A flower I picked off of a tree during a walk the other day.
With the start of my 5 Chances Challenge this week (you can still sign up until Sunday!), I’ve been thinking about change a lot. Not just change but what I need to change and things I don’t like about myself. Honestly, it’s a hard subject to think about, it can be stressful and confusing and unpleasant. It can also be inspiring.
But it can also bring up the realization that there are some thing we just cannot change alone. I’ve always had the thought that if you don’t like something about yourself, you can change it. Do you want to be a morning person but aren’t? Work on it. Do you want to be a more compassionate person, more caring about your friends and family? Make a conscious effort. Do you want to be better at your career? Take the time to practice, network and do the work.
The whole point of my new challenge was to pinpoint the things in our life that needs a bit of tweaking. Things that you can change and improve on to become a better you. It’s all about taking control and being in charge of your life. Too often we stand still and just wait for change. The challenge was to break from that and to get moving.
I think I’ve mentioned before, in passing a few times, that I have clinical depression. I was diagnosed in 7th grade and started therapy and eventually anti-depressants in 8th grade and was on them until I was about 17. For years, I hid it. I felt…ashamed maybe, or just nervous that my classmates would judge me. (lucky for me I didn’t have many friends? ha!) Eventually, I realized how silly that was. Some people might judge me sure, but mental illnesses get far too much criticize and shame these days for me to be ashamed of it. My silence isn’t helping myself or anyone else. And so now I’m pretty open about it, because I remember what it was like to be that sad girl, who felt so alone because I had this…problem that I couldn’t fix on my own.
And there it is. I couldn’t – I can’t – fix it on my own. I think most people get depressed at some point in their life, but with clinical depression, the chemicals in your brain just…don’t work right. (that’s pretty basic of what it is, but that’s not what I want to talk about.) On top of my depression, in the last 2 years I’ve developed pretty severe anxiety.
Now I haven’t been on anti-depressants since I was 17 and haven’t seen a therapist in well over a year. With my challenge starting and starting to think about things I want to change in my life, depression and anxiety are at the top of the list. I want, no I need to change those things more than anything, to improve upon myself. But I can’t. At least, I can’t do it alone. I believe we can change anything about ourselves we don’t like, we can take control and conquer our faults and our flaws and make ourselves into a vision of who we want to be. But some things just can’t be fixed without help. And that’s okay too. It’s okay to realize that you need advice, medications, to have someone to talk to. Sometimes you don’t even need medical help, sometimes you just need the support of a friend to change something. And that’s okay.
This post has become something I hadn’t intended it to be. I wanted to touch on the fact that I’m dealing with things I want to change, but can’t and trying to come to the realization that I really cannot do it on my own. No matter how hard I try to be positive, to not stress, to fight past the depression…more often than not it won’t work. Because my body doesn’t function that way.
I wanted to come here to just talk, to tell everyone it’s okay to have problems you can’t deal with on your own, to let you know depression isn’t something bad or something to be ashamed of and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it.
I wanted to just get some thoughts out, and hopefully feel a little better today but it became something different. Oh well.
I also made a playlist for today.
(*note: if you’re in a reader, click through to hear the playlist)
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