Improv On Self Improvement

My mind is dark, dark with thoughts that might give you shivers down the spine, not dark with inactivity. I feel numb, it isn’t an absence of pain or an inability to see, smell, hear or feel what you feel. I sense all these things, they just don’t seem to matter as much anymore. I know what you want to see. You want to see me smile. You want to hear me giggle. You want me to express my casual feelings of congeniality to reaffirm your position as a likable person, with a positive influence on my day. I want to die.

You ask me how I am, as if you care for how I am. Oh if only I could tell you how I am, just like those pamphlets about dealing with depression suggest, it would make you so uncomfortable. You wouldn’t know what to say and our conversation will end in an awkward silence, and you would probably avoid my company from there on – maybe I should jump off a bridge in front of an oncoming freight truck… Nah that’s too messy. So I smile. I know it’s a good smile because everyone seems to believe it. “I am good! How are you? What have you been up to?” See what I did there? Keep the attention on them, so they don’t end up annoying you with questions about your life. It is a much more entertaining kind of irritation when they tell you all about their perfect, happy little lives, complaining about shit you’d happily substitute for your own. Perhaps if I drive my car off a cliff, into the sea… Hmm… No, I might change my mind half way down, then I’m fucked… Oh grow a pair.

I sit here, surrounded by friends. Ha! Friends… At least that’s how they define it. I feel alone. My insides feel cold and lifeless! Where is the warmth of companionship? Where is that vivacity! If only someone could see the Me inside and be OK with it, if only one of these people could bother with a sincere connection, maybe help me out of this emotional shit-hole I’m in. Why are they all so horny! What is up with this desire to get drunk off your mind and rub up against strangers you might or might not fuck with no intention of getting more out of it – besides free drugs and alcohol(for some, usually the ladies. Oh ladies you.)? Well I get the drunk-off-your-mind bit, then you don’t have to think. You can’t think! Thinking is your problem after all. It’s your only way out of this though, or not – god I don’t fucking know anymore! Maybe I could make someone’s firearm disappear, and then make myself disappear, in a nice way, I don’t want to upset them too much, they’re good people- “oh yes I will have a drag of that, thank you very much ;D”… Look at them, taking my enthusiasm for a joint as a sign of a spirited appetite for life, are people really that stupid or do they just not care? Whatever, it is somewhat better here than at home… Ahh, right, that’s it, stoned… a smile creeps up into my face… This really does feel better.

Being depressed is like being submerged, walking around at the bottom of the sea, where everything feels dense, looks dull, and your brain is somewhat deprived of oxygen. You spend too much time inside your own head, postulating scenarios of all sorts, drifting slowly into the recesses of your mind where you prefer not to talk to people or see the daylight. You linger in the cloud inside your head, growing far too comfortable with the darkness, with the demons. For some, every experience outside of their comfort zone is tainted with a persistent anxiety. Some people experience bouts of overwhelming anxiety, ushering very dark notions into their heads, haunting them whenever they’re alone, increasing the appeal of an untimely demise. Everything that is supposed to be nice and pleasant makes you feel only sombre, and every relaxing afternoon alone leaves you with melancholy. It feels like you can just stop existing and there would be no difference in the world.

What am I? Nothing. What have I done so far? Nothing. What will I ever amount to?.. I really think it would be easier to just nip this in the bud… Hahaha, coward! You want it to be easy do you! This is just pathetic. You know if you stop isolating yourself from everyone you might just see things differently! I need confidence for that, confidence takes energy, I don’t feel like doing shit right now, how about I sleep some more… yeah I think that would be better, I can do that…

I don’t want to be this. I must find a route that leads me far, far away from this. So I search, I dig, I scratch and I tamper. I begin to gather information to help me build a case on this pain, this inadequacy, the mere thought of becoming this gives me the chills. I begin to identify the wind that blows in this evil boat’s sails. I know the water on which it floats. That’s it, I am building a machine. It must be autonomous because I know my genetic predisposition, I must not leave myself to chance, if I cannot consciously battle this dark force then I need something to have my back. My friends won’t understand, it isn’t up to them, neither is it for them. It is for me, so that I can live, so that I might have wings to soar over these waters and maybe set my feet on solid ground before this boat goes down and takes me with it.

