A Self Travelled path Out of Depression, plus 17 Things You Can do now to Begin to Enjoy Life Again

I finally found what I have been looking for.
You see for a long time, just like you I have been searching. Searching, looking for something that I had no idea was always with me, yet my search went on endlessly.
Just like you, I needed to quench a thirst in my soul. I wandered about sometimes aimlessly looking for answers to the many questions that I had about life. I didn't understand who I was for a very long time and just like you I asked the question "Who am I and what on Earth am I doing here?".
Perhaps you haven't got to this stage in your life, but I assure you, someday you will. The truth is until you get here, where all of your reality is held captive by this one question, you may not really be living true to the full essence of who you are.
You may not be entirely truly happy and a lot of your days may be meaningless.
For a long time in the recent past I battled wth several bouts of depression, I went in and out of my depressive states like it was a game and soon enough it became a norm for me to be depressed.

 In psychotherapy and psychiatry, Depression is defined as a state of mind producing serious, long-term lowering of enjoyment of life or inability to visualize a happy future. It is a period of unhappiness or low morale which lasts longer than several weeks and may include ideation of self-inflicted injury or suicide.

For someone like myself who used to be always jittery and excited about the smallest things, hyperactive in all ways, Depression was a real killer. It killed every memory I had of myself, any dreams I had for the future, every speck of hope I could ever imagine and to make it worse my career put me in the public eye and I had to force myself to continually appear happy. I had to create a separate me who was all okay yet still live with the real me who wasn't. This duality sent me even further down my depressive state and for some time it seemed like I could never get back up.

And then enter relationships, and Sex. And Money. And Liquor. And Marijuana.
Of course for the kind of career and environments I found myself in, all of these isn't exactly hard to come by. All you had to do was ask and it was served. If only I was asking for the right things.
If I only knew what the right things were.
When you are very low in life, anything that is different from what you have experienced in your low points can set you on a high really quickly. Anything to blur the illusion of your low is welcomed. What we fail to realize through our low depressive states is, what we consider as better than our low is yet another illusion if it is physical.

And Depression isn't exactly a physical battle. It is a mental, emotional and spiritual battle. You are fighting yourself against forces that you cannot exactly grasp physically. You can sense it in your mind, you can feel the pain deep within you and it is not a physical one at all. To make it worse no body understands what you are going through but you.
For many days you would wake up and look yourself in the mirror without recognizing who stared back at you. You may even sit at your desk and tell yourself you are going to get to work on a project and weeks afterwards look back to realize you have barely begun let only finished.
You would feel consumed by a darkness you cannot exactly describe and all hope would appear to elude you.
It gets harder and harder with each passing day and this is what I have come to realize throughout my time in this phase, hopefully they resonate with you and a part of you agrees with some of these points.

-Everything you are feeling is aiming at your willpower and stopping you dead in your tracks
-You see your past successes in life and cannot relate with them
-You think you are ugly
-You want to lie in bed all day and do nothing at all
-Everything you plan gets shoved under the mat and you cannot bring yourself to do what you say
-You procrastinate on almost everything on a day to day basis
-You spend money on impulse because it makes you happy in the moment and you end up regretting the expenditure.
-You want to stay indoors and not see anyone
-When your friends call you out you make an excuse. If you do go you plaster a fake smile on your face and pretend to be a part of the party
-You are not interested in food
-You want to think and smoke and think about nothing at all
-You do not know what day it is or what the date is
-You have that one friend who knows what you are going through but now you are tired of telling them of your problems because you have done it so often you don't want them thinking you are mad
-You actually think you are mad
-You do not enjoy doing the things you used to enjoy to do
-You aimlessly browse the internet
-You want to punish yourself
-Maybe once or twice the thought has occured to you to be done with life.


There are many more but these are a few that I experienced myself and if two or three or more of these resonate with you then I hope that what I am about to tell you next would help you tremendously as it has helped me so far.

