This is the best insight on depression I’ve ever heard!
“Today I don’t suffer from depression anymore. I don’t experience it as I used to in the past. I suffered from that for years, but now, when the rain comes, it just rains, but it doesn’t pour and it doesn’t stay. It doesn’t stay for so long to immerse me and drown me anymore.” – Jim Carrey.
Carrey talks about the astonishing realization he came to after so many years of fame: there is no point in wasting your whole lifetime to create some specific identity for yourself.
The following is all ego: wishing to be important, to be somebody, to matter. In fact, this longing for a particular identity can bring us only pain and suffering, for three major reasons. First of all, it separates from us and from all the other people who dishonor our inborn, interconnected nature. Second of all, it deceives us into thinking that things shouldn’t change, or more precisely – that WE shouldn’t change. Last but not least, it separates us from our basic goodness, because it makes us feel that we are not good enough just as we are in the moment.
The remedy for this suffering is to forget about the desire to be “somebody”. As Carrey puts it, “There is a difference between the feeling of wholeness and the feeling of me-ness.” If we want to feel whole, we have to forget about trying to preserve an image of “me”.
“We hear about depression every day. There is one big difference between sadness and depression: sadness appears as a result of something that happened or didn’t happen to you, or grief or whatever you call it. Depression is when your body is saying ‘go to hell’, I don’t want to be this person anymore, and I hate this avatar that you’ve made in the world. I can’t handle it. You should see the word “depressed” as “deep rest”. Your body wants to be depressed. It simply needs deep rest from the character that you’ve chosen to play.”
I don’t feel depressed now at all. I feel sadness, and excitement, and happiness, and gratitude beyond belief. But all this is like weather, it comes and goes. It doesn’t stay long enough to kill me.” – Jim Carrey
