Up from Down, or, Getting Over Mild Depression by Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A.
As a counseling psychic I encounter a wide range of human problems. One of the most common is boredom or periods of mild depression. I have client-friends who display symptoms of that pervasiveness sense of unhappiness that indicates mild depression. After a night of unrelenting pain and very little sleep, I was headed in that direction myself today... until I thought about it. As an active psychic counselor, I always have work to do, and if not that, projects that also need attention. But when in a gray mood, head seemingly stuffed with cotton, the inner eye unable to focus and an aging body that loathes to move for fear another muscle cramp will wrench my leg, I remain in a half stupor but more awake than asleep. So what to do. How to get going. How to come up from under a dark funk and become positive and active once again is the problem to solve.
While growing up, I was fortunate in some ways, though creative people always view their childhood as having been fairly bleak or even rotten. I was an only begotten child and both my parents worked. Being generous folks, they bought me toys. Everything from boxing gloves to a microscope to view my own eyelashes through. Not everything I thought I wanted at the time, but I got a lot. Toys that I enjoyed, that I used to make me happy in my alone Land of Pretend. My closest buddy lived a couple of miles away so I spent long periods sans company. I loved humor as a kid and for quite a while wanted to be a cartoonist since I waited each long week for the Sunday “funny papers” to come. Growing older I decided I’d rather be a stand up comedian like the ones I heard on “radio”. Funny people such as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. But before becoming a touring psychic counselor and speaker, I became a stand-up classroom teacher with a sense of humor. But even as an adult I’ve spent prolonged periods of time alone between girlfriends and wives which gave near-constant opportunity to suffer mild depression or find ways to get up and over whatever seemed to be bothering me.
Toys and developed interests always got me through. Instead of slumping and slouching around wasting my precious time, I’ve had a range of toys and interests to choose from to get up and over mild depression, those feelings of empty loneliness and general unhappiness. Fortunately I had a father who messed around with many musical instruments, my favorite being the mandolin that I also took up when I was maybe fourteen. Why I left the school marching band is another story. Oboe was best left, I decided, to snake charmers. The drum had been denied. In short order I was playing lead mandolin in my teacher’s band, all of us his students and that became my social life. And once again I was fortunate to have parents who loved and listened to all the old time popular music. So many, many down times over the years, when mild depression and feelings of unhappiness struck, I’d gather up my mandolin and sheet music and play for an hour or so, and maybe even sing, and then the blue funk was gone. Not everybody plays music, but everyone can have an equivalent, something they get off on doing when alone and a bit down. Mandolin has been my adult toy, but not only that.
One of the best things that can happen to a person with at least moderate intelligence is to become schooled in reading and writing. Reading that matters, not the junk and pap of the day. Books that makes one think while being entertained. And if so blessed with talent to write, one can come up by going within and writing a personal journal, a book of observations and reflections. When I used to write “Confessional Poetry”, I called the results “harnessed hang-ups”. That which could depress me, mildly, I turned into expressive poems that other people could relate to. So, I was not only a musician, but a poet as well. Those have been two of my many basic toys always available when the dark clouds descend and cause unhappiness, my vague sense of loneliness and emotional distress. My toys are and have been both positive and compensatory.
As a psychic counselor, I sometimes help my client-friends to remember their favorite toys, their positive and potentially fulfilling activities that can help them up from that occasional blue funk that like a fat toad squats on one’s soul and won’t get off. Developed or developing talents or interests can save us from much generalized unhappiness and emotional distress that we call being depressed. If we have identifiable problems, the first thing we might ask ourselves is if we have any control over such situations. Or if what we concern ourselves with is any of our cotton-pickin’ business in the first place! Letting others live their own lives as they see fit and the best way they know how can go a long way in getting rid of problems we don’t have in the first place. Meddlers and control freaks need to learn that for starters. Doing so, by sweeping out what does not belong to us, can clear up a large portion of what we regard as “depressing” problems. As a psychic counselor, I teach my client-friends such things when I can and if they listen instead of choosing to wallow in problems that are not problems at all since they are not the owners.
But, that squat toad can still sit on one’s soul for other reasons, ones that do belong to us. That is a good time, a very good time, to remember our adult toys, that which pleases us to play with, that energizes and gets us up and doing once again. If nothing else, a curious person always has much to learn. I am a book store addict, same as I was when riffling through the magazine rack and book stand at the town drug store when I was a kid. Now, as then, I buy what I can afford, books that might possibly be interesting, if not at the time, later, like when suffering a blue funk. In current time, I have my Best Friend Mister-Doctor-Professor Google who always has rousing material I’ve wanted to know about. As I say, learning to read and write, and think a bit, can save us from the unnecessary pain of unhappiness and mild depression when it descends. And the best thing is that there are toys for people with every bent or kink, not only us verbal-conceptual types.
Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com. For more information about psychic readings my e-mail my address is psychicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com
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