Rev Left Radio - Depression, Anxiety, and Turning Suffering into Compassion

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

In this episode Breht talks about his struggles with anxiety and depression, and offers words of compassion and comfort to those struggling with mental health issues. Outro Music: "Emptiness pt. 2" by Mount Eerie ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everyone and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So for today's episode, I'm going to talk about something sort of personal that I'm going through, but completely with the hopes that it could be used by others, either immediately or down the road, or maybe you listening don't really relate, but you know somebody else who's going through it that might relate. And that is centered around basic mental health issues like anxiety, depression, etc. Recently, I will, you know, first and foremost, some may may not know, but I've been a long time marijuana smoker. So all through my 20s, starting in my late teens, all through my 20s, I was a daily marijuana smoker. And as I got older, you know,

I just stopped doing for me what it used to do. As my spiritual practices got deeper, I started seeing it more as a chain, as a unhealthy habitual sort of compulsion more than the benefits, you know, allowed for. So like the negative started outweighing the benefits started becoming more conscious of just wanting to not have to depend on any chemical whatsoever to get through the day. Or, you know, like when you're smoking marijuana on a daily basis, it can be really easy. Like if you're just like in a bad mood to just erase that bad mood by going in smoking, right? Instead of dealing with the bad mood or maybe interrogating that feeling and seeing what's underneath it, et cetera. So after a long time of smoking and then an extended period of time where there's attempts to

quit and the desire to quit was ramping up, I recently, you know, after the loss of our pregnancy, decided that I'm completely done with it completely. And, you know, if you put something in your brain for 10, 12 years every single day and then you take that thing away from your brain, you're going to go through a process known as withdrawal. Now, you know, up front, I have nothing against weed. I believe in its full legalization. I do not believe in any sort of criminalization. I'm a fan of it. I've used it. And, you know, maybe in the future I'll have a new relationship to it. And I can use it in more medicinal ways going forward and not in compulsive ways. So none of this is to say that I have anything against it.

And there's a subsect of people who, when I even say that there's such a thing as withdrawals from marijuana will scoff. Marijuana is not addictive, you know, it's only psychological, it's not physical, you know, there's no such thing as a withdrawal process, etc. And that's pseudoscientific hippie bullshit. Um, you know, it's just basic brain chemistry to know that if you do something for a long time and take that thing away, your body needs to regain a new neurochemical homeostasis. And that process of regaining the homeostasis is known as withdrawal. You know, if you drink coffee every day, you know, stop drinking coffee. What's going to happen? and you're going to get fucking huge headaches, you're going to get nauseous, you're going to sweat,

and you're going to need to go get more caffeine, right? So the fact that it applies to things like caffeine or even the internet, of course it applies to marijuana. Having said that, people are different. So some people, there is a significant portion of people who might be daily smokers who go through little to no withdrawal symptoms at all. There are other people whose symptoms are primarily physical. You know, you get night sweats, you get headaches, you get loss of appetite, maybe some weight loss. People get muscle aches, right? I, because I have a long family history of anxiety and depression, and I myself have a long personal history of struggling with things like anxiety and depression. I'm more prone to having those symptoms when I withdraw from any

substance. You know, marijuana is the one and only substance that I would, aside from caffeine, that I would have any addiction to the level of needing to go through a withdrawal process. In any case, the withdrawal process for me, I'm about two weeks in, over two weeks. now. It has included intense anxiety, intense depression. Other symptoms as well, vivid dreams, for example, some low-level muscle aches, a loss of appetite for a while, and the big one, which almost everybody experiences, at least the most common symptom is insomnia. When you smoke every night before bed and you stop, it can be very hard to find some sleep. And when you do, the chances that you have incredibly vivid dreams, even unsettling or nightmarish

dreams, you know, increases quite a bit if and when you can fall asleep. So I definitely struggled with some of that at the time, but, you know, the two main things that I've felt that have been the longest lasting from the withdrawal process are anxiety and depression. And I wanted to talk about this, one, because I believe that whether you're going through a withdrawal process or just struggling with mental health for other reasons, the single best thing in my experience is to know that you're not alone. I mean, the single best thing, thing that brought me calm when I'm in the depths of anxiety or depression is to actually go online and just read about other people's experience with anxiety and depression. It makes you feel

that this is normal, that you're okay, that you're not going crazy, that this is not permanent, and that can be a huge relief, especially when anxiety creates those intrusive thoughts of like, oh God, my brain is broken, you know, oh God, is this ever going to be okay again, etc. So, you know, That's the first reason. And then the second reason is because it's just true that right now we are going through not just a viral pandemic, but an epidemic health care crisis. Some people have said at 2019 before the pandemic about one in five, 20 percent of people were struggling with anxiety or depression. Sort of baseline level of anxiety depression in this dog shit society is already really high. But with the pandemic, it skyrocketed. Some estimates put it at

