Embrace your depression, your hardship, your truth – don’t fear it

There is a lot to fear in living out the traumas in real life.  It can seem that there’s so much to lose and so little to gain.  You pick up the pieces of your life at any given point—you reflect—and you hope as you pray.  Then you read this:

“... we have two fundamental needs.  One need that’s with us in infancy and it’s absolute and it’s non-negotiable is attachment.  And so the other need then is authenticity.  Authenticity therefore is the connection to ourselves.  Without authenticity and without a gut connection with ourselves, how long do you survive out there in nature?”
—Dr. Gabor Maté

We exile our own pain when we refuse to face it.  When we refuse to face it, we cannot overcome it, and it simply stays there as the dormant (or not-so-dormant) trigger that springs up to create a relapse.

The gift we can give ourselves at any time is authenticity.  If we can be authentic with ourselves, we can be authentic with others, even as we have confidence within ourselves to confidently face the world we walk out into.

As we embrace our maladies of being—our depression, our sense of being at odds with our world, our hardships, the truth we face and attest to being our reality—we liberate what we cannot escape from.  In other words, there are states of being we all experience that are inescapable—if we can’t escape then why don’t we learn to courageously embrace them?

We don’t embrace these hideous realities because we’re scared, we’ll plummet further, but if we can embrace them, we reverse our default attitude.

Instead of fearing things will get worse, we focus our energy on just being mindful and the fear dissipates.  Then we can connect with ourselves, and authenticity comes into view, and we feel better attached to ourselves.

Insisting on controlling what we cannot control is not a sensible strategy.  When mental health is down, rather than fight our reality, we’re better to move through it by moving WITH it.  It’s about being gentler with ourselves.

As we accept what we cannot in that moment change, we take the pressure down, and peace comes closer to our grasp.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash