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In the last few months before I made the decision to pursue a new path of detoxing off the antidepressants and medication, I was trying so hard to hold it together. On the outside, I ran a small high-end design business, worked really hard, and was not someone who looked outwardly mentally disturbed. I like to say I was 'functionally dying'. Truth was I wanted to die so badly; I could think of nothing except suicide. I wished for death every year when I blew out my birthday cake candles; I silently apologized to people in the news who died tragically because it wasn't me instead. This became way more than an obsession. It was a comforting hole that I would crawl into in my head and hide from life. It was one day while I was internally hiding in this hole, yet working at my desk (my definitions of multi-tasking are a little unconventional because of my severe depression and anxiety). I began doodling this strange shape. Over and over and over. It was consuming me. As I doodled it over and over I watched it slowly taking shape. I was very curious what it would turn into because it seemed very determined to come out. It seemed to have something very loud to say. And as he took shape, I realized that I had drawn him each time without lifting the pen. It hit me what he was trying to say. All his parts were connected, he was whole. I was in pieces. Fragmented. Scattered. Parts were lost, misplaced, long forgotten.
After the few months where I did not go to my office because I was too sick from the withdrawal, when I finally returned I saw the papers on my desk. All of them had these doodles of the bunny, in various stages of taking shape. At first when I saw this, it hit me hard how sick I had actually been while still trying to function, and I reacted much like Shelley Duvall in The Shining when she stumbled across Jack's typewriter and there were a thousand lines repeated over and over. Once the shock subsided, I could not help but marveling at the universe. Had it really, in my darkest hour, sent a bunny out through my hand to give me a message? I found this thought delightfully humorous and I felt suddenly loved by some unseen magic. This was one of the first connections to energy of the universe that I had felt in many, many years.
The medication had done that to me. It allowed me to function in a severely depressed state, disconnected from myself and just disconnected from reality enough, so that I never actually dealt with the root of my problems- or considered that there might have been a reason other than having a "chemical imbalance".
Balto Bunny represents finding your parts, putting them back together and becoming a whole being again.
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THE BIRTH OF BALTO BUNNY
