I was alone.
Exhausted, confused, and utterly hopeless. The entire world was attacking me from all sides nothing I could do or say was helping and all was about to be lost.
Or so I had convinced myself.
Now I refer back to these days as the dark times. They should have been filled with joy and happiness but instead the first 2 years of my daughter’s life are a complete blur to me. Depression is a downward spiral where one negative event adds to another adds to another and so on until the only thing you feel you can do is . . . nothing, except maybe stay in bed all day.
My turning point, my quickening, my moment of truth came from a very frustrating conversation I had with an old friend, well if you can call him repeating the same two words over and over to me as a conversation.
Gordon asked me what was troubling me and as I poured out my heart and explained the wrongs that were being bestowed upon me, the unfairness of the world, and the anxiety and shame of not being about to afford a gallon of milk for my family. He would simply replay:
So what.
WOW, that made me angry. I tried to make him understand how losing all the material things we had work for would be taken. He said So what. How I could lose my profession, same response – So what. No matter what tragedy I tried to explain to him was going to happen – same response, So what.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of dealing with an unsympathetic, non-understanding, non-friend – he explained it to me.
Nothing that the world or the forces of evil were doing to me was causing my stress and anxiety – I was. I had the power to control how I reacted to the actions around me. The only person who could make me sad was me. Lawsuits, losing money and things were really unimportant.
Coming to the realization that I could control me, and NOT control others or events, set me on the path out of the deep dark hole my life had become. It’s hard, even unnatural – but it works.
You cannot control others; you can control you.
You can control that negative feeling and not let it magnify itself. Shed the negativity – bring and focus on positive energy. Let positive thoughts and feelings magnify themselves. Get out of the darkness by bringing in light.
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