I want to provoke a different view.
How about trusting your intentions when you are with others (working, shopping, celebrating, grieving, etc.)? The rules you're subject to are a reality. How about checking them to see how far you can take advantage of a personal space and still sail under the sail of the playmakers without them taking you up the witch's pole?
Some sage once said: if you can change something, do it. If you see that you can't, admit it.
I once worked under an ESF project aimed at integrating migrant mothers into the labour market. I could have barfed because I felt like a government henchman to suggest to women that they can only consider themselves valuable citizens of this country if they serve the economic cycle in the way they are meant to. My boss immediately saw through me and said that my attitude was more or less useless and that I had a bit of a tendency to be anti-government. Nevertheless, she hired me for the project a second time and after a short time I dropped it myself. In the first project I enjoyed a relative freedom in my counselling and I came to the conclusion with some women that they had other priorities than gainful employment and therefore left the project. I stretched my latitude to the feasible limit.
Authorities who believe of themselves that their diagnosis is set in stone can usually believe that if their patients are unlikely to ... surprise them. If I am indignant or injured at being attested madness, then it is to be assumed that I classify this assessment as true and give free rein to those who are supposedly without doubt. ... However, I would like to think that everyone is also a little right. .... When I felt trapped in the deepest phase of my depression, I was indeed displacing myself. My worldview had narrowed to the smallest point and focused deeply on my suffering. I attribute this to the fact that the shock that I was actually physically overwhelmed took me there. I call it the leap of reality! With a bang I was thrown into the brutal truth of life!
Nevertheless, I was not mentally ill in the sense that I would have lost my sensory abilities. I tasted, smelled, felt and saw the world. I assessed it as I chose to observe it. ... The end of a depression determines a person: that's me.
Though it's easier to rise from it if others don't believe in my depression.
I can believe in it or let it be that there is a family disposition. I can break the chain or confirm it. The more I am absorbed by the fact that I was predisposed and the more it becomes mine - and thus also the truth of those to whom I bring this truth vehemently.
... If suicide were an expression of clarity, wouldn't we have a Catch22?
Someone who separates from this world in equanimity does not need to pull himself out of life by force, does he? ... We survivors can construct this as an act of freedom, but is this not more of an intellectual explanation?
An interesting question to me is this: what had supported me in becoming determined to say goodbye to my depression? ... I haven't found out an answer and probably never will.
Maybe ... there is a chance that as long joyful people are around a depressed person this person can still witness happiness and asks the self in wonder: if there is at least one person who can laugh, is there the possibility of me gaining my laughter back?
Erika,
I can identify with your operating under the radar and creating a space in which to sail under the playmakers and perhaps that is sort of what I am thinking or writing about--that in a sense, being "diagnosed," can create an explanation NOT for me, but for those interested in enforcing social conformity. I am happier, more free to research, but also as I write this I can begin to question myself-- I really ought to be strong enough to just say, "no, that is not who I am and I am choosing to do differently." I suppose it's like being surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves who at first want to eat the whole of me and if I instead throw them a pork chop, they scramble off to eat that instead ;) I guess I've decided I can't change the system head-on as your sage recommends, recognize when that's the case and proceed accordingly.
When I write about suicide as clarity, I am not suggesting carrying through equates to clarity, but instead trying to convey the feelings I have experienced when I've walked towards that plank. A clarity of thought in how all will unfold, a precise planning and action, something much different than I think most movies depict. Similar to childbirth on TV and the reality that's brushed over in those quick clips.
And, I have survived, not carried through, so somewhere, parts of me do not believe in suicide as the optimal way out.
I too have encountered that sacred space/experience/being in which I was relieved of the extreme agonies of depression in anxiety in the pacing of suicidal thoughts.
I am smiling right now :)
With my example I have tried to explain that my boss, although she seems to be government compliant - after all, she is responsible for the budgets and that money goes to the social institution, is no better or worse than the rest of us. If you look at the hierarchy from the bottom up, my result is not that there are any conspiratorial intentions up there to subjugate a population. These people have their daily lives and their work and I have noticed that everyone is grateful for a little kindness and equanimity. The rather awkward and bureaucratic concern of the funders to ensure that more women are employed has only resulted in money being spent and people being employed in the project to pay their rent and food - which is needed, too. As far as I know, the whole thing was rather a flop and the other project participants have already screwed up. No one has been enslaved ... or was eaten ;-)
If I want to make a difference, it's bad for me to feed an enemy. My boss could very quickly be regarded as a woman integrated in rank and file and it would be easy to imply that she was just a puppet of intentions from above. I realized that this is nonsense when I got in close touch with her and was open to what makes her personal. She's a tough and friendly woman. There are rules to play.
She appreciates it when other people stand up for their ethical principles, even if it means resisting her. At first I had some arguments with her, because I refused to do everything she asked of me and I had been aware of my value. But how easy it is to assume that she is a wolf, I experience again and again that people sacrifice themselves very quickly because they do not find the courage in themselves to say when they dislike something. Then the mental placeholders come into play: the government, the banks, the rich or the civil servants.
