I'm Not Sad Anymore

I’ve got a new state of mind and I hope it sticks.

Ever since I’ve gotten older and matured (term used very loosely), I’ve found that it has become increasingly easy for me to become depressed. Once you get it in your head that you feel shitty, it is the only thing you can think about. When that happens, it overwhelms you. The more you think about how bad you feel, the more it takes hold of you and you feel worse.

I listen to a lot of hardcore bands that preach a positive mental attitude (PMA). Whenever I was in a good mood it was definitely something I followed. Keeping a cool head and always feeling good. But I really had it all wrong looking back at it now. I confused feeling good with having a positive attitude. It is damn impossible to feel good all of the time. Shitty stuff happens to everybody and everyone feels like crap sometimes.

This time though, I made a change.

For the month of November, I felt pretty crappy. Through personal life, professional (school stuff), etc. I felt like I was really falling short. The climb back kind of started because of one event. I was talking to the lead singer of Daggermouth on MySpace (they had to go on hiatus so he could be treated for depresson). The advice he gave me was “...find something you love and just do it. Fuck the outside pressure” and that was something that I really needed to hear. It’s hard to just start thinking one way after being used to another for so long, but I tried to incorporate.

Something that has a bit of significance later on; I watched Good Will Hunting for the first time in this period.

The Wonder Years were a band that I sort of liked but not a whole lot. Every now and then I throw on their jams but for some reason thought their older stuff was juvenile. November was when the build up to their new album, The Upsides, was starting. I follow the singer on twitter so I would be getting updates on the tour throughout the month. Each time he used twitter he would tag his messages with either theupsides or imnotsadanymore. Their older music wasn’t exactly negative, but some of their songs had lyrics and a vibe that said “there’s a lot of stuff wrong in my life”. Now it was like the band was saying “we need to be happy”. This really got to me.

I started doing one thing that really helped; focusing on the little things. You can’t only think about the big issues in your life. As absolutely terrible as this sounds, the bigger things never work exactly as you planned. They are always changing, because of all the things that happen to you every day. Take pleasure in the things that you enjoy about your day. Notice the small stuff that goes right, it makes your day ten times better. When you’re in a mood like that it lets you think clearly, it helps you a lot.

I was already poised to be in a better mood, when I remembered something. I was in the shower and I recalled a scene from Good Will Hunting. It was the one when Robin Williams confronts Matt Damon and keeps saying “It’s not your fault” until Damon breaks down. I started thinking to myself “It’s not your fault” about all the different situations in my life. It’s one thing to take responsibility for your actions, but you cannot blame yourself for all of your problems.

It’s not your fault.

That night I went to a show. I went mainly to see the band Sights and Sounds, but the headliner was Moneen, who I’ve never listened to. This is an important point; I’ve never listened to them. All in all, I thought that I would be poised to be in a really bad spot emotionally at this show. But what happened was the complete opposite. I was around the right people and the right music. Moneen put on an incredible show, definitely one of the best ones I’ve ever seen. The performance was an overwhelming catharsis of positive energy. The band and the crowd were completely in sync and you can tell that it meant a lot to all of the kids there to see them. I thought it was pretty rad that a band who I didn’t even listen to could do that for you. But it definitely did.

It was through the later part of that day and the show that I really began to understand what was meant by a positive mental attitude. It’s not being happy every second of every day, that is impossible. It’s understanding that you can overcome the things that make you bummed out. You need to keep your head, because if you don’t then it will only get worse. Shitty things happen, but you can control how you take it.

“So chin up and we’ll drown a little slower”