Enjoy The Show!

I was talking to a friend tonight about a situation he is caught up in with his family, and it occurs to me that in this world where it seems 90% of the people i meet are pumped up on one clinical drug or another, and everyone seems to be living depressed lives, that i have yet to meet a person on anti depressents or anti anxiety pills who “have it all together”. They are just as depressed and anxious on their pills as they were off of them. Which always leads me to beg the question, what the hell are the pills doing other than unnaturaly screwing up their biochemistry?

I find a lot of people are very overwhelmed by the world we live in. I of course don’t blame them really, its a tough place, maybe in a different way than it was thousands of years ago, but still tough for someones emotions, and i find a lot of people get caught up and swept away by it all, and end up losing themselves for years of their lives.

People think that life is a very difficult and complex thing, and they don’t seem to realize that in all honesty, when you step back and strip it down, its really very very simple. We just make it complicated cause, well, humans are like that, we like to complicate things.

There are a few lessons i have learned in my short life so far, a few pieces of wisdom i have been able to glean from all the shit i have wallowed through and watched others go through as well.

1) We are all our own individuals, and we are all responsible for the outcome of our lives

A lot of people live in situations where they have given away their individuality to others and become victims to others control. In reality, lots of people are forced into this situation due to war and oppression of one form or another and it is possible for a person to feel as though their power has been taken away from them.

2) We always have a choice

No matter what life has thrown at you you always have choices. Most people, for various reasons, just dont have the courage to make the tough choices. Instead they make the poor choices, which in turn leads to a path of more poor choices, which in turn would take even more courage to overcome, and thus they begin a cycle where they are trapped for the rest of their lives.

3) Life is simple, but we get caught up in the details

Again, because we like to complicate things, we make situations way more difficult than need be, and we like to pretend there is more to it than there really is. We do this because a lot of people dont want to take the respoinsibility for their actions, so, in essence, they CHOOSE to avoid responsibility. So instead we come up with ALL this detail and drama to justify why we shouldnt have to make the tougher choices, and of course, since everyone else is using the same coping skill to avoid their own respinisiblities we let each other get away with it, kind of a “you scratch my back and i scratch yours” deal.

4) Most people are seriously out of touch with their core-self

They live lives so full of defense mechanisms and coping skills that they have no idea who they actually are as a person, and can not define themselves. They are just struggling everyday to survive what the world is throwing at them, and i truly believe that people can go periods of months and years where they actually stop developing emotionally, and sometimes even begin to work backwards.

5) Most of our suffering is self inflicted.

Most people who are depressed right now tell themselves they are depressed becuse of the actions of other people in their lives, but again, i restate that we are responsible for our lives and the choices we make, so in essence depression is a choice we make for ourselves. What happens is everytime we make these poor choices we feel guilt and shame inside ourselves, cause we know we went against our core, so we start the proccess of closing ourselves off from the person inside, and then our life becomes a whole game of keeping oursleves distracted enough to not be able to hear our core talking to us. This is why so many people are afraid of being alone in life and they look in others for the things they cut off from themselves. They repeat this pattern until something extreme happens in their lives, something that really rocks them to the core, and forces them to face the perosn inside they have locked away, which leads to lesson 6.

6) Being honest with yourself and forgiving yourself for your mistakes is the key to a happy life

No matter how far life takes you away from the person inside you, ultimatly that is the person you will have to answer to, and in turn is the person most of us are constantly running away from. To most of us we have run from it for so long that we do not even recognize that person anymore as being ourselves. Depending on what choices you have made, and for how long you have been making them, the process of being honest with yourself can be a very difficult path to walk down, especially alone, but if one can muster up the courage to do so they will find they can begin to let so many other things go, in turn leading to Lesson 7

7) Being in touch with your core-self negates the need for defense mechanisms and coping skills

Ultimatly these things are used to defend us from the actions of others who would try to oppress us, but if one is truly in touch with themselves, they will have a self-confidence from within which, as long as they maintain it, can easily replace any walls or shields that we have ever put up. We also find that we can take the energy we were using to maintan these defense mechanisms and can put it towards improving ourselves in other ways. This in turn leads to more self confidence and in the end it does not matter what anyone else says or does to us, because we know that our life is our responsibility, and our choices are ours to make, and no one else can take that away from us.