This revised post from the early days of Storied Mind seems especially relevant to the work I’m doing with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Sometimes I’ve interpreted certain life and career choices of the past as avoiding depression. At other times, I’ve seen them as accepting the need to deal with it rather than play a […]
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Self-Acceptance and Depression
Depression grinds down many qualities of well-being, among them self-acceptance. Until recently, I hadn’t spent much time being comfortable with who I was. Self-rejection had been much more familiar. There have been many times when I felt fine with my life, but later I’d realize I had been overlooking everything too painful to face. When […]
Conversations with Myself: Accepting the Past
Accepting the past is hard work. Avoidance of any part of the past that makes me uncomfortable used to be my go-to strategy, even though it never worked for long. I guess it’s the opposite of the tendency to obsess about everything I ever did wrong. (For example, reliving that humiliating interview 43 years ago, […]
A Stage for Anxiety
(Anxiety has dominated more of my waking hours than I care to admit, yet I’ve written relatively few posts about it. While working on the next ebook, Depression Present Tense, I came across this early post that captures a typical incident. The new book is an attempt to capture the inner feelings of depression in […]
If You Can’t Escape Depression, You Can Try Making Do
It’s hard to escape depression when it dominates your mind. The illness has many faces, but its most visible one is your own. You see it everywhere because you can’t stop thinking about what’s wrong with you.
The illness is filtering out everything that would disturb your isolation – like brighter feelings, hope, the reaching out of a loved one, self-confidence, the energy to connect with people. It keeps your mind roiling with your flops, dumb mistakes, broken relationships, and acid self-contempt.
When you’re well, you can lose yourself in the daily flow of living, but when you’re depressed you never lose yourself.
Has Depression Become Part of Your Identity?
I can pinpoint a moment when I came to believe that depression was not just an illness that struck from time to time but part of my identity as a person. I was talking with a friend one day about how big a problem depression had become. He thought it must be brought on by […]
Declaring Independence from Depression
Here’s one part of a post from a couple of years ago, written a few months before I knew I’d really gotten past depression. Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher had suggested that I try assuming this: I have recovered. That really got me thinking and actually proved to be a turning point. I started imagining what […]
Writing, Creativity and Healing
Some Rights Reserved by tore_urnes at Flickr Thanks to isabella, and her recent posts on writing and healing (like this one), I’ve been thinking more about the way writing, creativity and healing fit together. From the beginning of this blog, I had no doubt that creative expression of all kinds, and writing for me, could […]
