If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides.
This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.
Calling has this weight that somehow we think that your calling is fixed. That your calling is this line that you’ve finally found and now you're on that track and that’s what you’re gonna do forever and maybe that's the case. But I feel like calling has much more to to do with the moment that you’re in.
Whereas I used to get depressed or neurotic or dwell on things, I see my son's bright eyes and smile in the morning, and suddenly, I don't feel like I'm depressed anymore. There's nothing to be depressed about when you've got that.
It can be difficult going through a period of time where you feel depressed because it can become your identifier. In the sense that you wake up, you're depressed; you talk to your friends, you're complaining that you're depressed; you talk to your parents, you're unmotivated. You know what you could do to try to overcome it - although obviously there's no cure - but you start to feel like, 'what will happen to me if I feel better? Who am I when I'm happy. I'm so used to feeling like this.'
Once you get depressed, you don't really feel like doing anything. You're kind of discouraged about yourself, and then the weight gain, too, or that makes me more depressed.
Stand-up wasn't a calling. It was more like, 'What can I do that isn't going to make me really depressed?'
I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.
How do I change? If I feel depressed I will sing. If I feel sad I will laugh. If I feel ill I will double my labor. If I feel fear I will plunge ahead. If I feel inferior I will wear new garments. If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice. If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come. If I feel incompetent I will think of past success. If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals. Today I will be the master of my emotions.
Overly positive, horrendously cheerful people can make a depressed person even more depressed. In fact, perhaps the least helpful thing one can say to a depressed person is, "Cheer up!"
I just try to keep busy. I find sometimes, when I put my emotions into records, I don't feel as depressed. It's so easy to get depressed. Sometimes it makes me feel better. Sometimes it makes me feel the same. But, the same squared. So, monumentally the same.
When I realized I was depressed, then I started reading up about it. When I read that one in four people are depressed, I felt that I'm not the only one. I also felt that how many people must be feeling suffocated to fight this battle all alone. I just wanted to reach out and tell them that even I'm like you, and it's okay if you feel like that.
A calling is the place where your gifts, abilities, desires, and feelings of worth all meet. When you follow your calling, you feel at home, at peace - you feel as though you're where you're meant to be.
I guess there are a lot of writers out there who get really inspired when they're depressed. I can't write about being depressed until I'm happy. That's all there is to it. I need space.
Typically, when you have a depressed individual, they feel hopeless. They feel miserable. Their mind is racing, their heart is pounding. They feel anxious. They feel exhausted yet they can't sleep.
If the dominant political expression that we're seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won't really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies - when we're depressed, we're much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes.
Every movie I do, I always use things that have happened in my life. Funny moments, anything. If it just sticks out I'll write it down and use that, too, because it has to come out of you. But no one can work when they're depressed. I don't think I'd physically be able to do it if I were depressed.