Depression

           Depression

            It is something that plagues many people myself included; I say something because of how it feeds off you.  How it seems to draw on your very core and uses what ever you have left to beat you down more.  A beast of emotions such as depression is something that can only be avoided; beating something like an emotion is like trying to beat being happy after an amazing day.  As with many positives and negatives the positive is always the easiest to destroy and the negative easiest to embrace.  But why is that, why do we as a people make it easier for the furthering of abuse at ourselves?

            I don’t know, I do not pretend to know why anyone does this it’s a mystery when even thinking of myself.  But when I do think of myself in this instance, I wonder what habits I have that make me believe pain is easier to go for than happiness.  Instinctually our bodies are meant to avoid physical pains, how have I made this habit completely against something that helps preserve who I am?  Questions after questions, I find an answer and I find more questions; isn’t that the way most journeys are, I finish one thing and three more arise to confront me.

            As a younger boy, many things depressed me and for the most part I could only say they depressed me because I was afraid of who I was.  I didn’t know if I was sane: I was terrified I would molest people as I grew older, what if I murdered someone some day, and what if I went all the way and killed many for my own twisted reasons?  How could I trust myself and be happy in this world when some of the things that made me happy also made me sick to my stomach?  Over the years, and after major cross roads in my life I chose to better myself and who I was.  I didn’t want to become the people I hated, and in those days I hate many so I would have chosen the path that let me be as good as I possible could be.  But if I have changed myself since then, and I have succeeded in learning new ways to vent my emotions, and urges that did not hurt anyone including myself; how then do I still feel that beast eating away at me at times?

            I understood some time in my changing that I can never be ‘rid’ of depression, unless I was just as willing to be rid of the opposite emotion like rapture, joy.  I read in a book and found on my own that one cannot be without the other.  It made so much sense I was amazed I’d never realized this amazing truth before.  “While you feel one, the other is there lying in waiting.”  So do I feel a lurking presence when I am happy for my depression is just waiting to come, no.  I found that I live it while I am happy and joyful, and when I am sorrowful, or depressed I can learn from it and take the lesson that may come with it.  Lessons are all around me and its just remarkable how many of them I never saw before.

            It amuses me at times, some say it took them reaching 30 years of age or older to realize and understand some of the things and processes I went through at 20 or younger.  For the longest time it made me feel like a balloon just got put into my ego and was still attached to the helium.  And now after hearing such things most of my life from family members and other adults, I take it all with my own personally introduced grain of salt.  It isn’t that I doubt their opinions, but it is that; their opinions cannot define me because it is theirs.  My opinion of myself is that I should know things even further ahead of where I am now, and that I still have much to learn in the next 5 months.  Let alone contemplating how much I have to learn in the following years of my life.  I can only assume and hope that with the way my heart works and the way my desires to never stop growing and changing drive me, that I do just that and continue to grow for the rest of my life.  However long that may be I know not, but who does honestly.  I saw a movie, saying the character once thought knowing when they would die might liberate them and release them from the fear of it and when he discovered he would die soon he was wrong.  He was afraid, and didn’t know what to do.

            What would I do, if I knew when I would die?

            What do I do, if I have known all my life?

            What should I say to let them know, its not that I wanted to go but that I accepted it?