brave enough, wanted it bad enough.  A lot of times, that was true.  But in this case, I wasn’t strong enough, and that just made me feel worse.  It took a lot of time and mental gymnastics to talk myself into getting professional help.  Other people needed drugs and psychotherapy and that sort of thing.  There was nothing wrong with my brain that I shouldn’t be able to fix myself, right?

But, in the end, I took a deep breath and got help.  I went on medication. I started seeing a therapist.  And slowly, oh so slowly, I started to get better.  I had relapses - including a moment in the fall when I came as close to suicidal thoughts as I did back during my aborted attempt at college when I was 18 - but I kept talking to my therapist, and let my doctor adjust my meds until finally something clicked.  I had energy.  I didn’t start crying for no apparent reason at work any more.  I didn’t feel awkward and paranoid around my friends any more.  And I started to realize that I had been feeling those horrible things for a lot longer than just this year.  Is this what ‘normal’ people feel like?  If it is, I hadn’t been ‘normal’ … well, maybe ever.

The psychiatrist officially termed this year a major depressive episode. (And wow, reading that entire wiki page is like reading a specific account of the first half of my year.)  Even after starting the medication and the therapy, though, it took me a while to be able to admit the truth.   I’m clinically depressed.  I have been for a very long time.  I’ve had better times and worse times, but my paranoia and lack of self-esteem does, in fact, have a root in a clinical, medical problem, one that can be helped by medication.  Being on medication does not indicate a weakness in my personality, but a strength - I had the strength to admit I had a problem and get the help I needed.  It was maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I am so much better off for it, I don’t even feel like the same person who took that walk on South Beach in January.

I got distracted this week while I finished a project, but now it’s time to start catching up!  I’m skipping a day or two, when the topic doesn’t really apply.

So … we’re back on day 7 in the Best of 2009, which is: Blog Find of the Year. That gem of a blog you can’t believe you didn’t know about until this year. For me, that’s Communicatrix - her cheerful, honest, sometimes brutal and often amusing observations about her own life and life in general have resonated with me in many ways this year.  She has a knack for saying exactly what I need to hear when I need to hear it.  She’s daily required reading for me now!

Night out. Did you have a night out with friends or a loved one that rocked your world? Who was there? What was the highlight of the night?

I can’t really pick one night to single out this year.  I could talk about the night of the Butch Walker show at the Varsity, when we went to the pre-show meet and greet and got a private mini-show before the actually concert, when Leigh and I stood at the front of the stage and danced our asses off, and Alex and Leah and Andy stood farther back and ended up loving the hell out of the entire show.  Or, maybe I could pick Saturday night at CONvergence, when a dozen of us dressed up as zombie pirates and pillaged the room parties for alcohol and candy and rice with soy sauce.  Or, there was the night we went to the Mall of America for the Vita.mn preview screening of Star Trek, when we piled into a theater with a couple of hundred people who all stared in wonder at a movie that would become a group obsession for the rest of the year.  Or, maybe the best was the night of the Motion City Soundtrack show at the Triple Rock, a tiny venue they hadn’t played in years, and rocked out with maybe the best concert crowd we’ve seen locally in forever.

I don’t know.  Awesome nights out are now thankfully part of my everyday life.  Being out with my friends regularly rocks my world, because I still vividly remember being a sad, lonely teenager sitting alone in my father’s basement.  It doesn’t matter that those days are 15 years past.  Part of me still expects that someday everyone will get tired of me and I’ll be back to entertaining myself again.

For now, though, I’ll simply appreciate every awesome night out that I have.

Best of 2009, day 3.  Article: What’s an article that you read that blew you away? I’ve discovered several blogs this year written by women who seem to know exactly what I’ve been through and what I’ve thought of this year; Gwen Bell (from whom the Best of 2009 challenge comes), Communicatrix, and White Hot Truth, from where this particular link comes.  I’ve read so many articles from these three women this year that have touched a nerve; this is just one of them, the one that’s been on my mind recently.  It’s short, but it’s exactly what I needed at the time I needed it.

Best of 2009, day 2.  The prompt is for your favorite restaurant experience of the year, but I don’t have one specific memory.  I have, however, spent an inordinate amount of time at the Pizza Luce in Seward, before and after concerts at the Triple Rock and the Cabooze.  Luce is my favorite restaurant in the city, hands down, no matter what location I’m at.  Seward is feeling more and more like my home location, though, now that I’m not downtown as much!

