Over a dozen years ago I posted this on Tumblr and it really resonated with teenagers who often are depressed.
You see any baby and everything seems fine, so you ask yourself how can some biographies turn into such a deep and unsolvable frustration ?This is a chronology about how things spiral down all the way – dedicated to sensitive teenagers on the verge of openness and disappointments.
It all starts with the open-heartedness of a child – life just is; you react openly to everything because you are truely honest, and to live means to be as you are, and express yourself.
Then some impressions are forced upon you in various ways:(Let’s assume that would be you)
First by your parents, then by others like your friends and it is refreshing to see how spontaneously kids react to confliccts – as a kid you speak your mind, show your likes and dislikes and stand up for things you do not agree with. And at one point outer forces oppose you and the suppression starts: In the best case parents guide you through differences by always ensuring you of their unconditional love, regardless of your positions or actions. This is the ideal parental care even animals are reassured of when they are needed the most.
Unfortunately very often this is not the case, because parents just didn’t understand the needs of your soul, so they simply did blank out what they didn’t want to be part of their reality and thereby suppressed you more or less forcefully.
The more violent the opposition hits you, the more traumatic is your experience.
Even any deep trauma could be resolved in this stage if there is a balanced network of understanding supporters around, but if it isn’t you shy away from what violates your soul and turn to new friends which then become a second influence in your life.
At this point it is so crucial that you have some people who understand you; and if that is not possible you settle for ones who let you be as you are. The problem now is that the best understanding person would be one who has gone through the same stuff; but the wiser ones don’t share all the fun you need to let of your steam so in the end you turn to people at your level who have the same lifestyle you currently live – addicts provide tolerance for addictions – hurt ones listen to your pain for example. This works really well for a long time but at one stage it is likely that their evolution takes turns which doesn’t agree with you anymore and you end up totally alone, because the ones who cared for you hold you down in swamp-like structures you strive to move out of.
You loose faith. Faith in your loved one, faith in others, fate, or god, and the worst loss is the loss of faith in yourself.
In your desperation you try to convey our pain to your best friend because best friends are really there for you when you need them.
But your pain runs deep and just won’t be resolved with a few nice words, so it carries on and you slowly but steadily you see people getting tired of your repetitions and they turn away from you regardless of the cause of your pain – whether it be a broken heart, domestic violence, sexual traumas or even a lost limb – people just have a limited amount of patience.
But something inside you still hurts and sets you up for further failure – you run into the same problem again and again or into another one and even a bigger one, and deep underneath, you cherish good stories like a sudden death of your best friend, because that would at least make people feel sorry for you for a reason. So you start to attract this kind of reality and such stuff literally starts to happen, but instead of now fully using it to your advantage you downplay it because you realize that sympathy is not true love and you want to be loved unconditionally.
The spiral goes down because at one stage it dawns upon you that you are being judged for continuous disasters and before you now it you became an official looser on top of having had all that misfortune.
Now what is left of your pride stands up and protects the last bit of your residual self-image and you pull up all your hope to “fake it until you make it” and you pretend that things are fine when they are not.
This is when you start to put on a fake-smile when people ask you how you are, even there is a hole in your soul.
And by now, if there are caring friends or family who genuinely try to pull you up and make you happy, it makes you even more sad, because you feel sorry for their incapability to reach you at all anymore. You might get a nice gift and see that your parents meant so well all the time, but don’t have a glue that they were the ones who let you down in the first place.
Things spiral further down because you started to see that you not only put on a mask to protect yourself, but also because you don’t want to hurt them by being an unsolvable case which worries them.
You are in a real double-bind-dilemma now because expressing your pain has become impossible, yet holding it back harms you further. Even the strongest forces break down under such catch 22 situations, like a lioness which has to rescue 2 babies from a flood and both babies die because she can not decide which one to rescue first.
The pressure from all sides is so great that you are paralyzed which now really bolts your outcry for help into the ground. From the outside this might look like serenity and often this is when therapists or parents think that their child gets better, but there is nothing you can do anymore and your entire sense of self is either shattered or slapped as a sarcastic farce into your face – over and over again.
But since life always finds a way – just like water – your life-force returns with a rebellious unruliness and some inner force just wants you to live. Yet by now your sense of life is distorted from a simple happiness to a stoic request just to feel yourself in any way – whatever the cost. And you simply don’t give a shit anymore and should you still smile it is for 2 reasons only – either you are to tired or too pragmatic to explain anything anymore; or you carry the burden of the additional dilemma of knowing deep inside that others are also humans who might suffer in the same way you do.
By now the easy access to happiness is shriveled to a mere fairy-tale you used to believe in as a child, just as you believed in Santa Claus. A basic growl now overrides all subtleties so that the only way you feel yourself is in extreme experiences.
So you turn to yourself – and on yourself. Why should you care by now if you are fine or healthy? It’s laughable and so naive to be confronted with such conformistic values which only are designed for your you to function better in society.
You roughen up by either numbing the pain with legal or illegal drugs or through all kinds of x-tremes like cutting for example. Since you lost acess to your inner soul you experience yourself on the outside – your borders – you become a border-liner.
And then it get’s exciting, cause you are beyond. Beyond hope, beyond caring anymore and beyond loosing anything.
Now you start to even cultivate and enjoy yourself and make sarcastic jokes about the junk around you. You love the dark life and live it to the fullest. You push back against all the hate and get your revenge on humankind.This is the realm of Gollum, trolls and ultimately serial killers.
And what expands must contract, so after your act of aggressive compensation you fall deeper into the abyss and once the intoxication is over, the hangover hits you twice as hard – remorse sets in so deeply suicide becomes an option.
If you can’t face the burden of one’s own guilt either try to scream it away – louder than your inner voice – never admitting to anything; or you dilute it by adding more of the same to it. The physical hangover was so bad that you have to reward you for this painful day by getting drunk with another extreme experience.
This is what happen in massacres or wars when people started to kill one person and thereafter can’t stop to do it again and again. Sarcastically the victim now becomes a perpetrator who create the worst pain to others and thereby push them into the exact same kind of downward spiral itself did suffer.
If you are in the lucky position that your conscience forbids you to hurth others you then the socially accepted way out is to turn on yourself and become addicted – continuing to escape into the opposite direction where your pain resides – only to experience the pendulum of your emotions to swing back to where it came from. You think this is alright because most people manage to survive whilst making their living in meaningless jobs – having forgotten what happiness is all about.
You think this was the bottom of the barrel? Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, because now nature has old age up its sleeve for you:
The initial good news is: Never before was there such a cult of slender teens in crisis who look good and songs are played and stars are loved for it so at least there is the comfort of crisis being displayed in the media.
But now think about what happens when your young beauty is lost and you still have the crisis? Yes- you thought before, that no one would suffer more than you. But you didn’t realize how there was at least an empathic ear for you when you were cute. Then you get old and no one cares – people turn away from you, because your pain is not sexy anymore – you are fat and ugly, loose your sight and get grey hair. And all people around you carry the same bad fortune, so all is left is some common daily struggle for survival.
Now you probably understand why old people often are so grumpy – they kind of went through all that crap without even being able to comprehend it and now internalized it so far that they for themselves are totally out of touch with the fact that they once were young, innocent and simply happy.
For lots of them now comes yet another hammer – serious physical sicknesses and no believe in a sense for it all anymore.
This is how an entire life is wasted without value unless you give it spiritual meaning.
Sodarshan Chakra Kriya 