December 30, 2012

I no longer use antidepressants.

I very much doubt I ever will again.

Wrestling with my dark feelings made them worse. I have come to the conclusion that, for me, I do not suffer from depression but benefit from seriousness. I do not have a sick mind, but a mind that wishes to take things seriously.

I have benefitted enormously from allowing myself to accept emotional pain, sometimes long term, and let it sink into me and alter my personality, rather than wrangle with it in the hope that I can maintain a youthful outlook. I no longer want a youthful outlook. I want MY outlook, and I no longer believe that sadness is an illness, not even if it lasts for years.

In 2012 I learned to accept that the world around me can be dark and terrible but that does not mean that it is off-kilter, upset or out of balance at all and in fact is functioning perfectly normally.

The result of all this is that for the first time in years, particularly over the past few months, I have been able to accept an increasingly giving world, have stopped taking the love of my friends for granted and have been rewarded with acts of forgiveness and kindness (that in fact were always there but I had been ignoring them through a strong desire to influence them and bring them about myself), acts I had long since stopped paying any attention to because I had fallen into the habit of believing that feelings were inherently suspect.

I have thrown away the desire for happiness, and finally it has reappeared.

So, in a slightly counter-intuitive sense, the Mayans were right.