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I think like, a lot of things in life, when we feel it
all of the sudden, we notice it everywhere.
As I got into this, I realized through studies that one in four women
are on anti-anxiety or antidepressant medication,
which also means there's probably another one in four that are considering it,
that possibly need it, that feel plagued by it.
So that means in every family, someone suffers from this.
If it's not you, it's someone that you know and love, and it might even ebb
and flow.
I think it's silence and stillness that cause those things
to surface in us. So often we can just distract ourselves with busy
and we just kinda stuff it down, but when you're stressed, it pushes whatever's
in to the out and all of the sudden, you have to face
the junk. And so I think for women, when we
when we feel
this loss or this fear of
purposelessness,
depression and anxiety are the root of fear
so it settles in and depression is when we lose a
hope for the future. We've lost an imagination for what our lives might
look like,
and we're not really sure where to go with that.
I started to do some reading and
I came across Victor Frankel's work, and he wrote an 850-page book. If
you've got a lot of time on your hands, it's called "Man's Search for Meaning."
And he's a Holocaust survivor and he really details and chronicles
the beauty of suffering and what suffering does and what it works out,
and part of his premise is that the root of anxiety
is unfulfilled responsibility.
And first time I heard that I was like,
whoa, because I knew that while I had been struggling with this,
I had also been struggling with questions of meaning
and purpose and was I giving myself and my time
toward something that mattered? Was I contributing
in a way that redeemed something that was broken.
And I just felt lost. I think a lot of us women fade when we don't know who we are
so if you were to ask,
when do you feel joy? Honestly, I feel joy
and purpose when I am able to connect with someone in their pain because I
know
what that feels like. When we walk
in things that are painful, we feel that pain with others
so it makes sense now that meaning for me is when I'm able to use
a gift of writing to talk about a struggle
of anxiety or depression. So that's the first part I think
of what I started to learn when I started to awaken to meaning.
And it took me having this free-fall
to really ask these deeper questions of life.