What a heavy burden it is to have to battle with the world to get what you want and if the world does not respond, to have to battle with yourself. How hard it is to believe that if you are poor, ill, ugly or unlucky it is your own fault; that you are flawed and so must change. These ideas suggest that you are an accumulation of various shortcoming

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There is a way, with moderate moral imagination and considerable countercultural courage, to subvert this tendency without turning away from the reality and magnitude of suffering that we do live with — a way to esteem in attention and admiration not the unluckiness of what has happened to us but the luckiness that, despite it, we have become the p... See more

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness ... See more