'Who Are You and What Have You Done With My Wife?'

This is how Husband greets me these days when I actually talk to him at 8.30 – 9.00am. It's a novel concept, me talking to anyone at that time. Many centuries ago, mornings, to me, were – how do you spell it? - Yeaugh. Or something on those lines. If I had to be up at crack of what-I-call stupid o'clock in the morning for any particular reason, anyone who was daft enough to even stand in my path at that time of the morning would be classed as a very annoying person by Yours Truly and be growled at.

For over thirty years I've suffered from depression and anxiety, mainly set off by post natal depression, a traumatic birth - which I didn't consider until recent years - and culture shock. From art student and traveller to stay-at-home mother. Had always thought I'd be okay. I was diagnosed and put on medication a year after my first child was born, which made a huge difference. I was still up and down, but less so. I was still, as ever, hopeless at getting up, never a morning bod. Telegraph pole propping up eyelids job. Usually took me till' around midday to come round (yawn).

A little over three years ago over the Christmas period, my medication stopped working. My psychiatrist put me on another medication. I became suicidal. Sheer chance and lovely neighbours led me to the brilliant mental health team who put me on a medication combination known in the trade as California Rocket Fuel (Venlafaxine and Mirtazapine. Fab-you-lus! And it is) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

My complete recovery was gradual and has taken over three years, but I began to feel better than I'd ever felt before, even as a kid. I'd been depressed as a child but hadn't even realised this until recent years. Another matter that added to my complete recovery was, bless them, the deaths of both my parents a year after my medication crisis. I loved them dearly, but, as far as my upbringing had been, they'd 'got it wrong'. Emotionally and mentally they hadn't understood me, and neither had my two older brothers. I 'over reacted' and was 'over sensitive' and so forth. So, after my parents died, within days of one another, I felt released. Released from obligation to family. I email or text my two brothers just to keep in touch, but socialising with my family... not on my nelly! Nothing was going to spoil my new found happiness.

The gradual result of all this has been dramatic. I feel good, mostly. I've never known what it felt like to be okay mentally. Wow. After the crisis, my getting up time became 10.30am usually. No guilt. Just get up when I'm ready. Three years on, I've noticed that I'm waking up earlier and getting up at a more reasonable hour. So, being up and awake at 8.30am, ready to do whatever it is we're doing that early in the morning (to me that's early), Husband, my dearest, loveliest best pal, has looked at me and uttered quite often: 'Who are you and what have you done with my wife?' He also says: 'You're not the woman I married. You're better than the woman I married.'

So I'm literally rebuilding my polymath-ish, creative, hopefully somewhat adventurous life and chronicling it all on my blog, Creating My Odyssey, as I go along, and having fun doing so. I'm also reaching out to other mental health sufferers and working on networking with creatives and people with a voice. After my recovery, I felt a strong need to let sufferers know that depression is the easiest mental health condition to treat. The trick is to find the right people to treat you and the medication/ therapy to suit the individual. That's the tricky part and I was lucky to find mine.

I've become confident, extrovert-ish and lost weight. I'm ploughing into all those things I ever wanted to do, including working on finishing the damn novel I've been writing forever throughout young parenthood and depression to help keep me sane. (Alias Jeannie Delaney is the life story of a devastating cowgirl who's the fastest gun in the west and also bisexual). A novel which I started after my daughter was born and I swore I would finish by the time I was sixty. (Hadeha! I'm sixty-four this year). All this with the help of my brilliant critic Husband who also cared for me for over thirty years.

What more can I say? Marvelous. :-D!