Day 5: What is the most important thing you learned about yourself this year?

This is a tough question to try and answer while struggling with depression.  Very little seems important and, despite knowing that I've learned things about myself, it doesn't feel like I've made very much progress or learned anything that I haven't already learned before (and promptly forgotten).  It would be easy to let myself think that all the self introspection I've done over the past year has been pointless -- an elaborate and overly drawn out mental masturbation session.  But would that be the truth?

While I'm honest to a fault with those I care about, I'm not always very good about being honest with myself.  Rather, there are places in my head that have been so warped, so twisted, that their perception of what's true is at odds with reality.  Some of those places are easy to spot.  Some, however, are not.  I'm learning to be better at recognizing them, though.  And learning which places those are, leraning which bits of my personal reality are distorted to the point of dishonesty, is pretty important.  Beyond that, learning what makes me go to those places is pretty important too.  As is learning what build those bastions of bias within my psyche.  After all, those are the places that my depression comes from.  Those are the places that my fears and insecurities about not being good enough, worthy, or deserving of any of the good things in my life, come from.  And those are the places that my certainty that, no matter what, I am not safe and never will be, comes from.

The most important thing, though, hasn't been any of that.  The most important thing has been learning how to face those places in myself -- how to go there, on purpose, confront the personal demons that are in residence, and exorcize them.  There are times I feel like Sybil: meeting the tortured, ugly, facets of myself and embracing them, comforting them, when what I really want to do (what I used to do) is push them back into their dark corners in my head, and lock them away there, forgetting that they even exist.  But I've learned that if I do that, if I don't confront them, they just break out again and fuck with everything.   So...  Confrontation it is.