Emotional Inversions

One problem with dealing with depression is that even when good things are happening it's hard for it to be enough. Right now, things are definitely moving in a much better direction, but everyday still feels like I just have to keep on working through every moment. In a non-depressed state, if I remember correctly, the good things, the good moments, they're enough and every day doesn't feel like work. I know I'm on the way out of the depression, but it's still so much work and I'm so tired of work with little return. It is hard for me to write a lot right now, just because my thoughts seems so repetitive and every day is just a lot of hard work without a lot of insight. Since this blog is supposed to be about "relearning" happiness, it doesn't seem quite right to simply write about all of the depressing thoughts I have. Anyway, I'm just slogging through every day right now. Wish there was more.

But it is an interesting conundrum--good things in and of themselves don't create the emotion of happiness, at least not for me. Depression is like a coating over everything, a veneer that makes the reality of the thing/moment/event different for the depressed person as compared with a non-depressed person. It was once described to me as a fog, or inversion, that makes it impossible to see, regardless of what you know as real. In a heavy fog, you may know there is a mountain, or river, or whatever, in the landscape, but the fog makes it impossible to see. With depression you may well know that there are good things in your life, but the depression makes it really difficult to see; it makes it hard to allow the good thing to work in your life. So how do you get the depression to burn off? What causes fog to burn off? What causes an inversion to dissipate? I'm not sure how the physics of this metaphor translate into the emotional reality. I'll have to think on that some more.