there's a very lonely and very misunderstood group of people out there who sit at the three-way intersection between severe symptoms of depression generally higher cognitive abilities and a strong sense of ambition wanting a lot out of life or wanting to do a lot with life and the midpoint between those three ven diagrams is a very lonely place to be because we tend to walk through life being really misunderstood and mischaracterized some sometimes even by ourselves because our functioning can change so dramatically from one period of life to the next People Like Us often feel like we don't have a home among peers because we typically alternate between two groups of people who understand certain parts of who we are we probably have people in our Lives who understand our struggles they understand the challenges and the limitations that come with depression these are often maybe like friends from earlier on in Life or or people you met in treatment or just during your darkest days during your rock bottom and they know what it's like to be at that Rock Bottom they in their own way they know what it's like to be at the bottom of life looking up and they understand that about you but they don't necessarily understand what you're trying to do they maybe have accepted some limitations in their life that you are still trying to break through if we know we have a lot of so-called protective factors if we know we have you know a lot going for us other than this big scary depression that screws us up all the time we tend to simultaneously recognize our own challenges and limitations but also feel like we should be doing way more and way better all of the time and the people who understand our depression don't necessarily also understand this sense of guilt and like I should be better and I should be doing more and so then we also have people in our Lives who understand that side of it they they we have our ambitious friends we have our high achieving friends we have our high functioning friends but they don't necessarily understand our depression or our struggle and we kind of feel like complete imposters with each group of people it's like we're not depressed enough to belong with the depressed people because we have these occasional periods where we're very high functioning and very capable but we also don't belong with the people that are high functioning and high capable because we have these feelings of depression we have these periods of of like disruption or disability and so we just always feel like we don't belong we always feel like an outcast before I started my own practice I worked at a hospital and I was pretty involved in a hospital Administration I was on committees and you know U Improvement groups and stuff like that and so I'd be in these boardrooms with you know highlevel Hospital Administration um you know seweet people surgeons oncologist and I would just look around this room and I'd be like what in the hell am I doing here like how did I even end up in this room and when are they all going to realize I don't belong here and and ask me to leave um and I ended up asking myself to leave but that's a whole another story for another day today it's it's this constant sense of like neither place is quite right for me and and I'm displaced and all three of these statuses severe depression High cognitive abilities and high ambition or strong ambition they're all pretty lonely in and of themselves I mean severe depression is statistically atypical most people don't have any depression and of those who do have it most aren't severe High cognitive abilities are just by you know pure laws of averages they're statistically atypical the third I guess is just my opinion but I think being highly ambitious is is an unusual human trait um I think most people are and I don't necess like I know especially the last two high cognitive abilities and high ambition I I get that this kind of feels like a humble brag and like oo I I have too much of these good things please feel so bad for me it's not that it's not that at all both of those things are very much double-edged swords the way I would describe I feel like I'm a high ambition person except the way I describe it is I suck at being content like nothing's ever good enough for me I can never rest I can never relax I always want more no matter what I have I actually don't really like it about myself if I'm being frank and if I knew how to shut it off I would be sorely tempted to do that but as far as I'm aware I don't have a mechanism for that and and higher cognitive abilities just means you learn faster it doesn't mean you're better at learning good things and as I've talked about before in other pieces of content sometimes it just means that you learn that other people don't like like you more quickly or you learn that you're a screw-up or a weirdo more quickly because it requires fewer repetitions of any particular piece of information for your brain to say I now know this I now consider this to be a fact and I will integrate this into my identity and it will affect the way I interact with the world in general and compounding all of the loneliness that comes with sitting in the middle of all three of those things is the fact that other people tend to underestimate our struggles because nobody really knows how anybody else feels so we infer Feelings by functionality and if somebody is generally quote doing well in life we tend to assume that they're also feeling pretty good but that's often untrue there are a lot of people out there who have good jobs excellent educations loving families stereotypically good looks who are hanging on for dear life every day I have seen people in my comments more than once say that they don't believe I could have ever struggled with depression because they think that I am handsome which first of all debatable anyway second of all even if it were objectively true it would be cool if it works that way but it doesn't it doesn't at all work that way and in fact sometimes it's another double-edged sword any of those things can be because all it does is it is it causes us to have one more reason to feel guilt and shame when