Yeah, I'm sorry, too. It's just tough. My family commits suicide a lot. They also spend a remarkable amount of time in mental institutions. It teaches you that past a certain point, all you're doing is watching the show. A word of caution: mental health is very much organic... but the body is a system. It will adapt to the environment. When the environment rewards depression, the body will acclimatize to depression. Beyond a certain point there's fuckall you can do about biochemistry but up to a point, you're as depressed as you wanna be. I don't know where that point is but I know that you derive no benefit from indulging it and the potential benefit of denying it is killing the fucking problem. I got depressed in fifth grade. I stayed that way until I left New Mexico. Talking wake up, go to school, talk to no one, eat nothing, sleep three hours, gorge, sleep two hours, run nine miles, work out for an hour, sleep. Yay exercise bulimia - I rode that train from Iran-Contra clear to the Serbian conflict. But then I got out, and then I wasn't somewhere shitty, and I was surrounded by people who kind of cared about me, and for about three years I'd get choked up sometimes and start bawling on the fucking highway 'cuz I couldn't believe I'd actually MADE IT OUT. Sometimes it isn't organic. Sometimes it's environmental. Usually it's a blend of everything and that's why you need the will to change the things you can change and the strength to suffer the things you can't. Fuck optimism. Fuck pessimism. Learn pragmatism and apply it every fuckin' day to every fuckin' thing you do. Experience. I haven't had a drink in a week because I'm coughing up a lung over here. If I felt better I'd have some bourbon. When you've got emphysema, go for the brownies, not the pipe.How does a reasonable person who knows they have an imbalance determine how much of that kind of poison to let into their life?
One must choose a balance between focus and perspective. News is never perspective. When one is constantly attuned to what is going on NOW one cannot evaluate "now" in terms of "always." GK Chesterton Read Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography and ask again.The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town.