Ever felt like you didn't matter? That you didn't feel like doing anything and that you asked yourself what was the use of everything in this life? That you'd rather just not wake up anymore because there was no point to anything and you had absolutely no energy left to do or experience anything?

 

If you express this to a doctor and you really start talking about it, before you know it you'll get a "diagnosis" of depression... Or depressive thoughts, burnout, it could be anything that comes out. I could write an essay on that alone when it comes to 'guessing what might be going on', but I'll leave that for now.

 

Depending on how open you dare to be about the thoughts you have and that are lingering, there will be a diagnosis that you can then move forward with. Because the diagnosis is required to be able to take further steps towards either counseling, an application for sick leave, a place on the waiting list at the mental health center, or just sometimes to reassure yourself because you have something.

 

I experienced it myself. During my burnout I went incredibly deep. I really had moments when it was so dark inside myself that I actually asked myself out loud before going to sleep: 'Do I still want to wake up tomorrow morning?' And that I then heard myself say, 'No, I don't have to anymore.' And then, perhaps most intensely, I was not at all shocked by that. The listlessness, the feeling of not being worth anything, of not mattering, really just the feeling of emptiness and nothingness. Even now I still remember exactly how that felt. Because I still have it sometimes. I still have days or moments when I feel and think that. Even before my burnout I had these kinds of feelings and thoughts.

 

However, the difference between these feelings now and then is that I experience them differently. I experience them now as something that belongs to me. I am an emotional person. Emotional in the sense of ups and downs, highs and lows, hopes and pains, joys and sorrows, passion and apathy, embrace and rejection. These feelings, can come in extreme forms. Very happy, very sad, very angry, very resigned. It can be all of the above. And particularly if you are in the very much of something, you may get stuck in that. And that lingering in that, that's not something your body does. That's something your head, your mind does. Your mind is going to try to find a reason for that "very much ..." In other words, if I'm feeling very happy, then my mind is going to look for reasons why I'm so very happy and try to hold on to that. 

 

When I do ... I stay very happy. Because at the time I also did .... and that made me very happy.

 

Point only is, this is really total madness. Because it has nothing to do with situations or circumstances that I feel very happy at a certain moment, but with the mood I am in when it comes to my emotions. That mood, it is mechanical and manifests itself in waves. And those waves, they go up and down. You cannot change that, you cannot do anything about that, they are just there. 

 

When I became aware of that myself and through seeing my Human Design, of who I am and how my roadmap is put together, I could understand it without having to think about it. Accepting that as a human being just have different moods that can change by the day or moment without me being able to influence them or do anything about them or reason them out, that suddenly made everything a lot simpler. Depression is the result of looking for reasons for something that starts with the feeling of melancholy. And so it also goes away by itself. 

 

If you can learn to embrace melancholy and turn it into creativity, you can see how profound and beautiful melancholic feelings can be, if you just let them be there. Listen to a beautiful piece of music, pick up your pen and start writing or drawing, do crafts, or chores, clean the house or car nicely or pick up a nice book. The life of emotional people is mostly a life of moods. And they are all allowed to be there. Once you stop giving your mind the role it likes to take, as a decision-maker and as judging and looking for answers to questions that don't matter at all, then you will find that you learn what it is like to live as yourself.

 

Every human being has melancholy and depression in them. However, there are ways to learn to look at those and to see them as something you have and what makes you who you are. Out of melancholy the most beautiful songs are written. The most beautiful works of art created and the most beautiful books published.

 

When we start seeing more and more of who we really are, and we start looking less and less for labels and for diagnoses, then the world really becomes a more beautiful place. I find it a gift to experience that in myself every day. The experiment of living as yourself is so rewarding. It is not simple, it is not always easy, but it is so incredibly valuable.

 

Life is heavenly, if only you have the guts to just wait and see....

 

If you also want to know what this is like for you, or you recognize yourself in this story, please contact me. I would be happy to look into it with you. Sometimes (or most of the time) prevention is better than recovery.