I must get out of here. I need to find my way out of alienation. Why isn’t it working yet? I have been working on this thing for years, I have compromised myself for this, and I still don’t have enough! When will you lift me out of this you vicious, cold machine! There are moments where you sit in this freezing, dark forest you have wandered into, listening, waiting for something to make a sound… Silence, dead silence. Even if it is a beast coming to devour you it would be better than this. Sometimes you hear a little bird coming out of the thick of the surrounding overgrowth, fluttering by and disappearing back into the dark unknown. They are like little messengers, carrying news from the world beyond, the world you know you should be a part of, but you no longer know your way out of the forest. The path you took to get here is lost and the open hills that once gave you a vantage point are now over grown with the dark thoughts, the thorns and the poisonous weeds you kindly sowed for reasons you can no longer explain.

When you are under for too long your inner being starts to send jolts of desperation through you, and you start doing things with the hope of feeling something for once. Some cut themselves, some pierce themselves, some do weird, scary and downright shocking things. I used to lie under water and listen to my heart slow down, listen to the blood flowing through my head, hear the world around me, distant and feint as it feels inside. Somehow it felt good to actually be in the physical state you felt you were in most of the time. Lying there with the rest of the world drowned out I immersed myself completely into my mind. Sometimes it felt like it would take only a little push further and I would be gone, no breath, no heartbeat, no me. It isn’t worth talking about the uglier bits where I approached the edge of oblivion with certainty in my mind, certainty that I would now step off the edge and be no more, this is not about sensation. I can tell you this though: standing on the proverbial edge made me realise that this is quite an extreme measure to take, it does not fall within the bounds of a balanced life. It made me think that if I could suffer all the awfulness that led me here, I might as well be at the other end of this scale, the end where there might be much more in my life, where I feel great and successful. If it was going to be a drag to live and end up dying, I might as well take the positive route and find a way to deal with the drag of staying happy. Besides, my family and friends would probably appreciate that. It became clear that I will have to change, I will have to become someone else.

Depression can destroy many a good thing for you. You allow people to drift away, the ones you haven’t pushed away yet. You reason yourself out of opportunities because you’ve become addicted to your pacifier. It is like forming a bond with a teddy bear, a thing that helps you reestablish your comfort zone, instead of just reconciling with those confronting you. It is more than a matter of chilling the fuck out and just taking a leap, but that is a good place to start. I became obsessed with the voice of reason in me, with the machine I put so much of myself into. Moving away from what constituted a problematic Me had to come down to abandoning ship and getting rid of anything that formed a part of my former self.

It is not per accident that we become depressed. Depression is not a sickness you suddenly fall ill with, and it is not something that can be remedied with a pill alone. Our circumstances shape our inclination to the dark, slippery slope, from infancy. It is said that depression is also genetically heritable, although I have found that depression exists to a much greater degree in a cocktail of predisposition ánd circumstance. From the outset it is important to get your definitions right, to understand how the condition is constituted through a clear grasp of the elements involved. What will follow is a little focus on the rhetoric and definitions behind our general conception of depression.

Firstly I would point out that we shouldn’t be so naive as to think that any business out there offering us a service or a product, nicely labeled as a ‘solution’, ‘insurance’ or even ‘cure’ for that matter, has our well being as highest priority. Insurance companies exist because they have identified our weakness (a lack of foresight and self control) and formulated a way to capitalise on that. Pharmaceutical companies prey on our fear of death and discomfort and provide us with conveniently packaged cures for our ailments, once again capitalising on our weakness. This seems quite cynical and likens itself to conspiracy theorist talk. But the truth is that many people in civil society, living first world lives, tend to have this sunshine & roses, ice cream and butterflies view of life and the reality in which it exists. This is far from actuality. Shit is complicated and ugly out there, so I shall refrain from referring to the complicated mess too much, and leave the figuring out to the obsessive thinkers and give you a palatable sample to make your own.

