It's okay to be sad. Really?!

I met with my psychiatrist (different person than my therapist) today to check in on how welbutrin is going for me. I told him that I've had a very good experience with welbutrin generally, but that I felt really knocked down by some of the things that happened last week (close friend's five-year partnership ending, painful moment in therapy, and more recently, sort of getting stood up on a date). I was assuming that my sadness was disproportionate to the events that caused it; I was assuming that how sad I felt meant that I hadn't made that much progress on my depression. The psychiatrist said something really unexpected and helpful about this: given those events, he thought my emotional reaction was pretty normal, and not necessarily overblown by depression (or at least not too much). He said if I was still feeling bad in another week or so, then it might be worth looking into to increase my dosage; but since these things happened so recently, and since the sadness wasn't interfering with my ability to get out and do things, my emotional reaction was really pretty reasonable.

Whoa! So I can have a bad week and feel sad, and all that means is I had a bad week? My depression hasn't returned with a vengeance? So awesome. Just hearing him say that, and realizing that I can have bad days or even weeks, and that's just part of life, made me feel a lot better. I think I'd been thinking, on some level, that my feeling bad meant that I was failing at fighting depression. It's a good and very helpful lesson to learn that I can feel bad sometimes and that doesn't mean I'm regressing or failing. I can handle the fact that life has downs if I also believe that life is capable of offering me some real happiness. :)