50% of people right now in the U.S. are going through some form of mental health issue, whether that is anxiety and depression or OCD or hyper-isolation, addiction, whatever it may be. The fact is, and it makes complete sense why, those things are skyrocketing. And I also believe, you know, even before I quit as I was tapering down to make that final leap, you know, just like the ambient background noise of American society right now is fucking scary and stressful. We have a pandemic. I mean, every time you go out, your body is now in a new state of alert. You know, even if you don't feel anxious, your brain is scanning for threats.

How close am I standing? Why is that asshole not wearing a mask? Don't get close to me, et cetera. It puts the mind in the body under pressure. And then you have the political situation, insurgent fucking fascism, you know, climate instability, not knowing what the future is going to be, not having access to health care. So if you do have mental health issues, you know, most of us don't, I still don't have health care. I lived my entire adult life with no health care whatsoever, and still to this day that remains true.

And I remember in my early 20s when I was incredibly low income, making, you know, $15,000 a year, $20,000 a year with a daughter, you know, how hard it was to afford gas, let alone insurance for fucking health care. So I remember, you know, swaths of my 20s, years, you know, probably altogether a couple years of my 20s in which I was going through. extreme mental illness and had no recourse to anything. No therapy, no medicine, couldn't talk to a doctor, and I suspect that's true for millions of other Americans. And it's absolutely fucking barbaric, but because so many people are going through it, I wanted to put this out there just as something to relate to. I'm not going to necessarily, you know, say anything incredibly groundbreaking or have some brand new insights or anything like that. I mean, most people understand that these are issues that a lot of people struggle with and whether again it's through

a withdrawal process or it's just normal mental health issues or you know you're struggling with addiction or maybe in the future um you'll want to get off a drug maybe alcohol or marijuana or something even harder and maybe you could revisit this episode just to hear the voice of somebody that you hopefully trust talk about their own experiences because i found that to be incredibly helpful for me And so, you know, I want to turn around and at least turn my suffering into something that can help others. Because aside from this withdrawal process, it's just something I've struggled with my entire life. I've been, you know, in-house, hospitalized in a psychiatric ward in my late teens for depression, you know. And so I'm sure that some of you who have been longtime listeners of Rev.

Left have probably heard some of those stories from my life. So it's something that I'm familiar with. So today I'm just going to talk about this withdrawal process. and hopefully, you know, put it out there. Some people will not find it helpful or it won't relate to them at all, and that's fine. Maybe somebody you know is struggling with it. Maybe somebody you know wants to quit marijuana, and there's going to be that process. And a lot of people, because of the misinformation out there about marijuana,

they don't think it's a real thing. And so all of a sudden you stop smoking and you wake up, drenched in sweat, having vivid nightmares, and you can't eat anything, and you have this deep, dark depression, and you're like, what the fuck is going on with me? And, you know, just knowing that this is a normal process, I think, can do a lot of help. So I'm putting that out there in that spirit. So let's talk about the withdrawal process itself from marijuana, but always keep in mind that the things I'm going to talk about can be extrapolated beyond just this withdrawal process. But the withdrawal process for marijuana, it's different for every single person.

Some people don't have it at all. For me, I was a longtime daily smoker. So, you know, that sort of smoking, you know, is going to generally have a two to three week withdrawal timeline. um the the first sort of symptoms especially insomnia they'll show up almost right away almost 24 hours after you quit 20 24 to 48 hours maybe after you stop you're going to start seeing some of those symptoms and then if you're prone to anxiety and depression and some of these other things you're going to have that start to creep in after a couple days and a lot of the timelines have it peaking around 10 to 14 days and that's pretty much been true for for my situation and that it's steadily

got worse and worse. In fact, because I smoked at the end of every night, I didn't, you know, for the last year, so probably a year, I've been tapering off and I've been trying to exclude it to smaller and smaller parts of the day. So, you know, I got it, you know, a few months ago I got it only past 7 p.m. And then I got it past 9 p.m.

