For Mom…..and all of us. Depression and Suffering

A ramble and exploration, containing some some hard “truths,” this is by NO means a fun essay. Nor is it me claiming that this is the ONLY interpretation, and hard, fast and certain facts.

My Mom died recently.

She was a prisoner of her life. Things happened to her that she could never have anticipated, or explained. Looked at from one perspective none of it was her fault, looked at from another, everything was. As far as we know, none of us ask to be born. But once we are here, we all have to find our way through, we all have to find ways to deal with the many challenges of being on earth.

Life does not come with an instruction manual. What instructions we do get, we get from other humans. Parents, religion, schools, bosses. We do, for the most part what we are told, just as our parents did, just as our priests did, just as our teachers did, just as our bosses did. Our lives are handed down to us, we are told who we are and what to do by other humans….humans who have no idea, other than what others have told them, what to do.

These people can teach us not to make the mistakes thy have made, they tell us not just what TO do, but what not to do. The things they tell us not to do are considered to be mistakes. The things they tell us TO do are thought to lead to successful lives. But of course, success has many and very, very varied definitions. But there are two main ones. Wealth and/or happiness.

Our greatest teachers are supposed to be our parents. In the traditional American life, based on patriarchal traditions of child rearing, we receive most of our life training and instruction, especially in the early years, from our mothers.

My mother was never, in the years that I knew her, happy. Or wealthy. Neither from what I understand, was her mother. Both of them in fact, were lifelong depressives who were in fact miserable and who in fact, spent their lives making other people miserable….before sinking even further into dementia. In remembering Mom, one person who knew her nearly all of her life called her “the Typhoid Mary of Self-Pity.”

If we look around us, at all the other humans, and at the pain and suffering and, frankly, idiocy of other humans….well, really….who the fuck are they to tell us anything. Who are they to define success? Who are they to teach us?

Buddha said, Life Is Suffering.

And boy was he right.

We come unwillingly into this world, blinking and screaming and unaware. We are blank slates. With no memory of a God who loves us, or of lessons learned in past lifetimes, or if we have, no memory of agreeing to come here to work of Karma or consciously embracing Jesus Christ so as to be saved. We are blank slates, blank slates to be written upon by the pain and suffering of a painful and suffering world. We are in fact, MOSTLY taught not how to be ‘successful,’ but how to suffer and be in pain.

Look around at this mess of a world, at the mess that all the humans of the past have made of this gift of a planet. THESE are the people we are supposed to learn from and emulate?

There are pockets of happiness in the world, like Bhutan and some of the Scandinavian countries that rank highest in surveys of such things. There are happy people, relatively. The happiest people I have met in my life, interestingly, were the (economically) poor Mayans in Mexico. When we bought the family we met there their first ever toilet, they were ecstatic. When I asked them how and why they were so happy, they said that it was a choice they made, rather than choosing to suffer. When one of them became unhappy, the rest made it the priority of their life to cheer them up…..lest the disease of unhappiness and suffering spread.

Just as the Bhutanese choose to be happy, just as Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche chooses to be happy.

None of these people are TAUGHT to be unhappy, so it is a much easier choice for them, to choose to be happy.

Which brings us to America. In America, you are not supposed to be happy, unless you are what in the majority of the world would be considered filthy rich.

In America we are taught to strive for wealth and power, we are taught that that is the measure of happiness. We are taught that unless you have all the underpinnings and symbols of the American dream you are not allowed to be happy. We are taught that happiness comes from without, not from within. But at the same time we are taught that unless we appear to be happy, something is wrong with us. We are in fact, taught to be victims.

While most of us are denied what is supposed to make us happy, wealth, if we appear unhappy….or depressed….there is something wrong with us. But at the same time we are taught that we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and that if we don’t, we are failures. We are taught that we are privileged, that we are exceptional. Since we are privileged and exceptional, if we are not happy and successful….there is something wrong with us. If there is something wrong with us, even though we are privileged and exceptional, well it must be somebody else’s fault, that something is, in the eyes of society, wrong with us.

Well….there is something wrong with us. We have been taught the wrong things, to begin with. And we have been taught that natural parts of life like depression, are shameful. Are mental illness. We are taught that unless we live up to an artificial, imposed standard of a faux happiness that does NOT make the people who achieve it truly happy, we should feel shame.

Shame that makes us even more unhappy. Don’t be ashamed of your depression. Instead, research treatments to help you feel better. This article comparing hemp extract vs cbd oil would be the perfect place to start.

But by this impossible standard, we are also taught that if we make alternate choices of happiness we should also be ashamed. Ashamed for not being “normal.” In fact many of us who are raised with the inherent guilt of religion, we are taught that unless we live a particular “normal” way and think particular “normal” thoughts…..we are sinners and are going to hell.

We come into the world as blank slates. And we are, in point of fact, taught to be unhappy.

Because we are taught to try to be something we are not. We humans are part of the earth. We are biological units that the earth has produced. We are subject to all of the cycles and rhythms of the earth. The ONLY difference between us and all of the other biological units is that we have….choice.

Depression is a natural part of being human. It is part of the natural cycle, it happens to all of us. Though some of us are more biologically susceptible to it. Taking the daily 100 cbd oil is one way of reducing the struggle associated with depression.

What matters, what makes the difference, is how we choose to deal with it. My Mom chose, every time, to wrap depression around her like a flag. She might have been a happier person had she just sought the services of somewhere like Psych Company.

Depression comes to us, as does everything, to teach us. It is a cycle. A cycle we have no control over except the control of how we choose to deal with it when it comes. It has a function, that function is to destroy us, destroy our ego, so that we can examine ourselves.

We can embrace it and learn the lessons it brings us and having learned, move on. Accept that destruction, learn its lesson, rebuild our ego embracing the lessons that it has brought. That is painful. But it is part of life. This girl scout cookies review will show you that overcoming poor mental health is possible with a little help from cannabis.

Or we can choose to indulge it, to NOT rebuild our ego, but to let the depression destroy it. We can let the depression tell us that we are worthless and hateful and shameful and unworthy. That is what Mom did….and it destroyed her entire life, and in large measure, the lives of those around her.

The WAY we choose to learn the hard lessons that depression brings us are different for each individual. There is no ‘solution.’ Because there is no problem.

There is only a choice. A choice to go down….and through the depression, or a choice to go down….and NOT go through, to stay sunk. A choice to be happy, which means doing the hard work, the hardest work, of finding what makes US, each individual, happy. And then working hard to achieve that. NOT outside of us, but inside.

Not measuring our happiness by some artificial illusionist standard, but by establishing our own standard. Separate from the expectations of an unhappy society.

I will claim only one fact in this ramble….and that is that WE, each individual, has the power to make the choice to be happy. And that that choice is ALWAYS hard, in fact is specifically the hardest thing we can do on this planet.

But also, the only worthwhile one.