When You Are The Problem

I hit a point in my depression when I had finished pointing out all of the things that were making me sad, all of the people besides me who had made my life miserable. And I decided that I was the problem, that if I wanted my life to be better, I was going to have to change. And that was the moment when I started to recover. I started going to a therapist. I started to try new things. I started to look at life differently.

I do not know that if someone had told me that I was the problem earlier, that it would have helped. I had to come to this myself. In fact, if other people had pointed a finger at me (and maybe some did), I would have simply felt that they were wrong, that they were the ones who were the problem. And I don’t think that I was doing something obviously, horribly wrong. I wasn’t abusing drugs. I was physically healthy, exercised daily, ate good food, and mostly managing my life. But I was still miserable and until I was ready to start changing, the change couldn’t happen. I had to have that tiny little bit of extra energy that is really hard to find in depression, to acknowledge the need to change, and to pick myself up and start making one small change.

A lot of the time, I hear people talk about how challenges in life made them better people. They got stronger, they learned something. I suppose that in some sense, I did learn something and I did get stronger. But mostly, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. The way I was doing life before was the way it worked for me before. The way I had to do life after was the way that after-life demanded me to do it. I wasn’t better or worse either way. I was simply adapting to the conditions at hand. But a depressed person does find it hard to adapt because that takes effort and energy, which you lack in that state.

I don’t look back at myself before and think about how much better I am now. I look back at myself before and think I was doing what I needed to do then. I think if you look back at dinosaurs and think—Wo, those creatures are going to have a serious problem when the weather cools down. Well, yeah. They’re going to have to adapt. But dinosaurs weren’t a bad model per se. They were magnificent creatures, the best of their time. And then times changed. And they were the problems. And they had to adapt.