And then I got it down to two hits a night. And then I got it just down to one hit a night before bed because I knew that the jumping off cold turkey was going to be tough and tapering down can sort of help alleviate some of those symptoms. you are smoking fucking, you know, five joints a day and you just quit cold turkey, unless you're incredibly fucking lucky, you are going to go on a neurochemical roller coaster ride. And so tapering down can be very helpful.

I've tried to quit cold turkey in the past without tapering, and it is, from my experience, much more difficult. So if you are thinking about getting off any substance, tapering is certainly the way to go, even if it's something as relatively benign as marijuana or coffee. so let me just let me just throw up some of the symptoms and I'm going to look these up really quick just so I can cover all of them even the ones that I don't have and you can go actually on YouTube and there's like a whole community of people who talk about this stuff and it's actually very helpful and when I was in the worth thralls of my anxiety and depression I would just go listen

to other people talk about specifically their withdrawal you know experiences and it just it helps eradicate my my anxiety at the time just to know that I'm not alone. So some of the symptoms are diminished appetite, mood changes, definitely irritability, outbursts of anger, sleep difficulties including insomnia, headaches, loss of focus, a general foggy feeling in your brain, you know, your memory is not as good, et cetera. Cravings, so with any withdrawal process, cravings are going to be there. If you're getting off of marijuana and going through shitty symptoms, you can solve the symptoms right away. Just go smoke. Boom. The anxiety's gone. The depression's gone. But you've also relapsed. And so whenever you're going to do that

process, you're going to start that process all over again. So keep that in mind. The cravings are a part of the withdrawal process. And they are also, you know, the thing that will make you have to go through this over and over again. And that's pretty common. I mean, this year alone, I think I tried to quit two times before I was actually able to successfully do it. Relapsed both times. And so it was after the loss of our pregnancy that I said, I do not want to depend on anything to get through this emotionally. I want to be with my emotions and I am quitting. And I had already been tapering down. So I was like, this is the final push. I'm done. I'm not, I'm not relying on anything. I'm going complete sobriety to deal with my emotions and feelings on this subject. And that really

was the impetus for my final push. And I feel different about this time. Like, I'm very confident there's not going to be a relapse because for me right now, in the past, I had intense cravings. For me, the cravings might come and go, but they're almost obliterated because I have this meta-perspective on what I'm going through, and I do not want to go back. So for me, it's not an issue this go-round. Other symptoms include sweating, including cold sweats. The first time I tried to quit earlier this year, I would have very vivid dreams, wake up, like almost like when you have a fever and you, like, sweat so much that your sheets and pillow are damp.

That's pretty common. chills or just fluctuations in body temperature, especially at night. You know, I'd be like laying next to my partner and she was completely comfortable and I'd kind of be like, fuck, it's cold, like almost shivering, you know? And other times I'd be like, get these blankets off me. I'm too fucking hot. So that's a part of it. Increased feelings of depression, which is absolutely true in stomach problems.

So let me talk a little bit about anxiety. Well, actually, let me talk about the depression first. So depression, as many of you know, fucking sucks. The horrific aspects of, you know, and if you have depression and anxiety, you do this game, like, okay, if I only had to pick one,

if I could just have one depression or anxiety, which one would I be and why? And when you're anxious, you're like, fuck, I'd rather be depressed. When you're depressed, you're like, fuck, I'd rather be anxious. Truth is, they're twin sisters. They feed off each other.

Every time I've experienced one for any prolonged period of time, I've also experienced the other. So there's no cutting those two and half, unfortunately. But for me, the depression, in this withdrawal process, at least, would hit like thunderbolts. And I don't really

know what's going on at the neurochemical level. I could have some ideas. I could opine on what I think is happening neurophysiologically and neurochemically, but it would be like I would just be sitting there relatively normal and then like boom for a solid, you know, 30 seconds, I would have this dark empty falling out of deep dark depression. And one of the main symptoms for me of depression is being unable to imagine being excited about life. Everything that you get joy out of becomes unjoyful. And so quickly you almost forget what it's like to be inspired and have joy around those things. You know, and it's like this, it feels very scary because for me it hit hard and it goes away pretty quick and it settles back into a more mild version of depression.

