“nor do twisted thinking and depression vanish in a twinkling.” (Page 133, Big Book)
I thought my depression was due to:
- A biological curse
- A neurological inevitability
- An astrological predetermination
- An external concatenation of facts
- A cumulative heredity
I appeared to seek help, but every time I was lifted out of the swamp, I found myself back there.
The game I was playing—although I wasn’t aware of the game at the time—was this:
I wanted to be depressed but not have it be my fault.
Why did I want to be depressed?
Because, when I am depressed, I fill my own universe, and that makes me terribly important. I also don’t have to do anything or make an effort, because I’m busy being depressed, and there’s ‘no point’, anyway. I don’t have to disappear into the banality of the everyday like everyone else. I’m the tragic hero, sitting on the sidelines. What’s more, my distress can make me the centre of your attention, as well.
When I finally had enough, I learned that the reason I was depressed was not because of any external or prior factors but because I was presently having depressing thoughts.
I also believed the depressing thoughts, because they were mine, so, of course, they were true. This gave them power.
Now, they were not true. Even if they were built on selected incontrovertible facts, the depressing structures built on top of such facts were optional fictions.
This licenses me to convict all depressing thoughts based on their depressing nature: I need not try each one individually in a court of law; they have no human rights, and they have no right of appeal.
That makes the job easier: shoot to kill and ask questions later.
The forum thus cleared, I can fill my consciousness with either constructive or creative thoughts.
Of course, this is all hard to get the hang of, but so are Bulgarian split squats and French irregular verbs. That’s no reason not to learn.
No better day to start than today!