Are You Making Your Life Unnecessarily Difficult?

We can’t run from ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we should choose the context in which we exist wisely.

Photo by Andrea De Santis

We are all familiar with the concept of not being able to run from ourselves, of how useless it is to change our environment if we are the problem. As Tom Waits pointed out during a concert, ‘You’re okay — I have to live with myself twenty-four hours a day.’

Of course, reality isn’t that simple: it’s not whether we are the problem or not, or whether the environment is the problem or not. Past and present circumstances conspire to create the complex fabric that defines our personality and mood. We may be a problem, or several problems, but we’re hardly ever the problem. And the same goes for our context.

Trying to unravel the many threads that make up our reality isn’t an easy task. To make things even harder, we don’t have any perspective. It would be challenging enough to analyse somebody else’s reality and try to make sense of it. Doing the same for ourselves is nigh on impossible. How to detach ourselves from the things that make us happy and unhappy, how to discern what is toxic and what isn’t?

External factors can lead to depression. Internal factors can lead to depression. Normally, it is likely a…