But when it hits, like I thought like, fuck, if I had to be, you know, in this intensity of depression for any prolonged period of time, I could completely understand people being like, I just want the fuck off this train in the most existential of terms because it is a hollowing out of everything that makes you happy, everything you're looking forward to in life, and it is fucking terrifying because of that. So then that would basically settle into something more mild

where, okay, I'm not losing my absolute mind, I'm not as scared as the thunderbolt of depression, but it's like everything is gray. You know, I don't have anything to look forward to. I can't imagine being happy. And then also self-doubt creeps in. Like, you know, why do you have your fucking show? Like, you know, those negative thoughts, like, you know, you don't deserve it or like it's going to go away tomorrow. And, you know, what do you really have to offer anybody?

And so those feelings can be, you know, that little negative voice in your head, And I'm a long-time meditator and stuff, but, like, it doesn't eradicate you going through this stuff. I'm by no means, like, some high-achieving, enlightened being or anything. I have the practice, but it's very hard to maintain the meditative practice of being present with what you're feeling when what you're feeling is so fucking horrible. And you want, on every level of your being, to squirm out of what the fuck you're feeling, not sit there and be with it in some, you know, more enlightened.

way like it's it's incredibly difficult and that's also why if you're into meditation you really do want to set up a momentum to the to the meditation before bad crisis hits because you can't start meditation or or restart your practice in the midst of a crisis it's incredibly difficult but one thing you can do and one thing I do was am able to maintain through my practice is a background sense of compassion for myself when those negative thoughts come in when I when I feel I'm fucking suffering there's a part of me that standing back in my awareness and almost like it's I picture it this way as like I'm holding myself like cradling myself like patting or rubbing my own back you know like it's it's okay like you know you're going through a tough time buddy like almost being able to to be your

own soother is something that meditation has given me and it really does help take the the deepest sort of edge off of the darkness of it particularly around beating yourself up when you you're already depressed. Being able to intervene in that process and be like, yeah, I feel like fucking shit and this is horrible, but I also don't need to kick my own ass while this is happening. And that at least is something that I've been able to pull out of my meditation practice and it really does help. As a side note for depression, you know, we think about depression often it's talked about, especially in this hyper-pharmacological society as neurochemistry. Oh, you have a brain imbalance, you know, your chemicals and your brain

just aren't doing the right things or you have an imbalance and, you know, that's why you have these medicines and they'll help correct that imbalance. And on some level, we can talk about depression at the neurobiological level in that sense. And, you know, it's fair. But it's not the totality of the experience. And something that is coming out of medical science more and more is linking depression with inflammation. And I can't get into all the details. now because it would take us far to a field. But if you're somebody that struggles with depression, you know, somebody in your life that struggles with depression, look into the link between inflammation and depression. There is a video on YouTube. It's a channel called What I've

Learned. And it's really fucking good. I mean, it's all hardcore science-based, talks about meditation, talks about diet, talks about exercise, talks about sleep, and it talks about depression. And it has this video on depression and inflammation. It goes through all the edged medical science. It explains the evolutionary roots of why inflammation and depression are linked. And it talks about ways that you can, things you can do that reduce inflammation in the body. And I think it's incredibly important. One of the cycles of depression is that you're depressed so you don't want to get up and do anything so you stay in bed, you eat like shit, you know, you get more depressed, et cetera. And that really does have a solid fucking link with inflammation.

When I understood depression as really connected to inflammation, I got a much better understanding of depression and how I can push back against it. And, you know, it's not going to be surprising. Meditation, healthy diet, rigorous exercise, forcing yourself to get up and go out, you know, doing things that reduce inflammation in the body, the exact things that depression wants to stop you from doing are the things that often can help at least keep it in check, keep it from getting completely out of control. So if you're interested in depression and the link with inflammation, there's a million

things you could look up, but definitely go to YouTube and check out the channel what I've learned and search up their video on depression and inflammation. It is fascinating and it really changed my understanding of depression. The other symptom is anxiety. And anxiety fucking sucks. If depression makes you feel like everything is gray, there's no hope, nothing will bring me happiness or joy or excitement in life. Anxiety is your body in fight or flight mode, this trembling, fearful, like what the

fuck is happening, racing thoughts, negative thoughts as well, but they're always like melodramatic. Like, you know, what's wrong with me? Is this going to keep going on forever? Oh, shit, is this other thing connected to this? Or this chest pain? Am I having a heart attack or am I just anxious? Let me search anxiety symptoms. Okay, this says chest pain is normal.

