50 things I enjoyed after depression
Convincing myself that there is light at the end of the tunnel
I forgot how deliberating fear and shame is. I forgot how it feels to not remember what happiness felt like once. I forgot that there were times in life that my chest was pain free and my brain wasn’t so heavy.
I don’t know if I am back to the loving arms of depression but it sure feels like I am one step away from it. I am standing in front of a cliff and surprisingly harder part is “NOT” to jump. The fall is almost effortless, what is hard is to go back to my “self”. I don’t know if I can walk all that way back.
My brain is feeding me with the story of how meaningless everything is, how lonely I am and how I fragile I am. It tells me that everybody is stronger than me. I am a fool to feel this much, question this much. I will never be happy or peaceful.
I intellectually know that voice is fucking lying. I know it inside but I just don’t feel it. So, I decided to make a list of everything I experienced and enjoyed after my last depression which was a little bit over a year ago. I am hoping this list will make me feel hope that there will be a time where I am not this scared & ashamed & lonely.
50 things I enjoyed after my depression:
1) How sun feels in my skin
2) The sweat I get from a workout
3) Every imperfect thing I tried (photography, yoga, painting, running, writing…)
4) The “a-ha” moments I had from all the things I read & listen to.
5) The clarity I experience after meditation
6) Laughing with my family on dinner table
7) Hanging out with my sister in our shared room in my parent’s house
8) All the chocolate I ate
9) Drawing my first boundaries
10) Creating FLUX
11) Being honest about who I was and what I was going through
12) Almost all the sunsets
13) New found love in walking
14) First time in a forest
15) Moving in & discovering a new city
16) Living alone in my studio
17) Feeling more fit than I ever did in my life
18) Smell of new books
19) Reading books
20) First kiss with someone
21) Intimacy I thought I would never experience in my life
22) Falling in love
23) Finding Glennon Doyle
24) Writing/Journaling
25) Travelling with friends
26) A surprising belief in higher power
27) Establishing a practice to connect to higher power
28) Waking up to someone you love
29) Passion
30) A hug that makes everything a bit lighter
31) Compassion to myself
32) Yes Theory
33) I fucking jumped out of a plane for gods sake!
34) A good salad
35) Having enough money to pay for interesting things (like the retreat I booked for Aug)
36) Altmba
37) Storytelling
38) Beautiful sentences & ideas
39) Colors of autumn in Luxembourg
40) The after-smell of rain
41) Dancing in your underwear
42) Going to movie theater
43) Slow Sundays at home
44) Every tone of green and almost every single tree I saw
45) Art as a way of creating without a means to an end
46) Peace you experience in deep meditation where thoughts literally for once disappear
47) Every moment basically with my family
48) Phone calls or get-together with friends
49) Encounters with random strangers
50) First wedding of a friend
I think I would walk all the way back just to experience the feeling I had when I first entered a forest or the first time I thought I could really love someone despite all my fears. Every moment with my family & friends is another reason to walk all the way back to myself. I am walking back to my “self”.
I am more than what that voice inside of me makes me believe.
My life is more than what that voice inside of me makes me believe.
Welcome to the newest section of Flux newsletter: “What am I _?” I will share questions, things I am reading, listening etc. Hope you enjoy!
What am I ___?
Reading 📚
PS: I am not suicidal, but I wanted to read someone who was also depressed and understood what I was going through.
If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.
The desire to step out of myself for a while. A week, a day, an hour. Hell, just for a second.
…to breathe the air that the people on the bank all around you are breathing as easily as anything.
‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.
If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.
THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value.
Nothing lasts for ever. This pain won’t last. The pain tells you it will last. Pain lies. Ignore it. Pain is a debt paid off with time.
You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and laugh until it hurts. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.
Find more of the quotes I saved in my Goodreads page!
Listening 🎧
We Can Do Hard Things Episode “EASY THINGS: Why, for some of us, is lightening up the hardest thing to do?” by Glennon, Sister & Abby
I will always be so fucking grateful for finding Glennon and finally not feeling like a fucking alien in my midnight blue world.
Questioning 👀
I was, I still am really frustrated with myself due to my inability to handle rejection & loneliness. I told my therapist that I feel like 1.5 years of therapy felt completely useless going through this.
He told me how I was viewing therapy as a learning experience, how I approached my breakdown as a learning experience, instead of really going inside and feeling what I am feeling, asking myself “what is going on inside you?”.
He was so fucking right. I always talk about what happened and how that affected me. Than he asks me, how did you feel in that moment when that happened? He asked me this about my break-up moment too. Whenever he asks me this, I go completely blank. It is like there is big fog between me & my emotions and I can’t see them. I can say it wasn’t a party, it didn’t feel good or at most I was sad or afraid but there is no step further. I just can’t see it.
So, my biggest question these days is
“What if I approached healing as a feeling experience, rather than a learning experience?”.
“How would be like to observe your feelings in the moment?” Maybe even understand where they are coming from?
Do you think you are in-tune with your emotions? When you imagine a hard moment in your life, can you explain how you were feeling in that specific moment?
So, see you next week!