We Are The Cause Of Our Depression

It’s 12pm on a weeknight and you’re lying in bed with a million things running through your head. You could be planning your next move on a person that you’re crushing on, or you can be replaying old memories wondering what went wrong- it’s a cycle. And it seems that even when we have happiness find our way into our lives, we pick it apart piece by piece because society has trained us to not believe everything we see and everything we hear. We’ve been trained to depress and blind ourselves to the good because we constantly see through to the bad. We’ve been trained to avoid the thought of perfection when it comes to happiness- because apparently there’s always something to be depressed about.

We depress ourselves when our relationships aren’t picture perfect. We depress ourselves when our jobs and career paths don’t take us to the exact places we dreamed of being, and we depress ourselves even more when it takes longer to get there. We even depress ourselves when once-perfect friendships drift away beyond our control. We depress ourselves because our lives are constantly changing without our permission and in ways that we did not expect them to. When one thing goes astray we automatically assume that we’re on the path to failure and that no good can come. Why? Because we constantly seek perfection instead of seeking a push in the right direction. We blame everything around us before blaming ourselves. Time? Check. Environment? Check. People who we think are toxic but actually aren’t? Check.

No matter how many times we try to push forward, there’s always something that brings us 10 steps back. That something could be a past person, memory, obstacle. It could even be the idea of fear itself and the fact that taking that step forward allows your heart and your mind to be worn on your sleeves for all to take a stab at- but life shouldn’t work that way. We shouldn’t let every obstacle or every new opportunity be the reason we resort to depression and anxiety. We shouldn’t be comparing our lives to others and wondering how we can become someone else, because with each of those thoughts just comes more of a reason to be depressed when those “dreams” and end results aren’t reached.

Obstacles are going to come in your way, that’s a guaranteed fact; because life isn’t always going to hand you everything you want, when you want it. It also isn’t going to live up to your expectations, at least not in the order that you expect it to. People are going to come in and out of your life for a reason, and the people that chose to stick around are the ones that should be fought for. It’s easy for life to show you how often people who were once so close to you drift off into becoming strangers- and that cliché and overused line is the truth. Being scared of that line is why we depress ourselves; it’s why we don’t take chances. It’s why we don’t go after everything that comes our way. We’re too afraid to make it work; we’re too afraid to even try.

Maybe if we weren’t so afraid of fear and rejection, we’d find a way to look past this depressed lifestyle and into the world that’s waiting for us to actually live. Every twist and turn our paths take happen for a reason, and that solo reason is to get us to the end result that we truly want, not one that we think we want.