Therapy Dog Thursday with Charlotte, the Great Dane

Life in a psychiatric ward and Charlotte, the therapy dog.

I keep walking about the house looking for things. I enter a room, determined, but by the time I scan it and search it whole, I realize that I have no idea why I even came there in the first place. I find myself staring everywhere. Into space. The fridge. The closet. The clogged sink drain. And if it were not for Tug and Waffle’s alerts, I’d probably still be there, looking for me, in all the wrong places.

Depression is a cunning sadist. It takes so many shapes and manifestations. In the beginning it’s slow and sneaky. It creeps into the corners of me. Tears, out of place. Exhaustion, in the late morning. Fury, over the most mundane of circumstances. And then, the fog rolls in. Slowly at first, before all at once socking me and my mind into a silent, blank state of oblivion as it smothers me whole.

I took this week off of work at The Dogist to “recover.” What an optimistic concept. As if one week of sleeping, weeping, and tweaking a medication that will take three months of white knuckl…