It is greatly beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry to define a mental condition as a disease and let it appear to the public mind as another problem that can be solved with drug treatments. With the right marketing strategies they are subliminally teaching us to have faith in drugs, and teaching us to think a certain way about our health and ailments, and what sustaining health entails. Do not mistake me for an anti pharmaceutical hippie, there have been developments in medicine that have changed humanity! So much so that we are growing in numbers to a level of idealistic detriment. Our lives have been converted from a state where a common cold would kill you, to a state where nothing short of cancer would be necessary to end a life – given access to the relevant medicine. The science of medicine has placed a comfortably large buffer zone between us and the ugliness of nature, and has made the presence of mental illness in society much more tolerable. Schizophrenics have a chance of living a normal life, and people suffering from varying forms of madness are sufficiently subdued to no longer be of potential harm to themselves or us and our consciences. Yet this is true for the small percentage of citizens who can afford treatment, and this does not change the fact that in the society we indulge, big business trumps big heart, nine times out of ten. If we can produce a synthetic sense of hope and materially elevate ourselves further, that is what will be done.

Now with a healthy dose of cynicism we can start looking at the matter with more objective sobriety:

It has become nearly impossible to think of depression as a state of being suspended between frustration, emotional discomfort or pain (internal mental and emotional conflict) as a result of – most often – identity and familial matters of heritage, mere incompatibility in disposition and misplaced expectations resulting from it; traumatic events; pressure to perform or be something you somehow know you are not. Negligence of the body (bad diet, poor routine, lack of exercise and consequent bad brain chemistry), lack of mental and physical stimulus or negative stimulus (dull and lifeless atmosphere; lack of diversity and colour in surroundings; no new ideas, interactions or things to get excited about and occupy your attention), a lack of control over the drift of your thoughts and resultant emotions – or vice versa – paired with the notion of a lack of control over your circumstances. All of which work together to create the soul sucking state depression tends to be.

The list may be longer and vary from person to person, but these are matters that usually carry the gist of it. We more often see depression as a thing, like a bacteria, a virus or a mutation that might be activated by a gene or that you might have contracted during a bad job interview, or gods forbid, got infected by when that person you really hate for how much power he has over you spewed another one of those gut wrenching lines, and a drop of that asshole’s spit landed in your eye, and now grows in your brain like a tumor… I think it becomes ever more appropriate to use computer analogies, and so I will do. The reason for this is because, for abstraction’s sake, our minds are like operating systems, our emotions like the graphic interface that animates it all, gives it a touch of colour and personality. Now, the dynamic range of this analogy, in terms of what needs to be accommodated in human sophistication is limited! So let us not make more of it than the idea I aim to convey. Our thoughts are like smaller applications we run on top of this system, and are therefor much more editable. Applications we can download, run, use and delete without too much consequence – on an individual basis – to the fundamental workings of the machine. It doesn’t take much effort to work with them and most of them are easily accommodated, given that your system is sufficiently up to date. Being in a state of depression is like running malware on your computer, systematically spreading a virus throughout your system. This happens because people often forget that they also compile their own applications! If you develop thoughts in a bad environment, thoughts derived from bad ideas, your thoughts become ever more tainted with the stink of counterproductive negativity. So the infection spreads, every application gets infected, every folder with a file worth anything becomes corrupted. The problem of depression isn’t the infection, it isn’t the virus. The problem of depression is the firewall that wasn’t on, it is the lack of precaution in the fundamental structure of the operating system that allows for us to drift into a compromised position. The problem of depression is the failure to use tools for prevention of data corruption and system errors. If we do not regulate the traffic in our own being, and do not govern the elements that are responsible for sustaining our sanity, then we are petri dishes waiting to grow a culture. Often these are bad cultures, toxic and detrimental to what constitutes a healthy person.

