Darth Vader and the dark side
Sometimes my thoughts feel like an invasion of Darth Vaders.
They pull me to my dark side and tell me that I’m not good at anything, that I’m worthless and useless.
Yesterday was one of those days when I felt really down again, for the first time in a long time.
I was sitting at our dining table in our new place we had just moved to last week.
A sparrow couple was singing on our balcony and the rain was adding the zaa zaa sound in the background.
It was around 10 am and I had just finished my morning coffee.
I should have been happy. I should have enjoyed the fact that the moving was over, that my husband and I had started a new chapter in our lives with a beautiful new home.
Yet, the opposite happened …
It was like a “knock, knock” at the door.
The dark thoughts had arrived.
Like a bunch of mean relatives they walked in through the door, visiting me out of the blue, sitting down on OUR sofa, drinking OUR coffee and bitching about me as if I weren’t there.
the trigger
What triggered the feeling was something very simple.
I had been looking at posts on Instagram.
I clicked on a fashionable photo, which took me to the profile site of that person. I scrolled down through all her posts and saw lots of beautiful pictures of healthy food, her well formed body after a work out, and her with her two little cute girls.
She seemed to be a super-mom promoting on Instagram her successful little online business about how to be a super-mom and how to love life.
Under one post, which was showing her playing with her two kids in their living room, it said something like “feeling grateful to spend some precious time with my two girls before sending them off to school”.
The dark thoughts started raining down on me!
- You would never say that you are grateful to spend time with your two daughters. Instead you’d be grateful to send them to school, so you had time to yourself.
- You’ll never be a good mom. You’d be tired all the time and find everything annoying.
- You are simply not a happy, light type of person, who embraces moments and knows how to enjoy life and you'll never be.
- You keep trying to build an online business but what do you really do to accomplish your goals? If you want to be successful like her, you would need to post pictures like her on a regular basis. Do you do that? No!!
- What are you good at anyways?
- Your husband trusted you with his credit card and you spent too much money at IKEA, putting more financial pressure on him. Will you ever learn how to use money wisely?
- Maybe you need to go back to being a full time English teacher. You might not like that but what else are you good at? Nothing. You are not even 100% good at that.
Pretty mean, ay?
tears
I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks.
I didn’t mind them.
It actually felt good to let the pressure out.
At the same time though they reminded me of my miserable situation.
On the one hand I was thinking that I had the power to stop the thoughts right here, right now. All I had to do was change my way of thinking. I was so close to being a happy version of me.
But the dark side was and always is like a magnet of overwhelming hopelessness. It would take too much energy and effort to think positively, to feel good about myself, to embrace myself and tell myself that I am beautiful and wonderful just the way I am.
I wouldn’t believe in all the good things anyway.
So, I cried a little bit more.
feeling better today
Like I mentioned above, today I feel better today.
It’s because my husband tried at least to understand me and gave me a big hug,
and because I had a friend I could talk to about my feelings and felt understood,
and also because I started writing for my blog again.
Lows seem to hit me when I can’t give my life a meaning, when I’m not sure where I’m heading, when I bite off more than I can chew and ,as a consequence, fall behind or start comparing myself to others who do much better than I, and when I don’t see any progress in my own life.
What I do then is to reflect my own shortcomings on my husband, and to put pressure on him by having expectations on him he can’t possibly fulfil, which obviously ends up with adding scars to our relationship.
I know that this is quite a heavy topic for a blog post. But I wanted to share this with you as I think that most people can’t imagine what depression in ist many versions can feel like. Unfortunately, there is a stigma of depression in every society aruond the world and the only way to fight it is to talk more about it and to share our stories.
Having depression doesn't mean that you have a weak mind because you can't snap out of a bad mood. It's not a choice, it's an illness, like diabetes is an illness.
the SELF Movement
I would like to share a video of a friend of mine, in which she talks about the stigma of depression and shares her own story.
Also, please check out her facebook site about the amazing organisation she has founded with a friend. The SELF Movement, helps create „a generation of strong, confident, supportive and kind girls, who strive to build each other up instead of breaking each other down“.
Go Tara!
Let's fight the stigma. For more information of facts on depression you can check this link from HealthLine.
Thank you, everyone!