A good way to start a new blog is a month-long posting challenge, right?  So I’m participating in Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.  I posted the first couple on my private blog, so I’ll be catching up over the next day or so. :)

So, Day 1: Trip. What was your best trip in 2009?

The movie begins when I’m walking through the Carnival cruise terminal in Miami, heading for the gangway to the ship, looking out the window and seeing people already hoisting drinks on their cabin balconies. It’s a little ball somewhere in my chest, a ball that grows when I see the Atrium bar, when we eventually dump our suitcases and head up to the Lido Deck to eat lunch. The ship is full of familiar faces; even if I don’t know their names, I’ve seen most of them sometime in the last four years. Our group is big enough to take up four separate tables at the back of the restaurant. These tables will become “our spot” for the next four days. As cell phones are prohibitively expensive out on the open sea, it’s good to have somewhere to go where you’re almost guaranteed to find someone you know at any time of day.

We’re sitting at our tables, chattering excitedly, when the sliding door next to us opens. A guy with long-ish blond hair and sunglasses walks past us. I know he’s a musician, but he doesn’t register until ten seconds later, when a small group of 20-something women walk in, giggling and shushing each other, and follow him up to the buffet at a not-quite-safe distance. “Ah,” someone says, “that’s one of the Hanson brothers.” We start to laugh. Hanson-stalking (not by us) would become a recurring theme of the cruise.

Fade to black. When we resume, it’s the next day, and we’re standing on one of the tiers of the Lido Deck, watching Sam Thacker play. I head off in the middle of the set to get ice cream - because, aside from the music, the best thing about being on the ship is 24-hour access to unlimited soft serve ice cream - and dance my way down the stairs and over to the machine. The wind whips my skirt around my ankles, and the sun is pleasantly warm on my bare arms. Sam’s playing one of the songs that I know all the words to already - “Right Where We Wanted”, I think - and I sing along cheerfully when I head back to our spot with two ice cream cones in hand.

Carbon Leaf plays next. They’re the reason I ended up here, back in 2006. I booked on a whim, thanks to a sale a mere two months before the ship sailed. I thought it would be a one-time adventure. But here I am, January 2009, making my way down to the stage so I can stand with all the Carbon Leaf fans I’ve met on four separate cruises and sing “Let Your Troubles Roll By” at the top of my lungs. It’s the first time I’ve seen Carbon Leaf since February 2007; their last show was the night before my dad’s stroke, and I’ve lived an entire lifetime since. Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers join them for “Troubles” - and for a really off-key cover of “Living on a Prayer.” I haven’t had so much fun in months. I’m so happy that I eat a few minutes of horribly expensive cell phone time to tell Twitter how happy I am.

Another cut. Another day - or night - and we’re all wearing green beads and hats and stickers for Gaelic Storm’s fake St. Patrick’s Day concert. They play after The Alternate Routes and Carbon Leaf, and I’m hard-pressed to remember a more awesome three-band line-up since … well, since last year’s cruise. The ship is swaying enough that I spend the whole show correcting my balance, which results in my feet screaming at me when I do finally sit down, at ‘our’ tables back in the restaurant after the show.

Cut. We may be skipping back a night, we may not, the editor hasn’t labeled this footage well enough. Midnightish, maybe 1:00am, somewhere around there. After thinking about sleep, I leave my roommates in the cabin and walk up to the casino to see what’s going on. What’s going on, it turns out, is Michael Tolcher playing a marathon late-night set. I can’t see Michael, the crowd is too thick, but that doesn’t matter. I stand at the edge of the crowd and participate in the massive sing-along to “Sooner or Later”. Misti’s there, and somehow we end up drawn into the drunken domestic drama of one of the members of Gaelic Storm. It’s traumatic to a very drunk Patrick, but mostly I just come away from the episode remembering him repeatedly poking me in the face. I think I mostly manage to contain my laughter until I’m walking away, back to my cabin to collapse for the night.

I scroll past a million pieces of footage, five days’ worth of music and laughter and fruity drinks and soft-serve ice cream. But, we’ll end the piece with me, walking alone on South Beach after our arrival back in port, browsing a gigantic souvenir shop while The Cab plays on the Miami radio station on the loudspeaker. A quiet moment, in which I look out at the sun-drenched street and take a deep breath. I’ll get this again next year, but for now, I imprint this week on my memory, to sustain me through the long Minnesota winter ahead of me.

And there, that’s my mental Rock Boat movie. The sequel will include Tony Lucca, Dexter Freebish, and a race around Cozumel. Tune in this January for TRB X: We’re On A Boat, Motherfucker. :D