I have colleagues who do not dare to rebel against a supposed authority. They swallow their anger at an injustice and poison themselves. It's always someone else's fault. But I also have colleagues who do. I can't see much of a one-way controller. People are smart. They contradict either openly or quietly. My experience of life has taught me that almost nobody lets himself be forced into something he doesn't want.
The assumption and mental construction that we are generally manipulated by higher powers seems to be a kind of tick. Even if it were, a review of one's own real scope is all the more important to see clearly.
There is exactly as much evil in my adult life as I let in and give it meaning.
I had a conversation the other day with an old friend who poisons himself with the media and somehow masochistically draws on what is evil and violent in the world - which is just the opposite from the esoteric happy new speech. When I told him that each of us has a meaning and that I know that my existence and actions in the world have a good influence (besides the bad), he vehemently contradicted me. He even accused me of living in a bubble of illusion and how I can only imagine that I mean anything at all. I asked him what he intended to do against all the critizised and whether he would take personal consequences. I told him that I work with refugees and that every single conversation was important. I am one representative among many who come to my country and make a difference. He said he had to admit that he probably had to form a party to change something, but he had done nothing. I think he considers himself worthless and he is probably the greatest capitalist when it comes to a man's need for success and money to represent something in society. But he has little idea of community, because he is not really interested in it. Nobody of his friends ever said that he is worthless because he makes little money and works a poor job other than himself. People start to believe him though ...
I'm not mad at him. He will probably die convinced that the world is a cruel place. There's nothing you can do but love him without agreeing with him.
Sorry, I got carried away because I am still provoked by the many encounters here where I sense that one-sided conspiracy theme. It colored this comment. As you already might have noticed I mostly referred to your wolve-expression.
Yes, I can see the feeding the wolves comment got to you.
I'd like to clarify a bit in saying that I don't just throw a "chop," let others pigeon-hole me in the general sense--meaning, for the most part I am able to speak my truth and happy to share a contradictory opinion, but when it comes to massive corporations/institutions/governing bodies that are set-up as people, but are in fact an entity, I believe it is different. Where it is difficult to locate a head, because all are there upholding a code of automated law (nice and hard-working people like your boss), that those are the times I find my energy may be wasted and that my functioning and giving to full capacity maybe hindered unless I know when my fight might be worth the effort.
Do I like all laws being enforced at the school? No, but I am in no way going to start yelling at the principal or even the district superintendent because I know that their hands are tied too and they only want the best for staff/students/education. They get their mandates from the state and they from the federal government who currently has 'elected,' a Woman for head of U.S. education and she has never been a teacher, or any experience educating in a classroom and her children did not attend public schools.
Should someone oppose the head, which in any case isn't even this individual woman because there are numbers of boards and voices in a democracy that winds up with hands tied with court cases and red tape anytime one attempts a change. I do think it is necessary for someone to fight for justice, but in that BIG sense, I am not the one. I have four children, am middle-aged and my effort in growing a better world is more enlarged outside the walls of an institution because my talents are not apart of their curriculum.
I think I could spend a lifetime going to battle with the institutions or I can spend my time helping and being helped by those people who I encounter in a flesh-body and living within my community.
Like I wrote in the previous comment, I thought that the sage you were referencing suggested knowing which battles to fight and which might be a waste of energy.
As this post was originally about depression/suicide, I'd like to say that those extremes rose when I was attempting to fight another's battle and fit into the correct criteria for the corporate model and this was not the one I had energy to fight because it was a war with my own nature.
Believe me, I have lot's of courage and endurance when I am standing behind something I do believe in, but I think society (and especially under current U.S. rule) is indoctrinating and employing "believer's," to force an agenda onto other's.
A difficult balance, for sure. On the one hand, there is evil in the world and a division in peoples (here in the U.S. pitted violently against one another and these not seeing they're behaving nearly the same in their vehemency to the other side who are simply people too). And, on the other, the positive and still seeing that there is beauty, light and goodness and a reason to be joyful in living. But, I think we must be careful about the incessant positivity, especially when we're (meaning societal) turning around and saying you have the power to change this kind of thinking because that message might be going into the ear of a person who is working hard, owns his house, is doing everything he knows how to be a good and productive contributor to his community, but is essentially isolated in getting this all done (work/car/wife/jogging/whatever) and he feels he is not himself, living his best life and isn't even sure how to articulate that any longer as the societal conditioning is so embedded that he now believes the messages to be his own voice. So, if he throws a "chop," tells wife and authorities he's suffering and needs to scale back on work hours, in our country that is considered by many to be weak and being weak is failing and this is a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps country. In the past few years at school the buzz word has been grit. Teach the kids about real grit. It doesn't matter if they're the smartest one the one who now wins in our educational system is the one who won't let go of the idea of the American dream (which is very independent/isolating) in nature.
:) Now, I'm going on and on!
Nice to have these discussions with you, Erika.