You can only remember a catalogue of illness and disappointment
🔠PERSPECTIVE, NOT PERFECTION: Seeing sadness in the moment without losing sight of the enduring, positive nature of life
The shitty thing about depression is, it lies to you.
It makes you forget all the wonderful things in life that you actually enjoy. You start globalizing your despair in completely irrational and extreme ways. Allowing your whole life picture to be colored by what may be a single negative detail.
Rejected from a new job? You're an in competent loser who will never get hired.
Dumped by an upset lover? Nobody will ever love you again. You will die alone.
Sprained your ankle walking down the stairs? Your body is failing and death is right around the corner.
Psychologists call it mental filtering. It's a cognitive distortion where you take all the negative details and magnify them while sorting out the positive aspects of a situation.
Now, that's the clinical definition of it. But when you're in the thick of despair, it feels more like forgetting.
It's the strangest thing. No matter how good life has been, thinking back, you can only remember a catalogue of illness and disappointment. It's like your subconscious starts working these nightmarish tricks on your memory. After a depressive episode, it seems like everything that occurred before that episode is from the distant past in another lifetime.
Have you ever been in that headspace before? Where your mind was giving heavy weight to anything negative?
Vomit. What a confusing, complicated mess.
My therapist summarized it perfectly during one of our sessions.:
It’s easy to forget how bad it was when you’re doing well, and it’s hard to remember how good it can be when you’re low.
And so, should you notice yourself doing some mental filtering, let me suggest this.
Aim for perspective, not perfection. Find ways to remind yourself of your own relatively good fortune. Avoid giving your ordinary negative experiences more weight than they deserve.
Honor your feelings of frustration and disappointment, of course, but challenge yourself to see whatever is happening in the moment without losing sight of the enduring, positive nature of your life.
In fact, for every shitty thing that happens, make a mental list of five amazing things to put that failure into context.
Don't let depression trick your brain into a bias against positive information.
To quote my favorite novelist, allow yourself to be hooked and reeled back by a line cast from the shores of memory.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How could you take care of your condition from a place of power, care and perspective?