Day One

I've been suffering from clinical depression since I was about thirteen.  I spent years wondering why nothing I did or experienced ever seemed to make me happy.  When I was in my early 30s I first sought help from a psychiatric social worker, and saw perhaps a half dozen over a period of ten years before I realized that what I needed was some kind of drug intervention.  I saw my first psychiatrist when I was in my 40s and was placed on a drug regimen.  Since then I've taken a number of drugs, all of which helped me improve my overall mood, but nothing has helped to really shake the depression off.  I've had moments in which I experienced something akin to happiness, but it never lasted for any significant amount of time.
Over a period of years I worked in therapy until I realized that much of my depression was rooted in my childhood.  I suspect now that my mother may have been bi-polar, because she was angry much of the time, often violent in her expressions and occasionally beat or slapped us.  She abused all of us, including my father.  Not once in all the years I lived at home did she ever make an expression of love to any of us, but she was continually critical.  Nothing any of us did was enough to elicit an expression of pride from her.  I grew up with feelings of worthlessness that plague me to this day.  I left home as soon as I could and entered a profession.  Over the years I made steady progress in my work, published articles and books, and made a modest reputation, but always in the back of my mind was the memory of not being loved or appreciated.  In the end none of my accomplishments ever mattered to me, and I think that prevented me from ever truly excelling at anything.  Nothing ever seemed to be enough to make me proud of myself or to even appreciate myself in the smallest way.  Waking up every day feeling that you somehow don't measure up, even to yourself, is a tremendous burden that makes it hard to enjoy even the smallest thing in life.  
I'm lucky to be with a woman who does appreciate me and who shows her appreciation in many ways.  I didn't meet her until fairly late in life, and wish I'd known her earlier.  Maybe it would have made a difference, but I understand that real appreciation has to come from within.  I'd very much like to know how to learn to appreciate myself before I die.  That would be a gift beyond measure, just to get up every morning and be glad I am alive and healthy.  It seems like a small thing to wish for, but to me it is as big as the sky.  There's hardly any price that would be too large for me to pay for that feeling.  
I also wish that I could somehow come to terms with my childhood.  It is really uncomfortable to realize that your own mother didn't love and value you.  I know that to a degree it wasn't' her fault.  Both of her parents were alcoholics and she was probably abused by them.  You can't grow up in an environment like that and hot have a warped view of the world, but I still can't forgive her for abusing all of us.  Her inability to love us caused me to grow into a person who had trouble appreciating children.  I grew up thinking I as a burden to my mother, and that left me with a feeling that all children were a responsibility to be stoically borne rather than loved and appreciated for who they were.  I thought I'd be a much better parent, but live with the knowledge that I didn't do a very good job of it.  
Today I live with the realization that much of my life is over and can't be redone.  That knowledge ties in with the other feelings of worthlessness and failure that dog me each day.  I can live with those feelings, but it's not really a pleasure.  I somehow need to forgive myself, forgive my mother, and learn to enjoy each day forward as it comes, not to sit around in a stew of sadness and frustration.  But how to do that?