Stable mental health is my illusive unicorn. I see it ahead and nearly grasp the beastie, but it skitters off and leaves me floundering in a dense forest of depression and mental muck. Like many survivors of child abuse, I have emotional baggage that exceeds the standard weight limits. I spent half my life unaware that I was carrying excessive luggage. Once I understood I had such an emotional burden, I spent the next several years beating myself up. Why couldn’t I just get over this?

I wrote this on one of those eternally dismal late autumn days that permeate the Midwest. The trifecta of perpetually oblique skies, seasonal affective disorder, and a personal crisis was weighing on me. As I watched the people on the streets, it occurred to me how alike, yet disjointed we were — an army of solitude and aloneness. If depression had a visual representation, it might look something like this. We are … an achromatic palette of grey of the neutral drizzle puddle.

This week, I was reduced to tears because a friend of three decades told me that one of my best attributes was my sunny disposition. “You’re always one to see the bright side! You have such a positive attitude,” she said. We’d been laughing about something earlier in the conversation and she inserted those compliments as we’d neared the end of our call. I choked back sobs. Puzzled, my friend probed a little. She’d hit a nerve at a time I couldn’t keep my true emotions in check another minute.

Outwardly your new boyfriend is perfect. He’s handsome, intelligent, charming and talented. At first you were thrilled to hear about his many career accolades. Now, weeks later, the one-sided dialogue is getting tiresome. Prince Charming seems haughty, perhaps even insensitive. You begin to wonder if there are serious flaws in your relationship. Could you be dating a narcissist? While only qualified professionals can assess narcissistic personality disorder, you can be watchful for narcissistic

Child grooming probably isn’t terminology you would have been taught if you were born in the sixties or earlier. As a child of less enlightened days, I’d been programmed to fear the scary stranger in the trench coat who would steal me away. I never saw the harm in the soft-spoken, smiling man seated at our family dinners.