All my closest friends are battling depression and anxiety, including myself. We have our reasons and they are very good, and all have something in common - we are all simple creatures trying to live complicated lives.
Where I come from, there was only strength or weakness. If you’re strong, good for you - and if you’re weak, you deserve pity (at best) or don’t deserve to exist (at worst).
My hardest practice is compassion and patience. As I try to help myself and those around me, I fight my own feelings of wanting to pity or respond with dismissal, and replace them with kindness - but my brain is so smart, it sees the big picture and the long-term lessons one might learn from traumas and hardships. Isn’t it kindness to make it harder for someone, or at least not make it easier? Are we all just being lil bitches, and if we are, does it even matter?
As I wake up for another morning where my brain and body collude to tell me about an imminent threat, as they were programmed to do, I see nothing but dead ends - not much to do, a lot to live with.