It’s men’s mental health month, and I wanted to share my story. In a world that doesn’t support men like it should, we need to stick together and make the world a better place. But that takes bravery.
In 2014, I had moved in with my girlfriend, who is now my fiancée. Sure, there were the positives of seeing her every single day, but there were the negatives of our finances. Recently, when I saw a barely over $700 paycheck from the time, I cringed. We struggled with finances for a while. The family income barely over 30k/year.
Then the old workplace called us all in for a “town hall”. When the words, “In a call centre, adaptability is key,” were uttered, I thought “oh crap, what have you done?” They were losing the contract which I was excelling at, and decided that we would be the support for the worst cable company in Canada. That was super fun.
Every day, I was suicidal. Walking to a workplace where I hated my job more than I can possibly say. Every day, I would see the bus and think, all I need to do is step in front of it as it’s passing me and that’s it – no more pain. But I didn’t for my fiancée.
By September, I lost my job, I got very addicted to porn, and I crashed and burned for months upon months. But in May of 2015, I found out something that changed my life. Heavy-daily porn use is linked to depression. So, I decided to get clean.
Over the next few months, I slowly fought to regain my life. The depression symptoms improved and then disappeared, my memory was better, and I felt motivated to start working on projects again. I was in recovery.
This gave me the mental fortitude to start being focused on building my life. And as time went on, I kept building. Sure, I made mistakes, but they’re my mistakes and I always learn from them.
Here’s what I learned.
Most of depression is our perceptions of our lives. I just watched a phenomenal video from a psychiatrist saying that people who suffer from depression have cognitive biases that lead to deep sadness. During this time, my over generalization was I was trapped by people’s expectations and new responsibilities. When I took agency for myself, I beat those cognitive biases.
Next, I learned that addiction can both feed from and feed into depression. With all the new struggles, I sought out porn more, and the more I sought it out, the more I struggled. Once I dealt with porn, that destructive feedback loop stopped. Yours might be something different, but dealing with the addiction can help with depression.
Once I challenged my perceptions and my addiction, my life dramatically improved.
I have a much better job than I ever had – my family income is well over 45k a year.
I have a business for my writing and game development – with one self-published story, several self-published PDFs for my game, and a blog series on how warped the Internet has become.
I feel in complete control of my life, and if God is for me who can be against me. Once you change your perceptions you do change your life. But only you can do that.
So, how can you change your life.
1. If you need therapy and medication, seek out help.
2. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, call up some kind of crisis line for help.
3. Look at objective reality – if you have a roof over your head and 4 walls around you, food in the kitchen, loved ones who support you, and something to do in life, you are blessed. If you don’t have these, and you are still alive and breathing, you are blessed.
4. Dealing with addictions is important step for uprooting depression. If you can get clean, that is your first success, your first positive experience you can draw upon so you can take the next step.
5. There’s studies that show the more spiritual you are, the more it can help. People regularly attending church services, who are seeking healing for emotional wounds, have substantially reduced suicidal behaviours.
Depression is a hard thing to deal with. Suicidal ideation makes it much harder, if you only see death as the only way out of a negative self mindset. But you can turn things around if you seek healing and changing your perceptions of your life!
You are blessed if you can read this!
Amazing Gaming Productions 