I can understand you, though I'm not sure what to tell you. Life has treated me badly too,. Yes, stomped down into the dirt. Hard. It's very easy to become depressed and bitter and hateful when all you've known is tragedy without much joy. And yet, I remain as I have always been. Yes, I suffer from depressions. There are times I feel like 'why bother'. But I hang in. I think the thing is, at the heart of it is a flame that burns. My creativity. I'm a professional artist and writer. That passion keeps getting me up in the morning when, with several illnesses that force me to spend about half my day in bed, it would be easier not to get up and get moving. But I have something to do I feel passion about, that gives me joy, in a way.
I'm starting to feel, more and more, that you need to find something you find true passion for, and just throw yourself into it whole heartedly. My being an artist and writer are tied so closely to my self identity, and have been all my life, that to give up on that would strip me of everything that makes me who I am. And I stop to think and know that quite a few of the tragedies in my life, maybe half, were, no, not my fault, but a result of the choices and sacrifices I made in order to pursue my profession. I could have been rich and successful in business. But that wasn't my choice, not my dream, not my ambition. So I didn't make those choices.
Perhaps you're looking for love. I've had bad experiences there, as well. Doesn't matter if you're straight, gay or ambisextrous. Love is damned hard to find, and once found, damned hard to keep. But you can't just give up because it is out there. But if you fee4l so down on yourself, your eyes and heart won't be open to find it when it comes your way.
I know i's hard to get out of deep depression. It's damned hard. Because that suffering, and you truly are suffering and in pain, it becomes the central fact of your life, all you can talk about, think about, feel. Despite all the psychiatrists and medications in the world, getting out of depression is still basically pushing yourself out. Concentrating your attention on other things. With me it's writing and art and movies. For you it may be something else. You have to force yourself to concentrate on things that aren't related to your depression. The more you do this, the easier it becomes. No, it won't make you a happy person. But it can serve to lift you out of the misery you're in. You see, it isn't other people and the world you hate, it's that you hate yourself as you are now. You have to get past that and find reasons to like yourself as you are. I'm not saying that's easy. I'm about 50/50 on it myself. But at least I've reached a point where I half like myself and some of the things about me. I can talk to people about something other than my illness or misery. Sure, it still comes up, because I'm still ill, still have really bad days more often than not. But I've been able to lift myself at least a little bit out of it.
What I'm going to say now will sound terribly cliched. But I've come to believe it's at least partly true. The way you think does serve to control what you get. If you're pessemistic and believe all you will find is bad, that's what you'll get. If you believe that some good things can happen to you, given time and patience, those good things will happen to you. I believe that, I've seen it in my own life.
If you're a religious person, pray. Take refuge in your faith. It can help. Doesn't matter what religion, really, as long as you have something you genuinely believe and have faith in. Though I would say to avoid fundamentalist Christian churches. Not that they're horrible or anything, but because they have a tendency to believe that once you're born again or saved you should no longer be depressed because now God is taking care of anything. They don't seem to grasp the reality that people often have very real things to be depressed about and that God doesn't just automatically resolve the problems, and they tend to criticize people who don't just cheer right up when they accept the salvation they're selling. But a solid, quiet faitth in something does help.
I don't know how better to advise you. I fight my depression every day, in some way. Even if most of the day is wallowing in it, I fight it some way. The more you fight, the better you get. This doesn't mean I'm happy. I'm not. My life lacks too much for me to be happy. But, at the moment, it's sufficient that I'm not always depressed, that I have times I can rise above it and feel moments of joy and pleasure. It's not fast, it's not an instant fix, but the more you fight, the more moments you have of not being depressed.
