Consider This: Depression Museum

Those who struggle with depression may approach everyday decisions differently from others, believing that the outcome of each decision they make, each action they take, demonstrates something fundamental about their character.

The person susceptible to depression relies upon feedback from their environment to gauge their self-worth. Positive feedback validates their worth as an individual, but negative feedback can just as quickly strip them of self-worth.

Good outcomes say that they are competent and intelligent, they are someone who is reliable. But bad outcomes proclaim to the world that they are not mature enough to handle adult responsibilities.

To make matters worse, one bad outcome may remind them of other bad outcomes, until they are buried beneath the crush of their (perceived) failures, and the possibility of living a happier life seems entirely out of their reach.

I call a review of bad outcomes from the past, making a visit to the Depression Museum, where exhibitions of work, relationship, and parenting failures are on prominent display.

Let’s say that a person vulnerable to depression finds themselves stuck in traffic, late to a staff meeting. They arrive at work feeling flustered, apologetic. Sensitive to how others may view their late arrival, they keep their head down during the remainder of the staff meeting and avoid eye-contact. When someone asks them a question, they mumble their response.

With a little distance from the event, this individual may recover their emotional footing, but later that evening they attend an exhibition of their work failures — arriving late for meetings, missing deadlines, inarticulate expression of thoughts and ideas.

The visit to the Depression Museum strips them of their self-confidence. They lose sight of their value as an employee. They disengage from coworkers, keep their thoughts and ideas to themselves. Their supervisor begins to write substandard performance reviews and any opportunity for promotions is scuttled. Work, which once provided them with a sense of purpose, no longer offers them fulfillment.

One way that a person susceptible to depression can end this vicious cycle — depending upon the environment for their sense of self-worth — is to embrace what Buddhism calls our Basic Goodness.

Because of our Basic Goodness, we enter the world already worthy of love, already worthy of respect, already worthy of the opportunity to live a happy and fulfilling life. We don’t need favorable outcomes to prove our worth, either to ourselves or to others. Our worth comes from the inside, as a manifestation of our Basic Goodness.

Having spent a lifetime searching outside of ourselves for our self-worth, agonizing over decisions, trying to please others so that they confirm that we are in fact okay, we may have missed out on the opportunity to cultivate self-awareness: What is truly important to us? What are our guiding principles and values? What is our “true north?”

Once we know the answer to these questions, we will be able to utilize our internal compass to navigate the twists and turns of life, without getting lost. Aligning our behavior more closely with our core principles and values ensures that our inner compass reliably points us to our true north.

Once the person vulnerable to depression understands that their self-worth is a manifestation of their Basic Goodness, setbacks no longer derail them. When, because of a traffic jam, they arrive late to work, they don’t waste time berating themselves for something that was outside of their control. Instead, they take a series of slow, deep breaths to calm their nervous system. Next, they focus on the discussion at hand and await an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution.

Since their late arrival doesn’t make them feel like a failure, there’s no reason for them to revisit previous work mistakes at the Depression Museum. Their confidence in themselves remains intact and they continue to find fulfillment in their job.

Before we learn that our worth is an internal matter, a manifestation of our Basic Goodness, we may expect that even those who know us best value us more when we achieve a positive outcome and value us less when our decisions result in an undesirable outcome.

But now we can see that those who care about us have never relied upon external measures of success and failure to judge our worth — they understand that our Basic Goodness entitles us to love, respect, and the opportunity to live a happy and fulfilling life. The tension we felt awaiting the judgment of those we care about begins to dissipate, leaving room for appreciably more intimacy.