> I've been thinking lately; banging my head against an old chestnut that I never can quite crack. There is something fundamentally wrong in my life, and I'm not sure how to fix it. As for the problem, well, that's easy: I'm not happy. I'm just generally not happy. Several times I've been told that I'm "depressed," but that isn't quite it. I'm just unhappy.
>

Perhaps I can taste this particular chestnut of unhappiness, this profound feeling of wrongness. It's almost as if it's like certain thoughts and feelings can suck one in... keeping a person thinking about darkness and death for hours, days, months and years, with little or no relief in sight? It's like that for me. Trying to analyze the question of 'why?' becomes virtually impossible. And it's meaningless at its core because it can't be answered. The real issue is not the morality of whether I "deserve my pain" because I might believe that I am mentally or emotionally deficient anyway, so who cares? Not true. The thing to strive for is to keep one's head above the storm, and handle these thoughts and feelings without being pulled into their vortex. If I should focus on only one aspect of my thoughts and feelings -- the dark ones -- to the exclusion of virtually everything else, then I let them become more 'real' than realistic. I am letting them control me; I become trapped. And that's not good; because it's judging myself with a truncated yardstick: where all that is good and sound and okay about myself is being reviled and ignored.

And I can tell you it can be REALLY HARD to climb out of this "annihilation vortex" by yourself.

Because these thoughts and feelings are extremely painful ones, and they take up a lot of energy. They can leave one feeling further drained and unhappy and feeling hopeless. It's what I meant when I quoted eyesore saying, "Unhappiness needn't necessarily turn into depression -- the line between them is vague, but it seems that depression is the unreasonable continuation of unhappiness which begins to feed on itself." That's when it's possible to tell, for yourself, whether you're having trouble and can't hack it by yourself. If that point is reached, I find you must trust. Trust that one's strength, and hope, and rescue will come from outside of oneself, in the form of other people... in caring friends... in a counsellor, pastor, and lifegiver, and in a higher purpose like that of God's love for you. De profundis. I want our Lord to be there for us. So let me pray for you then, and ask for His help, and, I hope, that you can pray for me.


> Dar "lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life..." ien

Wolf "(2Cor 1:4) Who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the solace with which we ourselves are comforted by God..." spirit