I suffered from a lack of energy to be able to do much as far back as High School.  But I did pretty well for a while.

As people with long term chronic depression know, life gets gradually harder as time passes – without treatment at least.

The first casualty of depression is things that are fun.  By 1977, I was starting to have a harder time doing fun things.  By 1982 doing fun things was pretty much out of the question.  I was back in college preparing to become a teacher.

From 1985 on, I was able to use my energies to teach.  By 1997, my energies for that were about gone too.  In the interim, I gradually became more and more house bound when I was not at work – coaching freshman volleyball for 10 years did not help.

The 1998-9 school year was the first year I was sure I was not teaching as well as I had the year before.  I knew I had to get out.  The 1999-2000 school year started on a down note, and I continued to have more and more difficulty doing much of anything.

I left teaching at Spring Break 2000.  I could not go on.  It was all arranged as we were moving to another State… but still.

Since then, my energies have not deteriorated nearly as quickly.  But even so, I have become more limited to home.

I finally discovered that I was not a normal person, who was just very weak, when I started seeing my psychologist, and got meds in 2005.  Since then, most of my efforts have gone into slowing my loses.

Now I hope to be transitioning to working on actually getting better!