We have seen that creative people are used to solitude, and we have explored some of the reasons for this. Instead of seeking friends in whom to confide, or counsellors to whom to tell their troubles, they use their gifts to come to terms with, and to make sense of, their sufferings. Once a work is completed, it can be shared with others; but the initial response to depression is to turn inward rather than outward.
Solitude, a Return to the Self
Anthony Storr
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Encouraging the depressed person to do something is a hazardous enterprise. It requires a delicate balance between being sympathetic and being robust. Too much sympathy may reinforce the depressed person’s belief in his helplessness and hopelessness. Too much active encouragement makes the depressed person feel that no one understands the depths of his despair.
Solitude, a Return to the Self
Anthony Storr -
Refrain from busying yourself, therefore, with charity bazaars, sewing meetings, and other such occupations. Busyness over many things is, in all its form, chiefly a poison. Look within, examine yourself accurately, and you observe that many of these apparently self-giving deeds spring from a need to deafen your conscience: that is, from your uncontrollable habit of satisfying and pleasure yourself.
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander -
For what is denying oneself? He who truly denies himself does not ask, “Am I happy?” or, “Shall I be satisfied?” All such questions fall away form you if you truly deny yourself, for by so doing you have also given up your will for either earthly or heavenly happiness.
This obstinate will to personal happiness is the cause of unrest and division in your soul. Give it up and work against it: the rest will be give you without effort.
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander -
Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées -
I am not disturbed by the fact that there are joy and abundance everywhere throughout the world, while in myself alone there is often no gladness, so that I look morosely upon the gladness and freedom of God’s creatures. I have within me an executioner for my sins—he is ever with me, and strikes me. But there will be joys for me also, only not here, but in the other world.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
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“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
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For as soon as their preoccupations fail them, they are restless with nothing to do, not knowing how to dispose of their leisure or make the time pass. And so they are anxious for something else to do, and all the intervening time is wearisome: really, it is just as when a gladiatorial show has been announced, or they are looking forward to the appointed time of some other exhibition or amusement — they want to leap over the days in between. Any deferment of the longed-for event is tedious to them. Yet the time of the actual enjoyment is short and swift, and made much shorter through their own fault. For they dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire.
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They lose the day in waiting for the night, and the night in fearing the dawn.
Even their pleasures are uneasy and made anxious by various fears, and at the very height of their rejoicing the worrying thought steals over them: ‘How long will this last?’ This feeling has caused kings to bewail their power, and they were not so much delighted by the greatness of their fortune as terrified by the thought of its inevitable end.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, ‘Thus each man ever flees himself.’ But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling ‘How long must I face the same things?’
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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When we feel down or anxious, our aptitude for self-control is diminished, making us more prone to making bad decisions. Sadness, it seems, leads to more impatient thoughts, and a desire for immediate reward at the expense of greater future gains.
How to fake a shopping buzz without spending any money
Katie Beck
SO GOOD QUOTES 