Culture is a relevant term in this discussion because it is the attitude, the practice, the habits that embody certain views on life. The major changes humanity has experienced at an ever increasing rate throughout the past centuries are effects of cultural evolution. The problem is that we are not consciously considering all the relevant aspects of the habits we cultivate! The truth is that in a society obsessed with opulence  there is a vast lack of empathy. The reality that we live among people with enormously differing dispositions makes the habits we indulge quite simply dangerous. Without the necessary degree of empathy we cannot suppose to ourselves how another person might experience the world and life within it. We cannot suppose to ourselves how our sense of normality might be ugly or outright harsh to another, we cannot see the pain that has tainted another person’s view of the world and we fail to imagine how a person can seem so dark while all we see is the pretty paintings of god – or something sugary like that. So we tend to resort to the ideas peddled by big names without faces, instead of soliciting a little humanitarian sincerity.

I am just about at the threshold of ceasing to slam the convention of running for a diagnosis and prescription. This will stop as soon as the picture becomes clearer… The picture that shows you how we as people can play a much more fundamental role in the well being of others, simply by pausing for a moment, and looking outside of our solitary pursuit of power and pleasure in this world filled with misguided idealism. It doesn’t necessarily take much for a person to shift from a state of feeling trapped and lonely, to being inspired and motivated. But you will never know the degree of difficulty in a person’s road to recovery if you never bother to understand the qualms of your fellow Earthlings! I find it shocking that we are forcing people in varying states of mental and emotional disrepair to pay someone to listen to them and provide constructive feedback. We have created this idea around depression that leads you to believe it is like fighting leukemia and it will take a long and mind-fucking course of radiation therapy to fix you. You are ill and you need to get your brain high on some neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors(antidepressants). In the light of the above mentioned state in which depression exists it is easy to see how it is a crime to even suggest a person should alter herself before altering her surroundings! Besides, if you know anything about the human psyche you will know that we become what our circumstances force us to be, we are the kind of people we surround ourselves with. It is within our instinctive nature to converge and take on an altruistic uniformity. In a more primitive existence these traits were vital to our survival, for some people out there it still is.

There is a certain narrow mindedness, ignorance coupled with an insecurity, a fear, that leads people to grab on to an idea and persist in pushing it toward you. People are afraid of the complicated thoughts of a soul tempered by the darkness, the evil lurking at the fringes of our sanity. They prefer to propose a treatment and place it somewhere between you and them because their lives are already too full to take on the feelings you have to unpack and rearrange. One cannot reasonably expect more from them, we are after all in charge of ourselves. It is after all our consequences to bear. A person unhappy with her life will often find herself being told with the simplest boldness to pull her shit together and just accept reality. But if one could transmit her reality to your brain, you would opt out as soon as an opportunity presented itself. We cannot afford to be so arrogant as to suppose our individual experience and understanding of life is sufficient for all the people we encounter. It is exactly that subtle, personal notion that has materialised the most appalling crimes against humanity. Which brings me to the part where I explain a little of myself. If you have made it this far, please bear with me a little longer!

My problem is not that I suffer from depression. My problem is that I have a ferocious appetite for stimulus, I am inexhaustibly curious, I crave information. I am obsessed with identifying patterns, patterns that clarify the world, patterns that grow and coalesce into a coherent understanding of what I know and am yet to learn. It is when I am unable to feed this organic machine inside me, when I lack the understanding of how to lead myself to pastures I haven’t yet grazed, when the pending questions start piling up, growing into a mountain of consequence not understood! That is when I feel depressed! I feel depressed when I feel the coping mechanisms my parents developed in their childhood, pierce into my soft soul like a spike, for no apparent reason, hurting me in places where I cannot conceive of a possible offense to justify it, and I am powerless against it. I  now know it is beyond their control, our insecurities and fears move us through life if we don’t learn to have an active say in it. I feel depressed when I doubt myself and buckle under the pressure of all this empty space wanting to be filled with knowledge, and I give in to the ideas of people I respect, the people who don’t have the answers…

So often I have been forced to think of how I can explain myself, so that I won’t feel like a ghost floating around in your very physical reality. How can I help you see me, so that I may have reason not to let life slip through my fingers. So often have I been in a state where a phrase as simple as ‘it’s going to be OK’ is enough to penetrate the void between me and the rest of you humans out there. When you feel your soul dying, you have reached a point where all the yapping about all the societal conventions no longer mean anything to you. Often I wake up, have a cup of tea, go outside and feel the warmth of the sunshine on my skin. I think of my friends, I think of the people I love uncontrollably, and all I feel is happy. Happy that I let myself live another day, that I gave myself another chance to appreciate something about life.

