Let's Get You Stronger

This was what one of my therapists said to me on my first visit. She wasn’t wrong, but I was not ready to hear what she had to say, and it was another couple of years before I tried another therapist. But I have since learned that people who used to be functional who suddenly begin to think that everything that is wrong is wrong with other people or with the world are probably in the same kind of depression that I was in. And the hardest thing about it is that you don’t want to get well.

Telling me that *I* had to get stronger to face the new, crappy stuff that the world had decided to heap on me seemed supremely unfair. After all, it wasn’t my fault that this had happened to me. I had never considered myself a weak person before this. The idea that I needed to become stronger, that I had to funnel energy into the project of improving myself was just infuriating. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to continue to be the way that I was and have the rest of the world change around me. Yeah, well, you can probably guess how that turned out.

Becoming stronger is not a particularly fun project. And strangely enough, I’m not sure that the way that I figured this out is at all intuitive. Becoming stronger from the inside may look like getting weaker or more passive from the outside, but it isn’t. One of the things that I have learned to do is (as the saying goes) stop trying to change things that can’t be changed. There are a lot of crappy things in the world. There are crappy things that happen to me and mine. Most of them I can’t change. There’s no point in trying to prepare for them or to stop them from happening.

On the other hand, letting go of the things that you can’t control gives you more power to control the things that you do control. It opens up your emotional energy and resources so that you can do what only you can do. It also allows you to pay more attention to the present. When I was depressed, so much of my emotional self was spent in worrying about what was going to happen next, as if preparing for that would somehow protect me from the pain when it actually struck. That’s not the way that real life works, I don’t think.

What happened when I stopped trying to control the future and changing the past was that I found myself more invested in the present. And that’s the only place where happiness resides. I have to believe that I am doing the right things now in order to feel happy. And in order to do the right things now, to figure out what those right things are, I have to let go of a lot of other things. To really get anything done, I suspect you have to develop a kind of hyper focus in the now. And that’s the way in which I’ve gotten stronger.

I don’t believe that this was meant to be, that this was the only way I could have learned the lessons I was meant to learn. I don’t believe that what I lost was worth what I gained (as if life is some kind of balancing contest). But I do believe that where I am now is a better place than where I was before, not because I am safe here somehow, but because I think I really do enjoy the life that happens now more acutely. I notice more. I feel more. I let myself live more.

Is that stronger? It’s something, and I’m going to say it’s good.