Oh hey, you’re back!

First off, medication is a brilliant tool of science that can be hugely useful in the battle against depression.

And also, In every glass that’s half empty, there’s a part of it that’s half full. If you practice focusing on the half of the glass that’s empty, you will become very good at spotting it everywhere, but there’s a vice versa to that.

It’s like buying a yellow car, and then suddenly you see yellow cars everywhere. You trained your brain to notice something that always existed before.

Handing over the power to control your emotions to outside sources, creates a state of non safety within yourself. It can cause you to live in a perpetual state of fight or flight. If others have control over your state of calm or happy, it means you are not in control. And ultimately it needs to be entirely you that’s in control. Because your emotions are a message from a part of your brain that isn’t verbal, for and to, you. They are for you and you alone.

How you see the world and what you train your brain to collect for you, is entirely programmable by the trickling water that your thoughts are. Rewiring where that water trickles is no easy task, water digs deep grooves. It requires deep effort and care for the person you get to take on this ride of life. Maybe we only get one ride, we owe it to ourselves to really make the most of it, and show ourselves the best time.

We can’t do much about the station we’re born into, or the socialitical effects that causes us, but we can do the best with what we have at our disposal. We can use what we have to make the small space we have available, as comfortable as possible.

This might sound doomish, but aiming for happiness all the time, is not sustainable for anyone living within the typical meat suit we all wear. Happiness is an elevation above, ground floor, it requires dopamine to flood your system to get there. It’s meant to be fleeting, or we wouldn’t have reuptake receptors that flood your system to rid you of dopamine (we have the same for all hormones similarly, cortisol etc) it’s not meant to be a permanent state. That sounds depressing but what if your centre, your calm balanced place, wasn’t emotionally charged, actually that sounds pretty relaxing. What if you could just be, without any of the extreme emotions bombarding you incessantly. And you just felt calm and balanced and centred.

It’s not unobtainable, but it does require effort and probably some good tools like medication, but it’s entirely up to you to find the tools that work for you.

I have been where you are. I’ve faced horrific adversity in my life and I got to a place where I just couldn’t stand it any more. The pain of feeling so run through from everything I have lived through. I was so broken, so emotionally devastated. There’s a way back from that desolation to a place where you can feel the magic in the air you breathe again.

You are not your emotions, you are not your thoughts. You are not the meat suit you walk around in. You are the entity that observes. You might have some deep grooves to redraw, you wouldn’t know the state you seek, if you weren’t capable of achieving it. It’s all there. Be patient, and keep working at it. I know you can do it. You’re already living life on the hardest level. Everything else is easy in comparison. You have the power to do this. You just gotta believe in you.

Make space for those emotions, the heavy and the light ones, and sit and listen to them, they just want to feel heard and they move on. Be patient it might take them a minute to notice they’re being heard.

Focus on right now. Feel the air on your skin, the floor beneath your feet, gravity holding on to you. Feel the air flowing through your lungs. Look at the closest nature thing you can see. Blade of grass, mountain, tree, clouds, stars in the sky. We’re all just molecules vibing along together. Us and the mountains. We’re all made up of molecules that vibrate at slightly different ratios.

Disaster is always trying to fight to be in the light, but an equal and opposite force works against it, humans have been doing this dance for thousands of years. We’re still going. People will fight, even if you don’t have the energy. Just focus on existing with the stars and the mountains, for a bit. Take a minute for yourself. Imagine the outside world doesn’t exist, just for a day. Just let yourself be.

Depression is a chemical state that your brain becomes accustomed to. You don’t become depressed after being sad one time, or getting one piece of bad news, and you can’t snap out of depression with one instance of good news. It either takes medication to resolve the chemical imbalance or active and concentrated effort to retrain your mind and thoughts to focus on positives rather than negatives. Or more often and more effectively, a combination of both. People can come out of a true depression without medication, Im not trying to say it’s necessary, but it makes the work of rewriting your neural pathways a lot easier. Other alternatives are therapy, CBT, meditation, a change in habits such as better diet, more exercise, better sleep. Your depression may have been caused by politics getting you down initially, but it’s built up over a long time, and those pathways in your brain have become ingrained until they are the path of least resistance. One case of good news is not enough to just magically fix that. The good news can be a big start if you let it, but it still requires some method or combination of methods to retrain your brain to focus on positive things, to undo all the time that you’ve spent focusing on negative ones.

One factor is likely that you’re on Lemmy, which worsens my mental health at times too. Particularly the backlash from many users on here who rushed out of the woodwork to tell us that we shouldn’t have hope after the blue wave happened. I don’t get the impression that many of them have good intentions.

depression often has very little to do with the events in your life. this us what differentiates it from sadness. its a chemical imbalance and you likely lack serotonin. see a doctor about this if you can, not a voting booth.

There’s still a lot to be done before anything starts to get better. This was a battle won, but the war isn’t over

The blunami hasn’t materially changed your life, and it won’t if we don’t essentially coup the democratic party before they give us another Biden or Obama.

Maybe you’d feel better if you were helping create the future you want and surrounded by like-minded individuals? Have you looked at your local DSA chapter?

I would recommend PSL, but I recall you wanted to work for the state department or something lol.

If struggling to create a better world seems like too much work, maybe buy a used motorcycle, it’s better to be depressed, while being sick as hell than to be depressed and boring.

You don’t electricute a steak and expect logic.

Depression is a social relation. Just because blue team won doesn’t mean your relationship to society has changed. Democrats and Republicans both agree on capitalism, they differ on implementation but they don’t want to end capitalism.

Under capitalism, a human is only valuable if they are productive. If a human is unproductive, then they have less, zero, or even negative value depending on how one approaches the topic.

Under capitalism, your function is to serve people who can pay you. You are replaceable always, and the less you’re replaceable, the more pressure is placed to make you replaceable. The people who need you the most - the poor, the children, the sick, the elderly - are most often the people with the least money to pay you. The people with the most money to pay you don’t need you personally, they just need a bunch of people to operate their profit engines, and many or even most of those profit engines are genuinely anti-social.

Your depression has nothing to do with who is in office and mostly to do with the fact that society wants you working or dead.