It is when I fail to discern between the respect our predecessors deserve for providing us with a platform to launch from, and the honor ideas are worthy of, that I feel depressed. Sure it is hard to watch me disregard what you believe in. But when was the last time you considered the fundamental principles your beliefs are based on, and their relevance to my individual makeup in the context of my unique life experience, in this part of society? When was the last time you considered the applicability of your ideas to the very specific set of problems my life has led me to? I understand that our parents have made decisions that set their trajectories for the rest of their foreseeable lives, but it is not implicit that the offspring they produce follow suit simply because that is what we do, and this is how we do it! Not for beings that consider themselves above the animal kingdom anyway. Perhaps if you had more informed ambitions you might also not have gotten married at 20 and had children for whom you would have to provide for the following 35 years. The criteria for successfully following such a path and maintaining course are vastly different from one where your ambition is to break away and reinvent. Who is going to give me medication for that? Who could possibly provide therapy for the ache of analogies not made in the quest of honing our understanding in places the best science in the world has hardly tread a solid foot? Am I supposed to constrain myself? Am I supposed to shut this down, send it through the mill and pretend it will come out whole on the other side of this western minion factory? There are moments in life where you have to pull up a chair, and instead of sitting on it, you stand on it, to have a look at what exists beyond this maze you are trying to navigate. There are many rules that are only intended for the maintenance of a certain status quo, adhering to them will not help you if status quo is no longer a priority.

It is a strange thing to outgrow the certainty we are taught to have in the ways we learn to live during childhood. The certainty we live with, at least for many of us, is an artifice. It was a tool our parents installed in our brains to alleviate the burden of teaching us what they know, a mechanism to ease the struggle of answering questions they do not understand or know how to respond to. Before I sound too much like an American claiming to have been probed by aliens I best explain a little more. Imagine to yourself the common scenario where a child picks up a sharp knife or pair of scissors. An equally common parental response to such an action on the child’s part is to tell the child to put the knife down and never to play with it, upon which the child naturally asks why, to which so many people woefully respond “because I said so”, and that just makes me want to cry. Here is a child, with a brain like a sponge, hungry for information, wanting to learn, and he gets an impatient and snubbing response like “because I said so”! No understanding can be derived from such a phrase besides that your parents will be mean to you if you do not blindly obey their command, and naturally we choose the path of least resistance. Before we know it “because I said so” has formed such a fundamental part of how we think, that we have no clue it is actively filtering knowledge and understanding out of our lives, never to be touched again, if reality has its unkind way. What I mean to say with this paragraph is that we aught to have a moral conviction to derive certainty from understanding instead of convention. All the people in the world have different ways of dealing with the unknown and frightening realities of life, but nearly all of them come down to accepting that which you cannot control or change, shutting it out of your mind as a burden that is no longer yours, and focusing on that which you can change and can control. It is a functional matter of prioritising the information you give your brain to digest.

There is a dissonance between the average citizen’s socioeconomic obligation and the soft and sticky matters of the heart and soul. People are trying everywhere to paste solutions to their humanitarian problems on top of their partially dysfunctional lives.  Depression might be a strange angle to approach such a big-picture problem from, but I did this because to me it is very good example of the side effects of our thinking at large. Depression embodies the instance where a person is no longer able to sustain a convention, no longer able to compromise on his inclinations and quits trying. It manifests our ignorance of ourselves and our inability to pioneer individualized trajectories that nevertheless remain compatible with other individuals in our society, only by different criteria. It is my approach in this piece of writing also because it is the pain of visceral, intangible torture that compelled me to seek answers and find solutions, and not to stop until I expire.

