Dear E:

You wrote: “I’ve chosen misery rather than fight through anxiety”. It is not you who chose misery rather than fight through anxiety. Nature chose it for you. You had nothing to do with it.

Fear is the most distressing emotion there is. Nature sees to it that you don’t spend much time experiencing it. It is not you who chose that. There are so many depressed people, many millions of people taking antidepressants, not because they chose depression, but because the brain and body cannot stay in fear. It escapes into depression/ misery automatically.

If you see yourself as an entity separate from nature, as the alpha and omega, a god of sorts, then you think that you choose everything. But if you see yourself as you truly are, a human, an animal with an evolved thinking capacity, but an animal nonetheless, then you understand what you can successfully work on and what is futile.

anita