Your Becoming Self: The Existential Search by Laurence Robert Cohen - HTML preview

Saying "Yes" to life in spite of everything—November19, 2011

I lived inside the pain of that depression for years, and for years, it loomed over and undermined the rest of my life.  I struggled mightily to keep it at bay, and in that struggle, I succeeded to a great degree.  The struggle, however, never went away.  Years and years went by, and I got a great deal accomplished in life, but the daily struggle against the depression which was, after all, a struggle with myself, went on every day.  Sometimes I felt exhausted by the struggle just to get out of bed after a night of troubled or non-existent sleep.  For all the struggle I went through each day, I thought it was a really good bargain with this personal demon I had unwittingly chosen.  I could enter into and engage the world as fully as possible whatever the cost, it didn't matter.  The struggle gave me a freedom, albeit limited, I hadn't known before. 

Then I read Frankl, and he told me about suffering and about my free choice of response.  I realized then that I could stop fighting against something that I chosen to appear like and feel like a demon and simply choose not to accept the daily, and sometimes constant, invitation the depression sent me to join in and fall under its sway.  The depression formed a part of me which, at that point, I simply thought was built in, that it "be" part of me as much as my biological sex or my age.  If I couldn't change it, unavoidable suffering Frankl calls it, I could choose how I would respond to it.  I had chosen, unbeknownst to me as a choice, to see depression as an enemy and fight it like mad.  Now that I knew I had a choice, I could make a new choice in response to the invitation.  As I write now, I realize I had always made a choice.  Now that I knew about choice, I could make a new one.

When the idea of choice filled me with power, I could accept the depression as a part of me, like it or not wasn't the point.  I would let it go if I could, or rather, allow it to become a balanced part of me, but that seemed impossible.  I chose to make balance with it by accepting it, even acknowledging it, and choosing to get on with the open life I could live as if the depression could not hold me in a more closed place.  In terms of this writing, I spent years upon years saying "No" to depression.  It worked, but the struggle, the "No" cost me dearly every day.  Some days, often if irregularly, the "No" failed, and I fell back into the morass of depression.  When Frankl introduced me to the idea of choice, I learned how to say "Yes" to life in spite of the depression.  As Frankl writes, I could say "Yes" to life in spite of everything.  I further find now that when I said that colossal "Yes" in spite of everything, I also said "Yes" because of everything.  That "Yes" brought me into a very new feeling of balance and a wonderful increase in life filling energy toward myself and toward the world around me.  I don't know that I reached happiness, but I found a kind of peace in myself I hadn't believed possible. 

I the process of saying "Yes," I questioned and critically reflected on the meaning perspective I held about myself and the depression with which I lived.  I discovered life was not a question of the power of control through the life denying "No" but a much more peaceful and fulfilling question of the power of balance and the life sustaining and celebrating "Yes."  A "Yes" to choice becomes a "Yes" to life.