Advice is so much easier to give than follow, that is why you give it away! We all deal with things in our own way, and we have to find that path for ourselves. We have all walked away from a situation thinking 'that's ridiculous', but it does strike a nerve and eventually makes us do something really dangerous like get our two atoms of brain cell to make a single spark of intelligent thought. Then the answer can seem so obvious you wonder why you hadn't thought of it before...
I always think that writing something down can really help you sort out your thoughts. It may never go anywhere but the bin, but having put them into some sort of order can give you time to think. Also with writing, especially on a computer where you can play around with it, you can leave it for a while and return to it when you are more settled. Often I will then re-read it and wonder what the heck I was talking about...so if I can't understand it how can I expect others to!
We all think that our problems are the worst, precisely because they are OUR problem, and we are experiencing and feeling the effects of those problems. We live with those thoughts in the wee small hours and all day as they press down on us and we have to find ways of releasing that pressure without alienating everyone else. Depression, in my opinion, is a coping strategy but also a cry for help by hoping that others will notice the depression and reach out to you; but it is a coping strategy that cannot be successful in the long term because it is avoiding dealing with reality, and I have been doing that for over thirty years! Having cancer made me realise that I am the only one who can change my life for the better. There is no magic pill which will take it all away and make everything into a fairy tale, pills can help and support you, but only your actions can make things better. That takes work and I have had many failures along the way, and hit many brick walls at high speeds trying to do so. But depression is a natural thing which I have come to embrace as a way of letting out the negative and sad parts of my being but I finally feel as though I have some control over it and it no longer rules my life. As with my cancer I have it, it doesn't have me any longer.
It is difficult to look back and realise that you have wasted your life and know that you don't have time to be able to make a real difference. But there again does it really matter. I can't go back to being a teenager and tell myself how lonely my life would be because of choices I made when I was 14, because I am not sure they were really choices. It was the only way I could survive at that time and in reality I have done the best I could do at that time. You can't live with the airy fairy idea that if only I had done that everything would have been so much better...newsflash! Life is not Hollywood, no one shouts 'cut' lets do that again, until you get it right. My life is what it is and in all honesty it has not had much of an impact on the world. I am a worker ant type, not a strutting peacock, brave lion, sleek cheetah; I will not be remembered my many people, but then maybe that in itself if a good thing as I hope I haven't had that negative an impact on anyone either that they would have cause to think of me.
A cancer diagnosis may be Stage 0 and never come back, but that diagnosis can still be the most devastating and profoundly life and soul altering experience that will ever happen to that individual. Who amongst us would ever want them to know what a Stage IV diagnosis is like. There is a difference between possibly and probably, and it is one which is what makes all the difference. Stage 1, they might possibly have a recurrence and die, Stage IV we will probably die. We all still have to deal with our lot in life as best we can at the time, I just like to think I am making a pretty good job of life at the moment...
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