Hopeful

Good morning all,

I hope that this message finds you well, I just wanted to reach out to all of you today to see how you are getting along on your journey with anxiety and depression.  I know that there are struggles from day to day, but I was curious to see if you had taken any steps to help reduce the symptoms any?  I know that this is a lot easier typed out than it is to put it in practice, but as a community with a common theme, I am hoping that we can come up with some strategies to help alleviate the overwhelming feeling we get.  For those of you who don't know, I have been battling depression and anxiety my whole life and it was not until recently that I took the step to seek help, because I finally realized that I could not do it on my own.  Now a lot of times we hear, "oh I am going to speak to someone" and then we never follow through.  Today I wanted to encourage you to speak to someone who you trust that can sympathize with you.  I have found it helpful to have someone who understands what we are going through.  Now there will be some people in your life that will just want you to snap out of it, but to those who suffer, we know that one cannot simply just snap out of it and rid ourselves of the disease.  So if we can help form a community that shares the same thoughts as we do, then there is strength in numbers.  We can begin to overcome the process together and move towards the eventual goal of not having our symptoms hold us back from enjoying that in which you have been given.

I know that a lot of times in life that our circumstance dictates how we feel.  The stress of the world alone is enough to hold you down and wear you out.  From my own experience, I know that the things we carry can be a real burden.  I have heard this analogy in a lot of talks in my life and I wanted to share it with you:  Imagine that you are walking around in everyday life carrying a back pack.  Every now and then you pick up a rock along the way, the rock symbolizes something that will either result in a depressing thoughts or bring on anxiety.  Now along the way we collect those rocks and add them to our back pack.  Over time the back pack will become a burden and harder to carry as you collect more rocks along the way.  Eventually you may get to a point where your back pack is so heavy that you will not be able to move.  The thoughts of depression and anxiety will cripple you.  However if start to take out the rocks one by one, your back pack will become lighter and more manageable.  Now as you can see there will still be some rocks in the back pack but it will not be so burdensome.  So if you can begin to start to take some rocks out of your back pack, you will notice that the weight you carry will become lighter and you will start to enjoy more things because you are able to move about more freely.

So for today, let's take out one rock at a time and move towards that goal.  Don't let the things you carry define who you are.

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