Date With Destiny ("Suicide Day") Part 2

What it awakened and held still

It’s been some time since my last update. I have been scrambling with getting my work life back in motion since the FTX contagion- thank you for sticking around. 

I have been reading a lot of Plath lately. In her unabridged journals, she writes:

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

It viscerally reminds me of when my mind gets lost in translation over all the goals I’ve never met and all the places I’ve wanted to go but haven’t gotten to. There’s something so integral about being attracted to the pain. You become so adapted to the parts of yourself that hurt more than the things in life making you happy and you let your failures guide you more than your value. I think that’s why relationships fall apart— it isn’t the potential infidelity or the quiet insecurities that pick away at our scabs; it’s the pity we salvage to continuously feel until we grow numb of reality and reality is.. it really isn’t as bad as we make it out to be. 

At least that’s how Tony Robbins describes ‘depression’— one’s chosen physiology. A Stanford-based study boasts a whopping 100% recovery from depression but without a deeper read/understanding, people will easily mistaken ‘traditional therapy’ for psychotherapy. It is vital to explain that traditional therapy = drug therapy = psychiatry. The study was also conducted 30 days post seminar— those type of results are believable in that window of time. I’m curious to see a 6-month and 1-year post seminar update when the highs from the event are worn off. The whitepaper can be found here.

It was day 3 of the seminar when my friend, a Tony Robbins veteran, elbowed me gently and whispered into my ear: “Oh, I think today is suicide day.” He didn’t know a lot about me but enough to know that I grapple with depression and have often tried to bring awareness to the unbearable mental pain people may feel. I sheepishly grinned as a response.