People suffering from depression tend to become acutely aware of the pressures placed on us from others in our society, to live up to a code or a set of codes, a behavioural median that comes with a package of theoretical and material guarantees. It has been like this since the origins of community and society. These pressures are known as hard and soft coercion. Our considerations in the humanitarian departments aren’t being reevaluated in the proactive manner we do with technological and economic development. Our take on the business of life is to enable ourselves to deal with a socioeconomic livelihood and then training ourselves to embody the compromise it takes to attain proficiency in it. Which is almost the reverse of enabling ourselves to deal with the reality of our humanity and training ourselves to accommodate our basic intelligible needs. The pursuit of attaining higher luxuries and a personal sense of status is an optional occupation, perhaps one for stupid people who prefer to have no control over their lives. We don’t have to have ‘personal’, ‘professional’ and ‘social’ lives, because in each we are pretending that the other is less relevant, with either one we are in denial of certain realities of our existence. This is why you so often find people failing in materialising the ideal societal trifecta. This is why the majority of the world’s population will never have what the privileged top percentage of the world’s westernised citizens have.

I say these things, not because I want to be a contrarian or because I enjoy the attention of everyone who disagrees with me. Opposition to the norm is not a pleasant place to be, but solutions aren’t found in perpetual agreement. Progress does not live among a single minded people, and the ones struggling to keep up understand this most. Given the shockingly poor state of our humanitarian maintenance systems – referring to education and mental health mainly – it would be veritably daft of me to give in and let justified fools tamper with my goods when I know very well what my qualms are, but seek a route to restoration that does not follow the dead beaten path.

At this point it is important to understand that there are various dangers in tampering with the thoughts and feelings of other people, even more so with yourself. We have the strange ability to trap ourselves in our own ideas. We build mazes that run so deep that nobody would ever find us, and sometimes so deep that we can no longer find ourselves. The most vital understanding a person can have is that stability and balance exists in diversity. We might be simple beings on an individual basis, but life is far from simple, and it is of cardinal importance that we equip ourselves to deal with the realities life will inevitably send in our direction. That feeling many of you get when life strikes you with a proverbial curve ball. That instance where you almost choke on your own words, dumbfounded, taken aback, incapacitated… Those moments where you want to vomit from shock or disgust… Some of us have such encounters on a regular basis, almost as if life has scheduled a routine mind fuck for the sorry individual who happens to get it. We cannot hold ourselves wholly accountable for those who buckle under life’s pressures, but we should at least try to find a place where our hearts and minds can intersect, where we can share some tools, generate new ideas, and upgrade our worn out hammer to a tool set more representative of the beautiful sophistication that is the human life.

Depression and other mental illnesses is a very sensitive subject to many people. I have spoken to so many people about their conditions and mine, and for many of them it is something bordering on scandalous. People easily feel embarrassed by their condition or the condition of a loved one. Some people assume by default you will think they are a special kind of crazy, and they dismiss themselves on your behalf. This can be as a result of the nature of the circumstances in which a given person’s mental problems find their origin. It is not something one can take lightly. It is definitely not something you can afford to be insensitive or inconsiderate about, especially if you mean to help. It is very serious and that means that it is more relevant than our eased consciences. It is not a matter in which we can afford self pity or pity from others! We need a helping hand. We need someone patient enough to hold out their hand and give us a sense of stability. We need to seek help and solutions in whichever form we can conceive of. From something as simple as standing on your head for a few minutes once a day, to following a drug course, most importantly paired with adequate therapy to set you on a route that can change your lifestyle for the better. Never try to simplify something that is inherently complex! But never dismiss the reality that at some points, or many points, the solution is as simple as getting off your ass and forcing yourself to do what you don’t feel like doing.

The key to starting a journey to recovery is getting real with your self and others, coming to terms with what brought you to where you are, and what constitutes what you currently are. You need to start addressing the skeletons haunting you. It is a matter of weighing up the possible methods for dissolving your pickle, and then to start chipping away at the elephant in the room, one bit at a time.
I cannot stress enough how important a consistent, balanced diet is. Even more important is a regular exercise routine. It is an imperative that you set yourself up with exercises of such a nature that you cannot conjure up an excuse not to do them. As soon as too many elements are involved the depressed mind quickly wangles itself out of the discomfort of strenuous activity. It takes only your body to move and exercise your body! Don’t tell people your bicycle needs repair, don’t cancel your day out hiking because the other person couldn’t make it! Do not rest behind the idea that you cannot afford membership fees. You must want the change for yourself, it is for you and the people who love you, and your life depends on it! A healthy body is the foundation and cornerstone of a healthy mind.

