Dear Emily:

I want to repeat your story, what you shared about your mental state and then comment.

* Your story: as a child, your father was addicted to crack and spent most of your childhood- not at home, but in jail. You dropped out of high school in the 9th grade, at about 15 years old,  got pregnant at about 17, and gave birth at 18 to a boy who suffered from severe cerebral palsy.

For ten years, from about 18-28, you stayed home caring for your severely ill son, living on government benefits based on your son’s illness. When you were about 25 (in 2015), your father was put back in jail (and has been there since), your mother passed away, and you gave birth to a second child.

At 28 years old, in 2018, your son passed away, and you lost the government financial assistance that sustained you for ten years. Currently, you are 30, a single mother of a six -year-old, working as a security guard. Your father is still in jail, and you have no family to support you at all, no friends and no social life.  Over the years, you gained a lot of weight because of stress, and to lower your stress and be able to sleep, you picked up the habits of smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol.

* Your mental state: “tired..  completely drained, mind running all over the place.. face expression is always confused or sad.. depression and anxiety… Daily high and lows…thoughts toward myself are.. mean its usually when I get impatient or something doesn’t go as planned”.

From time to time you feel a motivation to feel better and make your life better: you “spend a lot of time reading motivation books.. come to tiny Buddha site to help my mood… purchased some fitness equipment.. a yoga mat and a kettle bell”, as well as a GED book (GED stands for General Educational Development tests, which upon passing these tests, one can get an alternative to the U.S. high school diploma), and you want to cook or draw as a hobby.

But those times of motivations don’t persist and you get back to hopeless, tired, sad and depressed.

* My comments today: you wrote yesterday, “As a kid growing up I loved myself and would do anything an everything for myself “. As a kid, you had hope for the future, the future held promise, didn’t it? For a child, there is a promise in the air, a promise in the way the sun hits the green grass, or the frost on the ground- that life can be and will be wonderful soon enough. There is an energy in a child, a curiosity, a hope that is hard to extinguish. But for too many of us, that energy, that curiosity and hope get distinguished and we find ourselves feeling hopeless, tired and depressed.

But that energy, that hope and desire for a better life do not die until we die. When we are depressed, the feeling-alive, hopeful and curious- these feelings are still in us, masked and muted. Sometimes these feelings come to life just a bit, and we take some action for a better life (ex., exercise so to lose weight and get fit, study for a GED so to get a better job), but these feelings get muted too soon and we find ourselves depressed yet again,  abandoning our efforts to make our lives better.

It is very difficult to change this emotional dynamic of short part- awakenings and long-term depression, but it is possible. If you want to, we can think together about how to make this change happen.

anita