Madi > Recent Status Updates

“Dear Professor Cohen always said, ‘Try to accept people for who they are, not who you want them to be.’

People are awkward. Don't hold it against them. You never know what's in their hearts.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.

Landwehr pleaded with James not to say that he had caught BTK, or to at least tell a better version of what happened. After a few such talks, the boy finally got it right. He would walk up to people staring at his father. He would introduce himself.
"My name is James Landwehr" he would tell them. "And my father is Lieutenant Ken Landwehr. And he caught BTK"
And then he would add one more line:
"He had a lot of help."

Certain things will probably trigger you. Anniversaries, life circumstances. But your relationship with your trauma will change. It won’t be the beast that controls your every move, anymore. Your trauma will be more like that pain in the ass neighbor with too much time on their hands. You know the one.

People struggling with depression (or any mental illness) are ANYTHING but crazy. They are survivors, fighting back against brain chemistry that is entirely at odds with all the things that make life worth living. Those of you who are living this? Who are saying “Fuck you, Depression, you don’t get to win today”? You are the bravest people I know. Keep fighting.

You are not defined by your depression. You are not weak, and you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t deserve this. You are not being punished. You hit the perfect storm of genetics + trigger and you are now dodging and weaving while running your ass off toward getting better. People struggling with depression (or any mental illness) are ANYTHING but crazy.

Robert Sapolsky defines depression as “a genetic-neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.” I define it as a clinical case of the fuck-its.

If you have had a trauma, if you have been hurt so badly in a way that you don’t trust the world, you are far, far, far more likely to be susceptible to addictive behavior. At some point

Dr Faith G Harper. Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers (Kindle Locations 1812-1814). Microcosm Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The best model I have seen to explain anger uses the acronym AHEN. AHEN is as simple a conceptualization as you can get. ANGER is triggered by
Hurt
Expectations not met
Needs not met

To borrow a famous Buddhist expression, anger is like holding onto a hot coal and expecting the person we are angry at to get burned.

Dr Faith G Harper. Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers (Kindle Locations 1699-1700). Microcosm Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Feeling some serious fucking anger is a normal part of being a human being. Losing your shit is not. As I tell my clients…you are allowed to BE crazy, but you aren’t allowed to ACT crazy. Being as irritated as fuck because someone jacked the parking spot you were waiting for? Totally legit. Going postal over it? Not so helpful.

So here is our working definition: Anxiety is a state of full body disequilibrium at a level of intensity that demands immediate attention and corrective action on your part. It can be in the face of a real or perceived threat, either present or anticipated.

So here is our working definition: Anxiety is a state of full body disequilibrium at a level of intensity that demands immediate attention and corrective action on your part. It can be in the face of a real or perceived threat, either present or anticipated.

As a nerd is wont to do, I looked up the root of the word “anxious.” It’s from the Latin anxius, which is from the Ancient Greek anko, which means “to choke.” Fucking word, they got that right.

Reminding yourself that you were doing the best you could with the information and skills you had at the time is hugely important. And remembering that the people who have hurt us are also broken and fucked up is almost as important.

So many people think that forgiveness means forgiving those who have hurt them. And there is truth to that. But more so, I have found people really are working to forgive THEMSELVES. The person they are angriest at and ashamed of is THEMSELVES. And they have been carrying the weight of that around for years.

But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.

There’ll be another one along tomorrow.

So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. [...]. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I've been here before. I know a better way down.

No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human.
Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you're stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: "What's wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?"

We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. [...]

But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

There is no hate such as that born out of love betrayed, and my brain screamed out for revenge.

Why was it I never realized when I was able to run wild and free that I was experiencing happiness? Why did I think back then, that happiness was always just ahead in the future, when I would be an adult, able to make my own decisions, go my own way, be my own person? Why had it seemed that being a child was never enough? Why had I thought that happiness reserved itself for those grown to full size?

We create new ways to feel safe that don’t cause us more harm in the long run. We process our experiences with people who are safe and trustworthy and care about us. We retrain our brains to THINK rather than REACT. Those wounds? We treat them.

We find a way to live and cope with the situation that happened, the loss of what the world had been, and an acceptance of what it is now.

Whether you find yourself defensive and combative as fuck, freaking out hardcore, or completely shut off and disassociated, it’s your survival mode that is responding. The problem is when this happens during situations that aren’t actually life threatening emergencies.

" The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy. "

There’s no benchmark for how life’s “supposed” to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.