First things first, accept this please, YOU ARE OK!
There is nothing wrong with you but the fact that you think there is something wrong with you.
You.
You control everything you see? And whats more you have the power to give your control and willpower over to whoever or whatever you choose. I ultimately decided to surrender all control to God and to be led by the holy spirit in everything.
Now Imagine your mind and brain like it is a big Life Computer. The programmer of your life is You and you choose the codes and commands of what runs your life. Garbage in Garbage out is exactly how this works just like with a man made computer.
You have exercised and run several programs of negative commands time and time again so of course what you birth as a result would be negative.
Until you change the commands you have been feeding your mind, the result of negativity, hopelessness and depression would remain constant with you.
First you have got to get yourself into a state of knowing that You are Ok! That you are worthy. That you Matter in this world with 7Billion other humans. That your opinion matters and your input is important for the general wellbeing of humankind. That God has a plan for you, a plan of good and not of disaster to give you a future and a hope, as the prophet writes in Jeremiah 29:11.

When you can come to this simple and instantaneous conclusion within yourself, then you can begin to change the commands and codes and information you have been feeding yourself.
You would need to completely renew your mind and spirit by the food you feed it.
Just like we feed our physical bodies with physical food, you have got to begin to feed your soul with food for the soul.
I could tell you that you can do this by reading books and listening to positive messages but I would still be far from the truth, for I have read books and it wasn't until recently when I began to read the Bible in a new fresh way, that I finally realized I had found the book I was looking for.
The Bible!
All of my life I have read the Bible, but only recently did I begin to receive the word into my spirit and feel a new lease on life.
It is all brand new to me now.

Here I am writing this piece now, yet for the past months writing has been difficult for me cause I couldn't get out of my low depressive state long enough to put meaningful words down. But now I have been writing for an hour! And what's more, I realize that I have the power within me to go on and on and I believe that I can if I wanted to I will!

So what changed for me and what can you do?

• -Accept that the Battle of Depression is a deeply emotional and spiritual one and you need to seek for more than the Physical
• -Understand that the promises of a quick fix from Sex, Alcohol, Spending and making money or career successes cannot sustain you long enough and their results of happiness are fleeting
• - Realize that what you really want is to experience God in a new personal way and begin to search him out
• -Fall desperately in the need to understand the word of God pray according to Psalm 119:130 "May the entrance of thy word bring Light unto my soul in Jesus Name."
• -Pray to experience the Holy Spirit and for the grace to experience God.
• -Come to the realization that your life isn't yours and you are alive by grace. Knowing this I sought to live for purpose - "How do you want me to contribute Lord? Direct me."
• -Give up trying to control everything And let it all up to God.
• -Understand that the only way the Devil has a hold on you is through your mind and feelings and everytime you are depressed as a result of Doubt, Fear, Hopelessness, Guilt, Shame, You are letting the Devil win.
• -Know that your life has meaning, there is a divine purpose for your life and you are letting yourself and God Down by letting the depression keep you low.
• -I began to create new energy by working out every day. Exercise is an excellent way to create energy physically and I am boosted to a great high when I am in the gym. This also helps me build my willpower
• -just like physical exercise, praying and reading the word is a Spiritual practice and exercise that I am currently developing to nourish my soul.
• -I began to care for my body and care about eating. As I do that I feel better and better and more energized throughout the day.
• -I now know that Isolation is one of the ploys of the dark side to keep me from experiencing life and tapping into the positive energy that is out there. So I no longer refuse to go out. I accept all invitations and even seek to be around people more. It is important to socialize
• -I exchange positive energy with others knowing that what I give I receive back into my life. Its as simple as a Smile.
• -I now know that depression only occurs when I take my eyes off my divine goals, when I focus on the bad circumstances life may present me instead of focusing on God's promises.
• -Make yourself do what you say, asking God to help strengthen faith in yourself
• -I invite God in all of my projects and plans as I finally realize that I am nothing without him. I pray for the grace to complete what I start and for the divine energy to do great work that can bring him Glory

This is the truth about your quest.
You have been looking for you.
At the same time you have been looking for God.
You have been searching for a new meaning to life as it is clear that you had exhausted whatever meaning for life you had as a child. As we grow older this would happen to each of us and it is how we are led to a life of purpose.
There is no end to this battle however. The highs and lows would be continually interchanging but at least we have fought this fight before to recognize when it comes again. And it will come again to help us birth an even stronger self in God.
Stay in the faith. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. God has got you!  2:25PM .

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