A few years ago I was cripplingly depressed, going through a lot of turmoil, issues from abuse and a chronic perpetual liar. Anxiety abounded, gender issues I suppressed, made a mess of social life and all sorts of stuff and was generally a non-functional broken person. I did things for the sake of trying to bring myself happiness, or what I thought was happiness.

I bought a really nice muscle car in hopes that just having a thing would make me happy. It didn't. Nothing I did.... did. I found a relationship and clung to it hoping happiness could be found with others, morphed myself and my personality to fit others' ideals of a person instead of letting myself be myself. All because I thought happiness came from outside.

Today, I am happy. It is a general state I find myself in. Am I happy every day? No. Nobody is. Do I still have depression and anxiety? You bet your ass I do.

I began to learn to curtail my negative traits, with first getting control of narcissism followed by stamping out lying. I started to learn to manage anxiety and made a breakthrough there, with the help of a little green plant.

Where am I now? Anxious, suffer from bouts of depression but at least now I feel in control of it, and I am moving forward. But I can generally say, for the first time in my entire life at the ripe age of 30... I'm genuinely happy. And that's something worth celebrating.

This is more of a personal retrospective than anything else, but I guess the main takeaway here would be don't worry, you can do it. It'll take a long time, and the road is never easy and you'll never fully be over it, but you -can- do it, and always take a moment to look back and see how far you've already come. ^^