Hopes, Goals, Dreams, & Delusions: Navigating Life With Depression and Anxiety (Chapter 8)

Bringing It All Together

So – you’ve been my audience for several thousand words spread across 8 posts. (If you’re still with me, I’m very appreciative and thankful…and a little surprised). I’ve rambled. I’ve thought. I’ve tried to process through this and explain my thoughts as I go. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did! So in a nutshell what’s the take-away here?

First of all (and probably the most important) is hope. Hope is almost like money; very rarely will you find a human who is completely satisfied with the amount they have, and have zero desire to get more. When you’ve got very little or none to speak of (money or hope) somehow getting some, even a little bit, seems overwhelming. When you get a little bit, you want more. I’m not going to go all Biblical and start down the “Love of money is the root of all evil” even though it’s often misquoted. Maybe I’ll dig into that one down the road at some point. But getting more hope is no easy task when everything in your life seems to soak it up and absorb it like parched soil getting a few drops of rain. Taking that analogy even further, too much all at once and the soul and the soil get overwhelmed and it all just overflows without soaking in where it can really do some good (amusing side-thought – here I am talking about how too much hope can be a bad thing which sounds…hopeless.Not my intent, believe me. However the dichotomy does appeal to my ironic sense of humor)

So with a baseline level of hope, you can feed into it and grow it – out of the hope can come goals (specific things to attain) and dreams (less focused but more open and light hearted thoughts of the future). The risk of leaning too hard on the goals and dreams is in becoming blind to the hard realities of life, especially when dealing with a mental illness where the slightest upset or difficulty could very quickly unravel all the momentum and send the individual back down into the dark pit they just fought their way out of.

That also doesn’t speak of the delusions of the dark pit – where you can’t seem to escape the overwhelming negativity, and although you crave hope and comfort, you push it away because as scary and overwhelming as the darkness is, you feel safe within it because you know it so well. Hope, sadly, seems scary because it is so preposterous, so vastly different from what you’re used to, and you don’t feel worthy of it. At all.
Hopes, Goals, Dreams, and Delusions. At first glance you may not see how they all tie together, but I hope by this point you see that they are very closely linked indeed.

P.S. When the next wave of twilight comes creeping in, and you know you’re in for another season of gloom, remember to grab a coffee for Darkness. Black, with 2 sugar.

*****          *****          *****          *****          *****

I could not have pulled this off without the help of several people. First and foremost to my family who have been incredibly supportive for years, no matter what. I’d also like to thank the many people who I’ve gotten to know via Twitter. I will also give special mention to the entire community at http://www.sicknotweak.com. Last, because people tend to remember the last name or 2 on a list: An EXTRA HUGE THANKS to Meg and Kath – These 2 ladies went over this entire article with a fine tooth comb several times over. I don’t know if a THANK YOU is enough – but it’s all I have for now. IF you’re in town, coffee is definitely on me!

The featured image for this series was courtesy of Little Visuals