Three Disasters

College sucked for me.

Not the coursework...I graduated early with honors and distinction.

Not the friends I still have today.

Not the campus jobs that started my career.

First disaster: September of the first year.

I had a history of being a bad boyfriend.

She was loving and beautiful and worth changing for.

And I did.

Unfortunately she made other choices.

I could sense the distance that night, and it all unraveled.

My heart was broken. Depression nipped at my heels.

That February I stood on a bridge trying to find the strength to cross it to keep going.

Second disaster: Three weeks after the bridge.

My body broke. An infection in my liver.

A week in the hospital. A year of recovery.

Depression consumed me as my joints ached. 

I kept going. Stayed in school though my grades suffered.

One morning that summer I could not get out of bed. My knees no longer working.

Finally good news. The biopsy showing healing.

Disaster three: Four weeks after the biopsy.

It was Saturday morning. When the phone rang, I thought it was my girlfriend. 

It was my Mom calling to tell me that my brother had been killed in an accident.

The depression that had been attacking me for almost two years consumed me whole.

Not only was he my closest sibling in age and love. He left is wife and his daughter.

Who I was after will never be the person who I was before.

I survived and have even thrived from those disasters.

They do not define me, but they have shaped and scarred me.

Made me stronger for everything else since then.