we're still depressed it's like I know I'm very aware that I have things in my life that many people do not I have many blessings I have many wonderful things and when I am at Rock Bottom mood-wise all I can really do with those things is feel guilty about the fact that I have them and I still can't feel happy that that something in my brain says this stuff is not enough for me I don't feel good about that that makes me actually kind of feel like a terrible person if I'm being frank and so all of these so-called advantages that we have that Dark Twisted pessimistic part of our brain just uses it as one more piece of information that justifies how screwed up it tells us that we are I mean it's kind of like saying you know like that person doesn't look autistic which of course is is a stupid thing to say because autism is not does not have a a visible characteristic to it what does a depressed person look like we aren't all like disheveled and bedridden those are just stereotypes they're sometimes true but they're not always true and people tend to think that being smart is a buffer for depression or for just life problems in general I've literally had people say to me in response to like a vulnerable disclosure that I'm struggling something along the lines of like well that sucks but you're smart so you'll figure it out like my depression is just a long division problem or something the thing is there's an invisible tax on the cost of all behaviors so everything you do every Behavior costs some certain amount of energy right physical oral Al we're spending energy throughout the day and the tax on that behavior the additional cost is based on our mood and so the worse mood you're in the more depressed anxious or angry you are the higher the tax and our moods shift so dramatically with the severe depression that the tax also shifts dramatically way more frankly than most people understand and the people around us don't always understand how we could do so well know last month let's say but now we're struggling with the basics this month and well why is that well it's because the tax on everything went up by 300% because I'm in a depressed episode now and so you know making food for myself maybe took 10% of my energy last month and now it takes 40% because of the invisible tax that's magnified by my mood and because we've had these unsustainable periods of Higher Achievement in the past and in many cases we've been told from a young age by you know parents and teachers and coaches and whoever else that we have so much potential that anytime we are not like at the absolute top of whatever we're doing we feel like we're behind even if we're quote on track in life whatever that means it's arbitrary anyway um and we often aren't you know on track so to speak because of our depression but even if we are it still doesn't feel like enough it still feels like we're behind because we've been told for so long or at least we've been told things that make us feel this way we should be ahead you know we should be leading the pack we should be doing better than most people and so even keeping up feels like we're behind it feels like it is not enough and that makes it very hard if not impossible for us to appreciate the quote normal moments of Life which are often some of the best moments we always feel like we're supposed to be doing more just because we can some of the time downtime tends to be a stressor rather than a source of relaxation because nothing ever feels good enough and so not doing anything productive feels like a waste of time it's Sunday mornings with my family are are simultaneously like one of my favorite times because we just chill and we're just together and nothing has to happen and there aren't tasks and then there's a part of my brain that just can't even handle that and it and it just feels like my life is just draining away from me and again this is why I say it being quote um High ambition really just means you at being content it's a double-edged sword depressive episodes can feel even worse to us because they are completely against our nature we generally don't enjoy downtime or relaxation our brains are conditioned to prefer accomplishment or achievement so when we don't feel good enough to do any of the things that produce those feelings it you get this weird feeling it's almost like you were living inside of someone else's mind and body and life and not our own and it's it's not derealization but it kind of feels a little bit like derealization it's like who even am I right now and because of all this when the depression relents even a little bit we tend to go all in cuz we're behind right we feel like we have to make up for all the time we've lost we have to catch up to our true potential and now is the time the symptoms have relented a little bit I've got a little more energy I've got a little more motivation and so now it's time to get caught up now it's time to fix all these problems that I've accidentally created through inactivity and we can do it for a little while we do good or maybe even great for a while then we crash again because another period of severe depression hits and this pattern makes it feel like achieving some arbitrary benchmarks of of productivity or achievement must be the solution to our problems because when we function at a higher level we feel better but we can never maintain that higher level of functioning and we can also never maintain a good mood and because we're reasonably smart people we see this obvious correlation here we see this pattern we infer causation from it but we misunderstand the directionality of the relationship what if it isn't that you feel better when you do more but that you do more when you feel better and that essentially is my hypoth hypthesis for how people like us can break out of this cycle and it is a hypothesis that at least for me has been true rather than pursuing achievement and accomplishment and higher functionality as the vehicle towards feeling better more consistently I pursue feeling better consistently as the vehicle towards achievement and functionality because they don't actually matter otherwise the metaphor