Thanks for y'alls input
@imo_incolae and
@jane douloureux.
When I originally posted in this thread I got wrapped up in the medication aspect and completely forgot about what I used to do for panic attacks that helped me cope and overcome them before I became diagnosed and medicated.
I learned to do this on my own. When I felt a panic attack coming on, I got into the habit of telling myself, "Okay, if I'm going to die right now, I'm going to die on my terms and not sitting on the couch like a loser." I would pour a glass of water, sit in my armless chair, strap on my guitar, and start playing. I convinced myself that if I was gonna have the heart attack then I would die with my guitar in my hands like a badass. In addition to all that, I would also regulate my breathing by taking deep breaths. The funny thing was that the guitar aspect prolly helped distract me from the impending doom and the panic attack would subside within minutes. And hey, I didn't die.
No problem!
You are exactly right.
You completely ruin the story by actually going along with it and then doing something that throws a spanner in the works. The story can't hold and the truth reveals itself. Its just another story and its probably absurd, extreme and usually revolves around something bad happening to you. Why would you want to be a victim of that story when you can throw it into disarray by playing around with it? We aren't intelligent enough, and furthermore, we don't have two brains, to reinvent another story while the previous is unfolding and so its impossible for the story to reinvent itself.
It always starts with you. We have become too dependent on things outside of ourselves for the answers to life. None of those things will give you the answers. They just create a layer of convenience, comfort, temporary restbite and a false sense of security over the reality underneath.
Out of all the times I've been depressed in life among other experiences including severe anxiety, I would say less than 20% of those episodes have resolved themselves solely down to pharmaceutical intervention. Less than 1% involving actual support from the mental health system. 80% of the time (or maybe even more) has simply been down to doing the work. Getting my thinking cap on, getting the books out, opening myself to the realization I am responsible for understanding myself and nobody else can fix me, learning about what is going on, getting out into the world and putting it all into practice on my own.
Life is an experiment in many ways, and you are the scientist. There is no surefire concrete way of living, despite what our society and culture says. Do this, go for that, take this pill, buy this product, believe this, stand in line and consume, conform, follow the crowd, do the "right" thing etc. It's helped to make generations of increasingly more helpless and less equipped people to deal with the reality of life and further pushing them into comfort zones and conditioning them to reach out to sources that they are told are panaceas, when in truth they are anything but. When it dawns on them what they were taught to trust in and depend on are flawed and consist of empty promises they resort to more extreme and unhealthy ways of coping and here we are, in the modern world consumed by myriad social problems in our world. Much of that, I believe anyway, is simply because people have lost their way. Lost their way in large part because they were told it was the right decision and would benefit them.
We are living through a severe mental health crisis. We have more social problems than ever before. We have the highest rates of addiction and drug abuse than we ever have. All the things we know are fundamentally unhealthy for us are today the most popular and, sometimes even, the things which are pushed on us the most. I think that should be enough evidence that we have surely lost our way and that what we are told to assume forms the basis for how we should live our lives actually turns out to be counter to what best serves us, both individually and also collectively as a society.
The answers to much of our problems exist, as they always have done, within and through the journey of life and the inevitable path of becoming both through hardship and through abundance and prosperity. Today we have a tendency to be biased towards the things we want, or are told we want and have idealized while neglecting the most important aspects of our existence. In many ways, the elemental aspects of who we are and what it takes to exist on this planet. The aspects that for us here today as modern humans. Or in other words, the hard f*cking work because hey, life is f*cking tough and if you don't have a plan life has a way of teaching you lessons and if you won't heed those lessons you won't live much of a life.
