Guilt and Excess of Resources - Part 1

There are many depressed people who are so because someone they knew died, they have a life-altering sickness or someone they know (rather close) is sick, people who don't have enough money to survive, people who are being constantly abused by others (rather close). These people are depressed because they have a motive to be so, and most of the time they lack of resources to get out of that situation. 

However there are others, the ones that I belong to, who are depressed in no such conditions. Others who have a fairly happy family, who are not filthy rich but still have enough money, who have people who love them and want all the best for them. Even worse, people who are smart and capable with many skills.  And we are still fucking depressed!!  

And then we feel guilty. We feel guilty because there are others who are worse than us and are carrying on. We also feel guilty because we have everything we can possibly have or wanted, and we know that we have the resources to achieve whatever we want, and we are still depressed. Then the guilt starts leading into self-hatred, because no matter what we do we can't seem to get out of this state.. and so goes on.

The first type of people might be depressed for what experts call "exogenous depression", caused mainly by stressing events. The second type is what it is called "endogenous" depression, which means it comes from within (taken from netdoctors.co.uk, it seems scholarly articles refuse to talk about depression in a more general way). Basically this means that one gets depressed for apparently no reason  AND that one can get depressed over and over and over again. 

Great! 

Ok, so perhaps making classifications is not the best thing to do, but my point here is that it is hard to be this depressed when we have "everything". Of course we don't have everything; we want to have happiness and we don't have it! But in our minds we don't have a reason to be depressed, and still are, so, again, we feel guilty. We might even want to be as miserable as these other people, because then, at least our depression would be justified. If only someone we knew died... we could be understood


As a sidenote, I think this guilt steams as well from the fact  that we have (or used to have) many ambitions. At least in my persona, I used to be a very ambitious person, always wanting more from life. How can one want more from life when one has everything? Guilt again.  See, depression just  guiltifies everything. The point is that these ambition of living is making us also strive for things RIGHT NOW, that might take A LITTLE WHILE to achieve. THEN we don't get them because they are so impossible , and newsflash: take time, and we fall again into the guilt circle, and get more depressed. 


So what do we do then?

HAVE A SENSE OF CONTROL. You see, when you are depressed, you think that you have either "lost"  or that you just plain "don't have" what it takes to do the things you want or wanted to do. And it doesn't matter if everyone around you tells you the opposite- in fact many times it makes it worse. So probably the best thing to do is regain that sense of personal control. One has a sense of control when one does things one planned to do. Having control also means accepting that things didn't exactly go the way you wanted. It means accepting the fact that you feel like shit, even if it is "just because".

So start practising. Think of something you want to do but haven't done, because, for example, you were feeling guilty. Pick up a friend you haven't talked to because you feel you have overwhelmed them too much.Tell yourself: I WILL TEXT THIS FRIEND. No, don't complicate yourself, just write the following text: "Hey, how are you?". AND if you don't manage, don't berate yourself. And allow  yourself to feel some control over your life. YOU decided to call/text him if you did , and YOU decided to not call him and YOU decided to follow the advice of some blogger you don't know and ever heard of.

So, if you actually mange to talk to your friend, you might feel better (or you might not, but you already know that). If you don't manage to talk to your friend, at least you tried, and if you tried, hey at least you are able enough to hear other's advice. And if you didn't try, that's perfectly OK, you chose not to. See, to an extent having a sense of control also leads into being a bit more "flowy" into life (I know we hate the optimists and the positive, because we can't be like them but we can talk about that later), and a bit of guilt free.


Keep tuned to the next post.