I like to use to explain this is say you're building a house the part of the house or the parts of the house that you're most excited to build are probably akin to the finishing touches right you're excited about things like Appliance selection and paint color and things like that like the stuff that really makes it look unique and interesting and makes it your house but what's the most important part of a house it's the foundation it's what everything else rests upon and if you build in awesome house on an unstable Foundation you won't have an awesome house for very long now that obviously you have probably figured it out already the house in this metaphor it's your life and if you're a high ambition person you're trying to build a big house this house is large it's complicated it's heavy it needs a strong Foundation to rest upon or it's not going to stay up the bigger the house you want to build the stronger the foundation needs to be and that Foundation is the basic elements of your self-care it's your habits it's your physical health it's your inner dialogue it's the boring fundamental unglamorous parts of life the parts of life that are under stimulating that don't excite your brain and they're the parts that you keep rushing if I'm right this is just me this is what I did they're the parts I kept rushing and rushing those parts was the reason I kept falling back to square one and couldn't sustain anything so I propose that you start if you're at square one right now that you start by building a safe place in this world just for you both physically and internally inside your own mind inside your own mind should be a safe place and I don't mean safe as in you blindly affirm every single thing you think or feel I mean that what happens in there is respectful that even if there's contention or concern or problems that they're handled respectfully empathically and not judgmentally or insultingly or abusively and that you build this Foundation one thing at a time that all this rush and all this pressure that you tend to feel when you're doing even just a little bit better to say now is my time to fix all the stuff that's been broken now is my time to get to this high level that I keep working my way up towards but can't stay at one thing at a time pick one part of your life maybe sleep for example or your inner dialogue pick one area and focus as much of your time as much of your energy as much of your attention as you can on that one thing and work on building things one at a time that won't break when the pressure hits because every time we feel a little bit better there's this part of us that thinks maybe this is it like maybe I'm maybe I'm cured maybe this is the one that's going to last the risk of sounding pessimistic I've yet to get there I it's a chronic condition it es and flows and we have good periods of time for sure but if you live your life on on the foundational idea that this is the last time your brain's going to challenge you and mess with you I I think you're in for another fallback because that's just how these things usually go so rather than hoping that this is the time that you don't have to have a foundation because the pressure isn't going to hit again why don't we focus on building things that won't break when the pressure hits and speaking of the pressure what if you backed off yourself just a little bit or like maybe a lot because this whole idea of fulfilling your potential is fundamentally flawed and maybe even just a little bit narcissistic because for one it's not truly possible no one who who fully fulfills their potential as a human being who has done that no living human being has done that it's not an actual thing that we can achieve and not only that it doesn't really matter like like who do you owe it to to live up to whatever potential you think you have do you owe it to society they they don't care they'll forget about you when you're done anyway it doesn't matter do you owe it to yourself because it's making you miserable to try isn't it don't turn your gifts into obligations that's a Surefire way to ruin your life just let them be just try to enjoy them and appreciate them and use them for good here and there but don't use them to just Guilt Trip yourself don't don't use the things you're good at or the talents that you've been blessed with to anoint yourself the savior of the world and then tell yourself you're a worthless piece of crap if you can't live up to your own unrealistic expectations about that yes have goals yes have Ambitions but don't make your goals and Ambitions conditions for happiness because when you do this you just create an arbitrary and artificial middleman between yourself and what you really want don't live your life trying to appease an invisible gatekeeper who you invented it's very hard to effectively care about the micro and the macro simultaneously so the micro is like the mundane elements of your individual personal life right and the macro is like the world and society and and and all the big picture stuff and I know I know I get it I know you see the Brokenness and the suffering and it just kills you and and you know that you theoretically have the tools and skills to do something about it like long term not that you could fix it but that you could help and maybe someday you will but you know what you need first you need a solid foundation you need a place to stand that isn't going to crumble underneath your feet while you are trying to do that work and you are going to have to be the one who builts it achievement in and of itself is not the solution to your problem you cannot fix what is broken inside of you by rearranging the various pieces of what's outside of you if you are anything like me and I've been talking for a long time so if you're still listening I'm going to assume that you are at least a little bit like me you need to begin within this distress call that you're hearing it's coming from inside the house and so that's where you need to start I hope that this makes sense to you I hope you found at least one or two nuggets in here that were helpful to you and I hope to see you again take care and good luck