Thank God for meeting up earlier this week in Naperville with my old accountant, an unsaved 60-some-year-old who says he was long ago turned off on Christianity by Latin Mass as a child and thinks I’m nuts for believing a guy named Noah built an ark and corralled all the earth’s living creatures onto it.

We figured out I hadn’t seen him in 14 years. He gave me a saved copy from a 1994 issue of a national hunting and fishing magazine in which he, as one of its contributing writers, had taken pictures of me canoeing on the Fox River. He confessed, “I remember me and the guys discussing how you looked like Christie Brinkley.”

I hadn’t seen Naperville in at least five years and the whole experience was quite mood-uplifting for a month that I would have to say has been one of the worst ever in trying to cope with ongoing anxiety/depression problems.

In that same afternoon, while taking a stroll on Washington Street to see all that had changed in the heart of downtown (The old Naperville Sun office block is now a Tapas restaurant, grub-pub, Pottery Barn and Williams and Sonoma!), I happened upon a life-sized bronze sculpture of deceased Sun journalist Genevieve Towsley sitting at a park bench, notebook and pen in hand, outside a two-story Barnes & Noble that used to be the town bowling alley.

Genevieve (1907-1995), a well-known features reporter and columnist for the Sun just as I once was in the early to mid-’90s, was honored in an accompanying plaque with the poem, “She ‘pounded the pavement’ and upon her search/This journalist wrote of community, county and church/Her stories meandered through our everyday life/Writing of our neighbors joy and strife.”

I cried at reading the words, knowing I used to be compared to Genevieve by my colleagues. People all over Naperville once regularly read my stories and opinion columns, frequently telling me how they enjoyed this one or that one.

I knew many of Naperville’s leading citizens and some of them, including Mayor George Pradel and now-deceased town preservationist/activist Jane Sindt, even considered me a close personal friend.

Early that evening, for nostalgia’s sake, I popped into the old Lantern on the corner of Washington and Chicago for a bite to eat and then, across the street, ran into Dino Moore, the producer for the worldwide-distributed daily MarketWatch radio report from Chicago’s Agricultural Board of Trade. He encouraged me, “You still got it, kid. You’re a very unique, different kind of person.”

When I told him I moved to Manhattan in 1999 and then, in 2003, quit a good-paying job on Park Avenue—as associate editor for the international trade magazine Graphic Arts Monthly—to write from home about the Bible, he simply responded, “Don’t you know people don’t want to hear that kind of stuff?”

The funny thing is I’ve got a file—now in storage with just about all the rest of my belongings—of literally hundreds of names of people in Manhattan alone who assured me they wanted a copy of my book when it’s done. These people were genuinely, sincerely interested, too! They really wanted to read my thoughts!

Oh, if I could just concentrate on that and remember back to who I used to be! At my church’s summer Bible conference last week, I actually had a veteran preacher say to me, in kindly approaching me about my readily apparent sad state, “Right now, your personality, on a scale of one to 10, is a zero.”

Reporting this off-the-cuff remark to a friend over the telephone this week, I reasoned, “Who would believe anymore I was voted “female class clown” my senior year in high school?!” I then boasted that I was vice president of my class, as well as president of the Drama Club for two years.”

These days, none of my friends from my earlier days in Chicago see me. The phone calls are very infrequent. Honestly, I don’t have a single person on earth who maintains an everyday relationship with me, either in person or over the phone.

Even my mom—the person who cares about me most—only calls about every four-five days to check on my status and hopefully hear that I’m suddenly happy and well. The conversations never last more than 5-7 minutes. I know I’ve got her super-frustrated because she absolutely doesn’t know what to do or say to help.

Without fail, both family and friends have repeated to me in very similar words, “I don’t understand what happened to you. You used to be a fun person people naturally gravitated to. Now, you’re hard to be around you’re so glum and humorless.”

Of course, these are all people who long ago let me know they do not care for my website writings and don’t want me discussing my “viewpoint” on the Bible with them.

Obviously, I’ve got a real struggle on my hands. As the lyrics go from my favorite hymn since childhood,
 What a Friend We Have in Jesus:
 “Are we weak and heavy laden,
 cumbered with a load of care?
 Precious Savior, still our refuge;
 take it to the Lord in prayer.”

(Editor’s Note: Sorry for such a downer of an entry but I have had a very hard time writing lately and people have told me I should try opening up about my depression, not only to help myself but to possibly reach others going through a similar situation. I do know that one of the preachers at the Bible conference, who leads a congregation in the Wash., D.C. metro area, informed me, “I couldn’t get over the number of people who asked me to bring back for them a copy of Brother Jordan’s DVD series on depression.”)