The Hurting Hamlet of Hopelessville

I don’t want to cope with depression, I want to reveal in happiness.

There have been times I got so depressed I gave up on life. I was once pressured into spending some time in a crisis stabilization unit, and that was not as fun as it sounds. I spent months unemployed because I was just too blue to work, or while I was willing to work I was apparently so blue that I couldn’t give a good job interview and no one would hire me. For a long time I thought that depression could be coped with, but not cured, managed but not mended, handled but not healed. I saw depression as a condition hardwired into my DNA. I came from a long line of depressed ancestor, so, I thought I was cut from the same cloth, with despondency and angst woven into the fabric of my soul. I thought depression was like a severed spine, broken in childhood, that I would just have to live with my brokenness forever. I have come to know that by having such beliefs I was condemned to the condition I imagined. This groping coping mindset is a path that leads one place and one place only: the hurting hamlet of Hopelessville.

Not only is life a bitch, it has puppies. ~Adrienne Gusoff

I choose to see things differently, now, and my choice has, for me, turned hopelessness into hope, misery into comfort, stress, into calm, fear into fearlessness.

OK, I’m not always hope-filled, stress free, or fearless, but I am sometimes, and more often than before, and getting better over time. By choosing a different set of beliefs I have stepped from despair into fresh air. I no longer believe I am hopeless, and helplessness. I have choices and the capacity to make better choices. I no longer cope, manage, get by, muddle through, or survive; now I thrive.

Coping with depression is too depressing a concept. Who wants to just cope with depression? Why walk through life with a stone in your shoe, when you have the power to remove the stone? Why cope when you can conquer? Why live with your daemons when you have the power to exorcise them?

An inevitable part of life, for all of us, includes loss, deprivation, injustice and death. You are going to die. I am going to die. Everyone we love is going to die? If we’re going to be happy, it is important that we believe it is possible to live in a world where unfairness is as common as sand and suffering is as relentless as the waves of the sea. We can actually live in a world where their is pain, frustration, disappointment and death, and be happy anyway. If you choose to believe happiness is possible then it is most definitely possible, and you are well on your way to finding it. If you choose to believe happiness is not possible, then happiness could have a nose bleed in a white carpeted house and you wouldn’t be able to track it down.

And here you thought you were a prisoner in a labyrinth of evil, where everything was pregnant with meaning. ... Hence your mental somersaults and contortions. You writhed on the hook of your own question mark to solve that equation of horror. ~Stanislaw Lem Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

In the Bible there’s a story about a character named Job. In this story God allows Satan to TEST the faithfulness of Job. Satan TESTS Job by taking his wealth, then Satan uses some natural disasters to kill all of Job’s children, Job’s wife turns against him, and finally Satan causes Job to be covered, head to toe, with boils. Job and his friends spend most of the story debating the causes of suffering. The big question was this: What did Job do wrong? The question they kept asking is identical to the question most of ask when our own lives are swirling down the toilet. “What did I do to bring this on me? I must have done something really bad to hork God off this much.”

Actually, most of us want our suffering to be punishment for our misdeeds because that puts relief from suffering within our control. All we would have to do to avoid suffering is to not do that bad thing that caused the suffering in the first place.

Don't take life so seriously; it's not permanent. – Unknown

This is twisted thinking. Happiness is not living in a world devoid of suffering and problems; it is a choice that is made in spite of the problems and suffering we experience. This is a big point: WE CAN BE HAPPY EVEN WHEN THINGS ARE GOING BADLY FOR US. Actually, we can’t know happiness without being exposed to both good and bad experiences.

It is like sight. Without shadows and color you could see nothing. If we are exposed to total light, devoid of all shadows we will see only light. The beautiful curve of your baby’s cheek would be lost in a world absent of shadows and hues. While darkness may have many negatives, it also, when mixed with light, brings us the ability to see beauty. In a similar way, it is through a continuous succession of good and bad circumstances, through a constant progression of pains and ecstasies that we learn to strengthen our hold on joy. We choose to be happy when we choose to NOT be unhappy.

Actually, it is possible to choose not to be UNhappy even when experiencing great personal loss. When you take the long view, the Macro view even significant personal loss can be seen as “NOT that bad” in the grand scheme of things.

We shouldn't deny the pain of what happens in our lives. We should just refuse to focus only on the valleys. ~Charles Swindoll

I remember taking my son Ryan to the doctor to get a shot. He was sick, and the shot was going to help his body defeat the infection in his body. But Ryan was just a little kid, and he was scared of shots. He begged me not to make him get a shot. He cried. He was miserable. He did not know, what I knew, and that is that while to him this shot was a big deal, I knew the benefits were far greater than the pain he would experience from the shot. I knew that this horrible thing he feared was really not that big a deal. There is usually a way to see all of our sufferings as “not that big a deal.” A loss becomes a tragedy because we believe it is a tragedy. Look at the same event from a different point of view and it may not be tragic at all.

Now, I am not saying that I did not hurt for and with my son Ryan. I was sad with him. Here is a BIG point: To be sad is not the same thing as being depressed. If your spouse divorces you, or someone you love dies, it is OK to choose to be sad. Depression is not sadness that is rooted in a sad event, depression is a relentless exaggerated despair that is more sever than the loss would warrant.

There was a story in the news recently about someone sending fake love emails to a 13 year old. The girl thought she was exchanging emails with a boy, but it turned out to be a another girl and her mother. In these exchanges the started out flirty and nice and then abruptly were insulting and cruel. The 13 year old, thinking she was rejected by her new Internet boyfriend responded by committing suicide. That reaction is an example of depression brought to its very worst conclusion. The trigger for that child’s suicide seems unwarranted to most of us. It is an exaggerated hypersensitive overreaction. This is depression.

On the other hand, if your child dies and you think that, while you will survive, you can’t, at that moment, see how you will endure this loss, that is an appropriate response and easy to understand given the severity of this loss. This is sadness.

In the Bible there is a passage that says “all things work together for good. . .” The passage does not say all things are good. The passage say that all things, even very painful things, work together and that good can, will, and does result from these problems and pains.

Life will, from time to time, inflict wounds on us, and our suffering cracks our protective shell and we discover that we can endure what we would never have believed we could endure. Not only can we endure, but millions of us do endure horrible pains and losses and out of these experiences we are often transformed.

If God exists I do not believe God is inflicting losses upon us as a way to teach us valuable life lessons. But I do believe that we can learn stuff from suffering. There is a caution here! While suffering is instructive, it is not the only, nor is it the better way, to learn stuff.

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You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. -- Sam Levenson

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Suffering is not necessary to promote learning. Suffering is not even the preferable way to learn stuff. I just want you to consider that it is possible to find meaning in our suffering situations, but even then it would ONLY be from suffering that could not have been avoided. If you purposely and unnecessarily place yourself into suffering situations that’s not learning, that’s masochism.