For some the expression of unreserved rage can do enough to ease the pain that was inflicted on them. To some the solution is to busy themselves enough to forget about that which is no longer relevant. Some people need to drastically alter their brain chemistry, so as to force their brain’s synapses to fire in a different order, for them to think differently about the things they are so tired of thinking about, and that entails the use of drugs. Some need to get out of the house, move away, and start a new life! This is an extreme measure, but sometimes it can be the simple functional element that makes the difference between life and death. In the end we need to allow good people to help shape us, and keep away the ones that are bad for us.

Get out there! Hang with your friends! Hang with new friends! They might not yet understand you, but many of them want to. Get some constructive external feedback on yourself. Climb a mountain! Up there the city that treads on your dreams looks like a mere patch of dirt, sparkling in the night. Change your physical perspective on life! So often that is all we need to overcome the daily crap that drags us down. Some think it isn’t quite relevant, but I will always say this: location location location! Different people, different places, different ideas! These are the things that can save us.

I shall leave you with some things I alluded to earlier:
Many people create a facade as a buffer zone, so that people can think they are happy and refrain from tampering with the sensitive, unresolved feelings inside. Some people present an outright lie to everyone they care for, inadvertently shaping their own rudeness and loneliness, as a coping mechanism, changing them into something they don’t want to be. Others become so used to their condition that they turn into the proverbial drama queen, seeking attention around every corner, they become addicted to the cycle of attention and self pity. There are people who forget they are trying to deal with depression and end up with a very well practiced routine, a narrative between those who are confronting them about their problems and themselves. It has turned into a somber looking battle of wits with no clear end and no point of sound reason to be established. Watch out for them, and call them on their bullshit! They need it more than you know.

Every time you go out and feel like a bad ass, having too much fun to bother with other people’s sob stories or their sugary messages of hope to the weak and downtrodden, you insult yourself, you become an agent for the silent turmoil that kills thousands of people every day. There are statistics that show there occurs one death by suicide approximately every 12.5 minutes in the USA alone.
This is not meant to shock or scare you, I just want you to find a little disgust in your comfortable complacency.
So many of us desire to express ourselves, so that we may be understood, but we do not know how, or lack the confidence to try. Please don’t go out looking suspiciously at every person that isn’t glowing with joy, it is annoying. Please do not mistake a left downward glance for someone trying to lie to you, or a right upward glance for someone who is earnest. Rather just get to know the people you care for, deal with your insecurities or put them aside before you slap them onto the face of a person who doesn’t need it. Please do not try and smear off your personal religion on people, this is also annoying. Many thousands of people ended their lives while knowing Jesus loves them, and that there is some super great spiritual world beyond what we experience here in material. All this demonic possession and disembodied soul talk is dangerous to any mind struggling to deal with an already murky reality.  Your pious certainty is more repulsive than helpful. If a person seeks it out, let him have it! If you find your cure in a practice that helps you focus on something other than your fears, have at it! But it must originate from within oneself. Do not guide someone down a path you cannot honestly admit to understand yourself, this is dangerous, and ethically you do not want that on your hands.

Please do not mistake my reference to drugs as an invitation to the whole illegal drug abuse argument, ain’t nobody got time for that. There are several prescription drugs that work for people, and at the same time people have found their cure elsewhere. Be responsible, and always remain within the bounds of sensibility! Patience plays the biggest role in the gentle process of ushering a mind out of a mental abyss. Do it so that you may inadvertently save a life. Do it so that you may live with the freedom in your heart of knowing you aren’t an obstacle to someone else. Do it so that we may all have a say in where we end up, and when we end. Do it for love. Do it for yourself.

With the utmost sincerity and thankfulness to those who have contributed to my life experience.

The real me 🙂