I am my own worst enemy. I am definitely not an expert on depression, but I think that when you suffer from depression your own brain becomes your worst enemy; it just never stops analyzing and going through how you could do things differently or better. It never stops trying to drag you down. So you are constantly exhausted because not only are you fighting an inner battle between common sense and your debasing self-talk, but you are also fighting whatever hard battle life is dishing up at you at the moment.
For instance, this last year when I lost 22 pounds, I felt great as long as I didn’t look in a mirror. I would look in a mirror and think wow; I lost all that weight and still look awful. None of that hard work made a difference. There is nothing you can do to change you. No matter what you lose you will still look like that. It was defeating and just plain frustrating to constantly struggle with the self talk and my own view of myself. Now I have gained 10 pounds back and started running again, I am trying to figure out how to not sabotage myself this time around and just keep up the work out for health sake and not for image sake.
I remember when I went to see a therapist several years ago and she asked me this thought-provoking question
- If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, would you allow this person to be your friend?
My answer was no because I would not ever talk to anyone else the way I talked to myself. My self-talk as has been discussed before, as my inner voice is the biggest, baddest bully on the playground. I am working on this daily and fully understand that logically it doesn’t make sense to have the inner dialogue that I do. The good news is that 5 years since that therapist visit; I have grown to a place where I would be my friend and that part of me is the part that is just finally beginning to win that battle against depression; s…l…o…w…l…y but one day, one day it won’t be so hard to live in my skin – I just know it.
How about you – if you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, would you allow this person to be your friend?