I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. And when I say thinking, I mean rehashing every negative thing that has ever happened to me and trying to find a pattern. I am literally dying. At least it feels that way. My mind works like this: The positive stuff is always, at best, hazy. I can never get a grasp on it. Therefore, it doesn’t have much impact on me. The negative, oh the negative, is so vivid and so present…it feels like it’s happening to me all over again. and again. and again and again. I keep asking why? What if I did this instead of that? Could I have prevented it? Why didn’t I see the signs? This is the mental loop. I’m having actual physical reactions. Aside from the sadness and general feeling of loneliness there is the disruption of sleep, fatigue, digestion problems, stomach pains, poor memory, an inability to concentrate, a loss of appetite, body aches and headaches.
The funny thing is that I feel like this more often than not. Actually I’ve felt like this most of my life. So, I Google my symptoms and apparently I suffer from Dysthymia or Chronic Depression. This is not to be confused with major depression. After reading the descriptions there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the two, but I do not suffer from a reduced sex drive (thank God), I haven’t had any angry outbursts (yet), I haven’t had any crying spells (yet, lol). I have had thoughts of dying, but not in the suicidy, “I’m going to kill myself to get away from the pain and despair” kind of way. It’s more along the lines of, “if I died today who would care?” kind of way. My initial/knee jerk/screwed up mental state answer is “not very many”. So I think I’m good. I think…
The question I have for myself is, why does “not very many” NOT seem like enough?”. Why am I so concerned with external validation? The people that love and care for me are the one’s who should matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 people or 50 people. Those are the ones I will focus on now…and myself of course. If becoming the best person I can be leads to more people giving a damn about me, so be it, but that is no the focus.
I’ve recently read an article that postulates (big word bonus) The cause of the depression is alienation. It is generated by social guilt. The guilt leads to jealousy, which then turns into the depression.
“When the person is an idealist, then the essential theme of mania is character transformation, as a means to compensate for the self-hate within the guilt. Since the person does not like hating himself, so he has to transform those hateful aspects of himself before he can begin to establish a better self-image. But usually the person does not have the ability to change, or lacks knowledge about how to change. Therefore mania produces only an illusion of transformation. This is why the person is susceptible to rejection ; it bursts his bubble of illusion, it clearly demonstrates that he has not really managed to rise above his inadequacies and be a better ethical or noble person.”
This is good stuff. I mean really good stuff. It explains in part why I feel depressed and even though I need/want to socialize and go out and meet people I can’t. It’s about my fear of rejection. And rejection is negative (in my mind), which means I relive it over and over again and feel the sting like it just happened. This leads to jealousy of people who actually can go out and do those things, which makes me feel worthless, which leads to the depression. Isolation and alienation leads to depression. So the solution is that the things that can kill me are the things that can save me (Metaphorically speaking, of course). Essentially, I have to put myself out there and meet people. I’m usually not one for all the psycho babble. I usually just mark all my short comings down to the fact that I have, by my own estimation, been a pussy for most of my life. This might be a better explanation and a possible breakthrough. I’ll have to delve deeper into this later.
Alright, back to the mental loop of doom. In order to break from a mental loop you have to employ some mental techniques.
NLP Techniques are great as well as doing things to take your mind off of whatever you are over thinking. Do something physically and/or mentally taxing. Workout, Read, play Chess or better yet, GO. Try to sleep on it. Meditate. Try talking to someone you trust about the issue. If it’s extreme talk to a doctor. Another great way to break a mental loop is explained in detail here. Positive thinking and having a positive outlook on life can be a wondrous thing. If all else fails get it into your head, that whatever it that is rattling around and around in you brain hasn’t killed you yet, so it probably won’t. Confront it. Do everything you can to resolve it. I know it’s hard, trust me, but it’s the doing of hard things that make life worth living.
The Logically Unavoidable Death of Me 