I'll be Gretel

After each refill my stash of pills dwindles, and inevitably I find myself standing in the kitchen staring into the amber abyss of an almost empty prescription bottle.
I should be used to this.  It's been years.  It's almost been decades.  I've lost count of the amount of times I've told myself, my friends, my family, even strangers on the internet that I am a person who will need to take a pill every day for the rest of my life.  If I don't take that pill then I lose the ability to be the person I am, and instead become someone else.  Someone who cannot add anything positive to anyone's life, or is convinced she cannot, and so doesn't try.  Someone who becomes consumed with sorrow.  The idea of it, the feel of it. The weight and texture of despair become a part of every breath and fill the space in between every heartbeat. I have lived in that dark disorienting place.  I have followed the twisting logic of depression right to the brink, and am lucky enough to have found my way back.  I don't want to go back there.  No one does.  Ever.  I promise you, no person ever wants to feel that way.  Not once, and certainly not twice, or three or four of five times, or however many occasions I have wrongly decided that I was cured, I was fixed, and I didn't need any stupid pills to help me.
And yet . . . every month I wonder.  Who am I really?  Is this who I was supposed to be?  I was barely a person when I got lost in the frightening woods of depression, so it's hard to say.  How can I tell, at almost 35, if I am the person I was on track to be at 17?  There is no app for that.  No picture to take and extrapolate from.  I cannot know, and it's that exact fact that keeps me wondering.  What I can know is this:  I lost myself.  I lost the very core of who I was, and who I could be.  And I found myself again, by swallowing a trail of pills, one each day, until I limped back into the world. Changed perhaps. Limping and skittish, certainly.  But present, and capable of joy.
It is this knowledge that I rediscover at the bottom of that amber bottle.  I was, and I will always be, Gretel.  I was lost, and I was willing to be found.  I will keep following that trail.  If only because I know what darkness lies behind me, and I would rather step into the unknown with hope and love.