so this probably means that it's just anxiety and it's not, you know, those loops of anxious thinking are torturous and understanding the link between the feeling of anxiety and the thoughts that fuel that anxiety is something that you can at least investigate within yourself. If you pay very close attention, anxiety, the feeling of it, for me it is like in my sternal column. Like it's like a, it's like a metal pull right in the sternum down to my stomach and it can sort of spread out in my stomach and just just feeling anxiety as a sensation in the body you get this wave of like heat sometimes you know where your body like almost when you almost get in a car crash and you feel that little spike of heat in your body you know that comes with anxiety you get the you get the sweating you know the sort of clammy

palms so feeling anxiety as sensation in the body and then trying to see how that fuels thoughts and how thoughts in turn fuel more anxiety is a worthwhile investigation. It can really illuminate some of the connections between emotions and thoughts, which we sometimes, because we're not aware of what's going on in our bodies, we're not living in the present moment with what's happening right now, we can just feel like chaos. Like, you know, I can't parse out where the thoughts stop and the feelings begin, but it can be very helpful, especially if you're not in a crisis when you just have little moments of anxiety, maybe social anxiety or something, to just say, okay, where does it actually feel? Where do I feel anxious in my body? And just fall into the feeling.

Don't think about it, but feel where the anxiety arises in your body. And then try to maintain awareness to see how that connects up with thoughts and vice versa. So that's just something that's helpful. Again, there's no cure. Like, you know, one of the big situations when you're dealing with this stuff is you want to get the fuck out of it. You want it to stop happening. And you know, you wish there was a button you could fucking push that said, okay, now I don't feel it anymore. And I guess there are, you could pop a few annexes, but, you know, overall, most of the time, you're going to have to deal with it. You're going to have to endure it. But you can understand it. You can use it as an opportunity to learn a bit about yourself and how you think in these moments. You can get stronger by having gone through

these struggles, and as I'm going to talk about maybe as an ending in a little bit, how you can turn your own suffering into compassion for others. But before we do that, I want to talk about how anxiety manifests in the dreams, because as I said earlier, with the marijuana withdrawal, specifically, there is a rebound effect because marijuana, it is thought, suppresses REM sleep. So if you get high before bed, you know, if you notice, you don't really have a lot of dreams. Sometimes dreams leak through. But for the most part, you know, you don't have a very accurate. active dream life. And those mechanisms are not fully understood as far as I'm aware, but it has something to do with the suppression of REM sleep. And as with so many things in the body, when

that chemical is taken away, there's a rebound effect. And so without that chemical suppressing the REM, the REM sleep comes back with the fucking vengeance. And sometimes it can just be very vivid, even cool or interesting dreams. Other times, it can be nightmarish. When you combine vivid dreaming with anxiety you're going to get something like nightmares and you know that is something that I definitely struggled with

the first few the first like week or so I would wake up in the middle of night my heart fucking pounding out of my chest thoughts racing I'm like gasping for breath like reach over to the water

at my nightstand and just like start chugging water try to calm down and then takes me like an hour to calm my heart rate down and everything till I can get back to something like comfort to fall asleep but and this might not be relatable to some but for me when I have nightmares

when I have existential dreams my worst sort of reoccurring theme when it comes to my absolute worst nightmares is always centered around cosmic catastrophes so in the past due to other things probably underlying anxiety or whatever I would have a dream where I was and I remember this dream as many years ago, very vividly still. I was walking down the street, beautiful blue sky, bird singing in the trees, etc. And I look up at the bright blue cloudless sky and a huge hole is ripped in the atmosphere and I can see directly out into the cosmos, the stars, you know, the Milky Way in the middle of day and just this hole.

