Advice to My Younger Self | Depression, regret and the future

I’ve come to the conclusion that regret is largely a waste of time.  Despite that fact I was thinking about what advice I’d give to my younger self if I could, because although I can’t change the past, I realized that this advice is likely advice I’d give myself now in the sense that it’s still relevant. 

Here’s the advice, and I share it as with all my writing that it may help you.

Feel your feelings. 

Feel your feelings, learn to feel them to their fullest extent. Feel the most extreme version of them.  Knowing all the while that you are moving through these feelings by feeling them.

If all goes well, we are taught as kids to behave certain ways, and to express our feelings in appropriate ways - don’t have a tantrum in the grocery store, don’t hit people and so on. This way we become functioning members of society.

That being said, sometimes things go wrong and we are taught that certain feelings are better and others are worse.  This is a “good” feeling, this is a “bad” feeling.  Sure, I’d love to spend most of my time feeling joyous, happy, excited, and less time feeling angry, pissed off, and sad.

This is very generally a good way to go about life.  Things get tricky though when we have patterns of suppressing or not feeling our feelings. You my reader have your own special poison that you may be drinking and it’s probably a pattern.

If you’re angry, learn to feel that anger and move through it.  Otherwise it will consume you.  This can take many forms, but for you (and to myself of days gone), this has resulted in depression.   Many years of on and off depression.  

Depression is toxic, it eats your very soul, it sucks the life out of life, it makes you make bad choices, and the worst and best part, is it doesn’t have to be this way.

A tricky thing about depression is it is a forest for the trees situation.  When you are depressed, everything seems to filter through that depression first.   It’s like wearing goggles with very fogged up dark crap on them with the added fact that you don’t even know you’re wearing the goggles.

Put another way, you are living in a dark forest, but you just call it “home.”  You walk out everyday, the sky is dark, there are clouds all around, food is bland, everything is pretty shitty, and well, this is your life. You accept it.

The ways this can look are as many as the number of humans on the earth--I will still give some insight to how it has looked for me, because I think it will help you.  For me depression was nothing to do with a single dramatic and traumatic event, (life is often not like the movies.)

Depression meant, compromising a lot. Depression meant playing a role in many situations - put on a happy face, make jokes, diffusing tough conversations instead of handling them head on.  Depression meant a permeating, consistent fog, a haze, a filter, ways of thinking, a sense that nothing would improve, or feel good. It meant spending large swaths of time chasing happiness, and a quick laugh.  I say chasing because in a chase you are not embodying something you are pursuing it, and in this case I was on a search for something “out there” rather than being able to live in the moment right now right here.

You see how toxic this is? Constantly chasing something in the future, constantly living in another place, or living for a goal?  Doing things like living for the weekend?  These are so commonplace and accepted that it’s hard to even see them!

For me, well I’ve been lucky, I wasn’t always depressed.  I had a taste of the life outside the forest, I’ve lived in the forest and outside the forest so I knew that things could be better.   I know though, that very sadly, for some people this may not be true. For some of you, you don’t know what it’s like to not be depressed.  Luckily the antidote is the same either way. 

Get a therapist.  I really want to make this the end of the post, because the call to action is clear, and to me not debatable, but I know that some need more on this so I will continue.  

Find someone you trust in your gut, you need not like them (though it helps)  but you need to trust them.   It may take some shopping, it probably will take some trial and error.

It will be worth it. 

Actually I need to add: Find a good therapist.  Someone worth their salt, someone with experience who knows their shit and has done their work.

Someone who has done real work on themselves.   It’s hard, you won’t be able to ask them “Have you done the hard work on yourself?”  You will need to figure that out, feel that out for yourself. 

Give yourself time to figure it out. Real time. Weeks, months, years. Do not expect miracles in days, expect miracles of perspective and time. Expect to be able to look back over time and see progress.  Progress is very much it’s own reward.  That, I can tell you without doubt.

Having walked out of the dark forest I can tell you that time does not heal all things on it’s own.  Time, patience, a good therapist, learning to move through your feelings, these can heal things.

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