I went to the CBT meeting. I managed to walk along the road, through the supermarket car park then into the offices and waited to see the councillor. As I sat there in the waiting room I started to sweat. People all around me were chatting with some people talking in a language I didn’t know. I looked down to the floor as I found it hard to look at anyone. I was beginning to panic and looked for a way out. I shifted uncomfortably in the wooden chair as the palms of my hands started to go clammy and sweat. I tried to concentrate on something, anything inside my mind that would take this fear of being in the presence of people away. I knew they couldn’t or wouldn’t harm me but as I sat, with my head down I listened. I listened for anything that would tell me they were talking about me. I listened.

I heard a familiar name being called from beyond my swirling mind. A name which drew a confused state inside me as I tried to figure out where I had heard this name before. Then it dawned on me; someone was calling my name.

Sitting in the office I listened to the councillor then I began to tell her things, things about my past, how I felt, tablets I am taking etc. In that instant something changed inside me. I went from someone who hardly ever talks, who bottles everything up until I can’t take it anymore to someone who wanted to tell this total stranger everything about me. As I listened to myself talking and talking I was surprised at how easy the words, so long a silent entity except in my mind where now flowing from me like a waterfall. Oh and the tears flowed freely from my reddening eyes. I tried to stop them from falling but it was no use, they flowed down my cheeks like a flooded river whose banks have been swelled by days of rain, and now over spilled onto the land, overwhelming and covering everything in it’s wake.

As I sat there talking and snivelling I began to see something beyond the councillor. In the distance beyond her and the wall I saw something begin to shine, like a halo shining in the sunshine. Brilliant white light shone from behind it making it hard to see what it was. I continued to talk, telling her how I first encountered the vial, stinking fingers of depression. How it crept up on me without warning except for a few tell-tale signs, which at the time I was oblivious to, How it wrapped it’s long, bony fingers around my entire body and squeezed me like a hand squashing a fly. I told the listening woman how I relive those incidents in 1989 and 1990 in Northern Ireland. How I stand and stare at the plastic bag underneath the Chemist window. I tell her how I felt, and continued to feel the shock, fear, and then elation as the scenes unfolded inside my warped mind. It was then that I realised what I could see beyond the lady sat in front of me, that shining thing that began to slowly open as if being opened from the other side by unseen forces. Inside my body I felt relief for the first time in 11 years. I felt all the tension, all the unwanted thoughts that this dreadful harbinger had surrounded me in, start to slip away and disappear through the floor leaving me elated, scared and empty inside.

What I could see beyond the woman who was listening intently was a door and it was beginning to open. To open a new dawn in my life finally after 11 horrible years. A door that was opening ever so slowly but from beyond it I knew was a ray of hope, my new dawn. They say there’s light at the end of the tunnel, well yesterday as I spoke to my councillor I saw my light at the end of my tunnel. I know by the way it slowly opened that there will be good times and bad ahead of me. But with the help of this wonderful woman I hope to walk through that door one day and into a new beginning. One of happiness and wanting and finally free of the clutches of this demon called depression.