Something’s Right with You
Ten per cent of young people in the United States are “experiencing depression that is severely impairing their ability to function.”* Depression, anxiety, and addiction are all on the rise as every metric shows.
It’s heartbreaking that people experience depression, anxiety, and addiction and think there is something wrong with them.
If you are anxious or depressed or addicted, I want to offer you a different starting point: these feelings are showing that there is something right with you.
As a recovering anxious/depressed/addicted person, I see us as the people who can’t seem to easily deny reality. We see things. We feel things. Maybe we’re part of what science is labeling the 15-20% of “highly sensitive” people. I see it as people who can’t seem to deny reality and just get with the program.
So, number one: do not kill yourself over this. You are right and the world really needs you.
Number two: you’re going to have to figure out what to do now.
In my twenties I was regularly curled up in the fetal position in front of a space heater experiencing my terror. I was very lucky to get the right advice early on: invite your terror to tea. “Hello, terror. Have a seat and we will hang out together.” For years, I would sit with terror—in public places, at home on my living room floor. Slowly, the terror became less intense and visited less and less often. It’s as if we became bored with each other. But even as it took years, I was gaining a sense of agency over my own mind. This practice works with all challenging emotions. Don’t push them away. Feel them. But don’t take them as particularly solid and try not to act on them (like anger, for example). These emotions are what it is to be human (aka not easy). When we fear them, try to get rid of them, think they are bad or wrong, this leads us in exactly the wrong direction in terms of our mental health. I see them now as signs of my mental health, but I needed to learn how to understand them.
Our minds are calling out for wisdom, for a culture that nourishes us. As one of my teachers said, “if you don’t have your life, you don’t have anything.” So, we do need to get it together. The fact that we have these feelings shows that we are on the right track, not the wrong track. It becomes a very sustaining and meaningful pursuit to follow this path that our inner wisdom is pointing toward. We can get some control over our minds and inch the world toward health and fulfillment and away from vacuity, denial, and impoverishment. What else should we be doing with ourselves? As that same teacher said over and over, “it’s the only game in town.”
*https://mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america
