Reconnecting

It has been what seems like an eternity since I was able to sit down and write.

After my book was published in 2015 I was completey exhausted and the prospect of writing anything meaningful was beyond comprehension.

Since then my life has been puncuated by moments of brilliance followed by moments of self destruction. To be fair I have been more successful at the self destruct element than the brilliance.

Depression has been my biggest battle in those years. A subject I have written about before but only truly understood in the last twelve months.

Everybody, including those who suffer from depression have an idea in their head of what depression is, how it should be treated, and, an intorerable distane for those of us who seem to struggle repeatedly with it.

I have come to realise that my depression is a result of how I have experienced the world up to now. In a world of eight billion people there are eight billion different ways of experiencing life. No one feels the same about love, rejection, forgiveness, hope, money, success, future etc etc and because of this we have eight billion unique minds dealing with their own personal experience of life.

Of course there are some tribal ways in how we think that have been ingrained into our DNA, but, it is the uniqueness that sets us apart.

To try to understand depression, watch how two sets of opposing football fans react during and after a game. They are all watching the same ninety minutes of football yet they experience very different emotions dependant on several different factors. Not one fan expresses the exact same opinion for the full ninety minutes. There are often arguments on the terraces by fans supporting the same team, watching the same game, yet completey different perspective of the reality in front of them.

If that can happen in ninety minutes of football can you understand how many different ways someone suffering from depression can experience their life. One, that is on the same planet and in the same timeframe as eight billion people but yet uniquely different due to the experience of life up until that moment.

We often use the football terrace mentality when speaking to someone with depression, “Cant you understand how lucky you are?” “Why cant you just look at the positives?” “You are being fucking stupid!”

Rather than try and make people see life from our perspective maybe we could try and listen to their experience. Maybe we could accept that we are all experiencing life differently base on billions of life altering calculations that lead some people to massive success and others to suicide.

We do have one thing in common, we are all flawed. Every single one of the eight billion humans on the planet has experienced something that causes defect of charachter, if we embrace this, maybe then we can show more understanding to those who need it most.

Stay blessed