10:21am January 19, 2014

➸ the best advice i've ever gotten

smilekiditgetsbetter:

If you think moving to another school, city or state is going to make you happy, it isn’t.

If you think buying new clothes, makeup or shoes is going to make you happy, it isn’t.

These things may help momentarily, but the truth is you follow you everywhere you go….

Also, in some cases, the new location may have resources that can help alleviate the depression, while the old location didn’t.

For instance…

I’ve always had a mortal fear of driving a car ever since I started learning to drive, in part because my sensory processing gets overloaded enough that I go into shutdown. I never got to the point of feeling remotely comfortable enough behind the wheel that I would have even considered driving alone.

I used to live in a part of Georgia where public transportation ran once an hour and skipped some parts of town by over a mile; this was not helped by the fact that many major roads were completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Naturally, this frequently left me feeling depressed about my inability to drive.

I now live in an inner suburb of Boston where transit runs every 10-15 minutes. As a result, I feel like I can finally do things on my own schedule; I no longer have to set aside two hours of my day to get enough groceries that I can manage to carry home.

My inability to drive is significantly less of a barrier here than it was in Georgia, and thus, something that used to be a major contributor to depression for me is barely even on my radar anymore.

codeman38:

smilekiditgetsbetter:

If you think moving to another school, city or state is going to make you happy, it isn’t.

If you think buying new clothes, makeup or shoes is going to make you happy, it isn’t.

These things may help momentarily, but the truth is you follow you everywhere you go….

Also, in some cases, the new location may have resources that can help alleviate the depression, while the old location didn’t.

For instance…

I’ve always had a mortal fear of driving a car ever since I started learning to drive, in part because my sensory processing gets overloaded enough that I go into shutdown. I never got to the point of feeling remotely comfortable enough behind the wheel that I would have even considered driving alone.

I used to live in a part of Georgia where public transportation ran once an hour and skipped some parts of town by over a mile; this was not helped by the fact that many major roads were completely inhospitable to pedestrians. Naturally, this frequently left me feeling depressed about my inability to drive.

I now live in an inner suburb of Boston where transit runs every 10-15 minutes. As a result, I feel like I can finally do things on my own schedule; I no longer have to set aside two hours of my day to get enough groceries that I can manage to carry home.

My inability to drive is significantly less of a barrier here than it was in Georgia, and thus, something that used to be a major contributor to depression for me is barely even on my radar anymore.

Also, I know that moving to a really distant location with a different climate and everything alleviated my PTSD symptoms and made me massively happier because mere proximity to things that had happened to me made me constantly on guard and amped up on adrenaline. It didn’t solve all my problems but it made me considerably happier.

Otherwise good advice though.

Notes: