the rich and famous have it too!

It can strike anyone at anytime...

I've been learning about Empress Elisabeth of Austria http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Elisabeth_of_Austria, I share a lot of her symptoms and however rich she was she was deeply unhappy; depressed for most of her life. It seems that having it all is not having it all. Elisabeth also had several psychosomatic illness in her life, something I can relate to having fibromyaglia myself. Sisi has her family called her like me had an obsessive personality,  Sisi was obsessed with maintaining a youthful appearance at all times, so much that it made her ill, she suffered from bulimia and insomnia. Grief at losing her only son pushed her to the edge, so much so that her family when learning about her death at the hand of an assassin,  thought at first reports it had been a suicide. This poor woman was plagued by the blackness of depression as a lot of us are.

It does annoy me greatly that people who have never suffered depression think they can judge you and your illness by what you have in your life. I do have a good life to all outward appearances, my family are my rock, and shelter me and comfort me whether I'm good or not, we're certainly not rich by any means and struggle like many to pay bills. My husband has long term health issues and my home is over crowded because my children can't afford to move to places of their own. So yes I have a lot to be depressed about and my situation with money, health, family is reason enough for my depressive episodes. I can't cope with it at all at the moment,  my coping mechanism is lost. So why do I jump to defend those who have more than me and still have depression? Because having it all is stressful, overwhelming and unnerving. If you like me are timid, overwhelmed with social situations and have as I call it a default grumpy gene, then having it all is going to be depressing too. Life isn't easy, people who have worked hard to get to the top are often depressed because once they have got there what else is there? They don't have the fight, the hard work, the struggle anymore so they feel empty and nothingness. The struggle is a trigger for depression but so is the conclusion. Fighting for something makes people happy and fulfilled, I've read about people who struggled through WW2 in London; the blitz, the rationing, the fear for loved ones, the hard work they put in in soup kitchens and tea wagons. They describe a hard but generally happy life with purpose, only to become depressed when the struggle was over the war was won and they had had their purpose in life taken from them. Of course new struggles, new work found them and they coped. But the lesson is sometimes working towards your goal is more satisfying than achieving it.

So I have goals in mind to occupy me while I'm trying to be happy again. I need to remember that getting/struggling/working towards there is going to be the treatment, not the actual goal itself, I can't make it too difficult, but also not too easy. Maybe working towards something is a medicine in itself.