Sometimes I am grateful for my depression. Weird, I know.

Sometimes I am grateful that I had my breakdown when I did, and that I went horribly depressed for a while.

There are multiple reasons why I had my breakdown when I did (16th August 2006), and I think I might have had some depression before then,but one of the long term causes was that I am a workaholic and a perfectionist.
My breakdown forced me to look at my life and think about it. Think why my body and my mind have given up and decided that if I wasn't going to give myself a break, they were bloody going to take one. It was a hard task to face the life-style choices that were, well, not exactly wrong, but not exactly right either. I had no work-life balance. I had work, and then I relied on people to occasionally get me out of it. When they didn't, I worked. I wouldn't even notice I was hungry or needed the loo.

I take much more care of myself now, and have reached a work-life balance. To be fair, this is helped by the fact that now I don't have to go to lectures, and then study/do coursework when I get home, so I can separate work from home. But I do have more hobbies now (yey knitting), and take more pleasure in doing other things.
Part of it is, I know, that I am not at full capacity. So, even if I wanted to concentrate so much that I didn't notice I was hungry/needed the loo, my brain can't physically do it. It's still too weak for it. But now I know (and knowing is half the battle). So even when I regain fully my capabilities, I will keep taking care, and use that capacity partly for work, and partly for fun.
I have the feeling that I will be all my life watching for it; I know I have a tendency to depression, anxiety and workaholism, so I will have to be careful, always. However, that is a small price to pay to not be ill.

Depression sucks, but it will in the long run help me reach a better way of life. It also got to me early in my life enough that I could still do something about it, I could still change. It sucked having to learn all this the hard way, but at least now it's learned (mostly), and hopefully I will not have to this again.