And it just produced in me this rabid anxiety and fear. The world is crashing. in another dream a couple years after that I had a dream in which the basically Mars was was smashing into earth right they get knocked off their orbits boom and you see the entire catastrophe everything you know and love is is gone when I was younger and I was going into like I started really getting an atheism when it really hit me like in my late teens 20s that you know like there's no god there's nothing looking over you know and that might or might not be true I have much more complicated feelings on it now at the time it felt like very clear cut that there was no god or afterlife and this is just fucking nature unfolding and i remember getting a lot of anxiety around not only my own mortality in such a context but i just remember thinking like oh fuck like nothing's keeping nothing's holding this system up like nothing is making the earth go around the sun like you know what's to say gravity won't just turn off right now what's to say that earth won't just get nudged out of its orbit and

and you go somewhere else. Like, I remember having, like, awake, like, those extreme panic attacks. I was a dishwasher. I remember specifically, like pacing back and forth in the back of the kitchen, like anxiety, heat, sweating, thinking like, oh, fuck, nobody is looking over this thing. Nobody is keeping this shit together. And so, you know, that probably speaks to some deeper existential anxieties inherent in the human condition. But this time around, with that underlying anxiety, my anxiety dream was actually, it harkened back to

that initial fear, which is Earth being bumped out of its orbit. So I have this incredibly vivid, realistic dream, so you really feel like fuck this is happening. And the Earth, for some cosmic reason that was unexplained in my dream, got bumped off its orbit and was floating out now past Mars. And it's going to be this prolonged period where Earth gets colder and colder and, you know, right now, like, you know, it didn't go into a tailspin or anything. So it still sort of has the momentum of the rotation. And so it's not immediate extinction event, but slowly it's getting farther and farther away from the sun. And I started getting calls from my friends. Like, you know, so-and-so just killed themselves. They don't want to be around for it. And I got

another call from another friend. So-and-so, you know, our mutual friend just killed themselves. They don't want to be around from it. And I am heartbroken. I'm scared. I'm thinking about my kids. I'm like, what the fuck do we do? Do we ride this out? Is there any chance of, you know, of getting Earth back in its orbit? It's just going to get slowly more cold and cold. and society is already, you know, breaking down. And that was the dream. And in the end, I think something happened where humans were able to shoot something at the earth

and bump it back into its orbit or something and I woke up like gasping for air. But it was fucking trauma. I mean, if you really having a vivid dream and like your friends, people, your family are offing themselves because they don't want to be around for the catastrophe that's just around the corner in a few weeks or months, it's fucking scary and I wake up and my heart's pounding and I'm scared as fuck thankful

as shit that I'm just dreaming you know that that relief of waking up and realizing it was all a dream it's like holy fuck but the fact that my anxiety manifests in my dreams as specifically cosmic catastrophes over and over again throughout my life is something that's at least I guess worth noting maybe a small subsection of you will relate to that part of it but overall those were the two dominant symptoms that I've had and I think it does play on my already existing propensity towards anxiety and depression and as I said a little bit earlier one thing you can do if you're struggling with this stuff and and you know I said this to my some friends a few days ago is like the thing I hate most about depression and anxiety and this

is maybe overstated but I do hate this part of it is that it makes me think about myself all day long. It makes you obsess about yourself. Hypocondria is a manifestation of my anxiety. So like any little pain or weird feeling in my throat or anything, I'm immediate, plus we have COVID, you know, to add to that anxiety. So I'm immediately like searching up like, fuck, what does this mean? What does this mean? So hypochondria is that extension. But you're going through this suffering. You're thinking of yourself the entire time, you know, obsessing over every little shift in your mood, every little spike of anxiety. You're, you know, anxiety is, you know, anxiety is self-propelling in that. You're anxious about getting more anxious. Okay, I feel a little anxious

right now. Okay, but it's still manageable, but fuck, what if it gets worse? And then you get anxious about getting more anxious. These fucking feedbacks, I mean, you can't help but obsess about yourself. Every little imagination that your mind and body is going through when you're in the pits of this shit. And that's why talking to other people about it can be so helpful. Listening to other people talk about it can be so helpful, knowing that you're not alone, getting your thoughts out of yourself for a second and maybe thinking about somebody else. But, you know, spiritually speaking, whether you're suffering from mental illness or any other suffering, physical, anything, any disease at all, think how can I turn my suffering into compassion? Because we know for

fact, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people around the planet right now are dealing with anxiety, depression, OCD, addiction. And when we're in those states, we become very self-obsessive, but what if we can view those states as a mechanism through which connects us to everybody else going through this? Yeah, I'm fucking depressed. I'm anxious as fuck. This sucks ass. I'm suffering. But so are tens of millions of others. What I'm feeling right now internally, experientially, is what others in this world are feeling right now too. And if you can really get into that mind state, it can radically connect you. with other human beings? And then you say, how can I turn my suffering into compassion and assistance

for others? Well, one thing is for sure. You know what it feels like to be anxious. You know what it feels like to be depressed. And more than that, you know that talking about it and hearing somebody else relate to your experiences back to you can be so helpful. And when it comes with the authority of somebody who's gone through it, it can be that much more helpful as opposed to somebody who's never had depression or anxiety trying to calm me down, they don't get it. So, you know, whether it might sometimes, it might have to wait until you get out of the shit before you can turn outward and think about others and help others, and that's okay. But think about how you can turn your suffering into help for others.

How can I reach out to other people who might be going through this? Maybe I should share my story online or in this community or amongst my friends or on my Facebook post or whatever to show people they're not alone. in fact that's what I did this time when I was going through this stuff I have an Instagram and then it has the private Instagram like 200 people that I personally know and trust and then

within it is a close friends thing on your story you can click so it's like you know just 70 of like the closest fucking people to me on that and I would like basically do videos which is just a form of like journaling where I would talk about my experience like this is happening this is what

this feels like and kind of stuff I'm doing right now in part to get out in part to keep track of the process and in part to let others know that they're not alone and just the feedback of just 70 people I got like 10 messages back immediately of people like you know thank you for talking about this I'm going through this as well you know I was going through this and I know exactly how you feel you know keep your head up that sort of connection can be very profound and so you know that's the motivation for doing this maybe some of you won't relate to any of this, but I'm willing to bet that a majority of you either can relate

to this right now, will be able to relate to it in the future, or know somebody who could definitely relate to it. And what I want to say to anybody who's going through any of this stuff, you are not alone. This is not permanent. This two shall pass. Only constant in nature is change. I've been depressed and anxious dozens of times in my life, sometimes for months on end. But every single time it's ended, every single time there's been respite. There's been a light at the end of the tunnel. And you will have that too. Do not let your mind convince you that your brain is broken, that you're going crazy, or that it will be like this forever. I promise you it won't. If anything is true about the cosmos, about human physiology, about life itself, is that change is the only constant.

It's a churning soup of atoms that are constantly in motion and constantly changing. Nothing is permanent. That includes joy and happiness and excitement, but it definitely also includes depression, anxiety, fear, etc. You will get through it. Reach out to somebody. Talking to other people can help so much. Look up other people's experiences with the specific sort of suffering you're going through. On YouTube, watching them talk can be so fucking helpful.

connect with other people and then maybe with time try to think how can I turn my suffering into help for others now I have a fucking podcast and I can reach out to you know tens of thousands of people and put this message out there but even if I didn't it

I have nieces and nephews you know some of which are entering their teen years right now some of which are already starting to feel the anxiety and the mental health issues of becoming a teenager I could help them I have friends that are depressed or anxious. I can reach out to them.

I can be a resource. I can be helpful to them. So it doesn't matter what your reach is. You do have reach. And even if you are completely isolated and all you have is the computer, go on internet forums, talk to other people about it. You know, seek out how I can help other people. Maybe you go onto an anxiety forum, somebody, you know, some teenagers going through it. And you can just directly respond.

I've been there. You know, you're going to be okay. This is how it was for me. I promise you it'll get better. You know, stay strong, words of support. It can really fucking help people, man. It can really change even for a little bit somebody's sense of well-being in the world and alleviate some of the hardest edges of this torturous shit.

So, you know, with that said, truly from the bottom of my heart, love and solidarity to all of you out there. If you're struggling, I'm with you, I love you, you will get through this. Good night. The feeling of being in the mountains is a dream of self-negation to see the world without us how it churns and blossoms without anyone looking on It's why I've gone on

and why I've climbed up alone But actual negation when your person is gone and the bedroom door yawns there is nothing to learn her absence Saying nothing Conceptual emptiness

was cool to talk about Back before I knew my way around these hospitals I would like to forget and go Go back into imagining that snow shining permanently alone could say something to me true and comforting. I don't know. I don't know. Thank you.