Elena's Legacy. Texts written by Elena, excerpts from texts she liked, her artworks.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Lindsay - Chapter XVI

A month went by since Lindsay found her job as a waitress. By now she knew everybody and, as always, some people liked while others did not. For example, one waiter completely ignored her. He never said hi or talked to her whatsoever. Lindsay was the kind of person for whom it was very important to get along with everybody, so she paid close attention to this seemingly unimportant detail and felt rejected. Her newly found psychiatrist told her that it was part of her depression, otherwise she would focus on the positive sides of her work and on the people who liked her (and that was almost everybody).

In regards to focusing on the positive instead of the negative, psychologists have found an explanation by conducting studies. For example, abnormal psychology, the branch of the social science that deals with dysfunction and mental health, dictates that in depression there appears to be selective attention. People with the condition tend to concentrate on the negative and forego the positive. A characteristic of depression, or Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), seems to be loss of self-esteem. Again, psychologists have found that people with low self-esteem tend to notice more frowning faces in an array of smiling faces to a greater degree than people with high self-esteem. According to the researchers, the finding meant that people with a negative self-image tend to expect more judgement and rejection from others than people with a positive self-image.

Lindsay's dundelion flowers.

Today Lindsay woke up very tired. She did not feel like going to work, but she knew she had to. She even thought about calling in sick, but she changed her mind quickly. First of all, today was payday. Second, she had only worked three days this week, while she usually worked four shifts per week. So she got ready and left. But she was in for a surprise…

She was serving patrons when the most handsome gentleman walked in. She had to stop herself from staring. What’s more, he was sitting in her section, so naturally she went over to take his order. She was amazed by his polite, but flirtatious demeanor. He tipped her really well and in a very shy way asked her if he could have her number. Of course, she was delighted that he did. She gave him her number and he left, while she continued to work. His name was Brandon and he was as charming as he was handsome. He called her in the evening and asked her out. Even though she was really interested, she declined. She believed in playing hard to get. She was old enough to know that being too easy would quickly bore the other person.

She saw romance and dating as a game and she wanted to be and remain a challenge. Ideally, she would propose an alternative such as joining her with her girlfriends, or group of friends, but since she was a loner she had none. She started to think whether a relationship was even possible due to her lack of friends. She knew some people would be quite turned off by such a state of affairs.

Lindsay – Chapter XVII

After refusing a couple of dates, Lindsay finally went to a romantic rendez-vous with Brandon. Like a true gentleman, he picked her up at her home. At first she gave it some serious thought. She didn’t necessarily want someone who was still a stranger to know where she lived. But they had been talking for a while on the phone, so she felt like they knew each other somewhat.

So the day of their romantic date finally came… Lindsay took her time to get ready, it took her at least two hours. Getting ready seems much longer for women than for men. For example, Lindsay had to do her hair and put on her make-up, which was a routine that lasted a while. On the other hand, men can simply put on some gel and they’re pretty much ready to go. It was time, Brandon called her. He was downstairs. She went to meet him.

When she arrived downstairs, her heart skipped a beat. Brandon looked gorgeous. He was wearing a suit by Versace. He was driving a Maybach, her favourite car. Lindsay was difficult to impress… But she was impressed this time around.

Lindsay's blue flowers. Photo by Elena

Obviously, he had made reservations in one of the best restaurants in the city. She had never been there. Sure she was impressed, but she remained cautious. She didn’t yet know this man’s intentions. So, she wasn’t ready to fall in love.

Falling in love is a process. No need to rush it. Interestingly, it happens naturally but can be stopped. Indeed, there is a way to stop yourself from falling for someone. However, no matter how hard one tries, most people will experience heartbreak at least once in their lives.

The date was a success. The restaurant was perfect. Both in terms of food and service. The atmosphere was awesome as well. After dinner Brandon drove Lindsay home.

Lindsay - Chapter XVIII

Lindsay – Chapter XVIII

Lindsay always wanted to become an accountant. However, it was a lot easier to say than to do… In order to become an accountant, she had to go back to university and earn another degree. The degree she had was in Fine Arts and it was pretty much useless to her. What could she do with a Fine Arts degree? The problem was that she changed her mind about being an artist halfway through her undergraduate years… too many starving artists she thought.

But because she lost interest and also because of the tragedy that happened to her, she got bad grades in university. Of course with a low GPA (grade point average) her chances to eventually become, for example, an accountant were slim to none. So in between of crying over all the photographs which burned away, she was considering getting a certificate. She could get one at a private college or at the continuing education faculty of a renown university. Most continuing education departments had lower standards of admission than the strict requirements for enrolling in an actual degree…

Lindsay's old flowers. Photo by Elena

She knew she had to go back to school to get the necessary skills to land a better job. She felt like she was wasting her time as a waitress with a B.A. (bachelor of arts). She asked the other waitresses and waiters about their education and found out that she was the only one to have graduated from university.

On the personal side of her life, she and Brandon moved fairly quickly into being girlfriend and boyfriend. He even told her that he loved her, but she said nothing in return. She did not believe him as it was way too soon, according to her and common sense, to use such a strong word. She believed feelings took time to develop and she also thought that she was better off keeping her guard up.

Stages of Grief

People grieve all over the world. They generally reserve their deepest mourning mostly for the same thing: the death of a loved one. Grief is powerful.

In her book “On Death and Dying”, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross examined what people go through when they discover that they have a terminal disorder. She said that they went through stages of grief. The named of theses stages have become part of the public conversation about grief:

Denial: This is the first stage, when a person first hears about their disorder and pretty much refuses to believe it.
Anger: This is the stage when it begins to sink in that the person is terminal, and it really makes them angry.
Bargaining: This is when people try to negotiate their way out of the bad news. The bargaining can be directed at God, usually an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
Depression: This is when the person understand that there's nothing he or she can do – nothing will stop the bad stuff from coming.
Acceptance: This final stage is mostly an emotional white flag. It's often accompanied by a feeling of peace, however bittersweet it may be.

Not everyone experiences all five stages when they grieve – nor does everyone go through the stages in the described order when the stages were present. Some people flit between one stage and another, moving back and forth between them.

Kubler-Ross, more than anyone else, has put our grief responses to death and dying into the public discourse. That includes the research world, and because of that, we owe her a great debt. However she published her book in 1969, a time when our understanding of how the brain works was much more primitive that it is now.

Almost everybody suffers memory loss with aging. Almost everybody suffers from something we call refocusing problems with aging. There are ways to slow down the cognitive decline -or, better, to substantially delay the inevitable. Social interactions and exercise can slow the natural erosion of the aging brain.

Sadly, memories are susceptible to degradation with time. A cemetary. Photo by Elena.

Happiness and Its Absence

Nature is hardly the whole story regarding happiness, of course. Psychologist Martin Seligman says that set ranges are only part of the story – that a great deal of happiness includes environmental factors and choices that are completely under your control.

What research says makes you happy can be summarized in two sentences: Relationships make you happy. Money does not. One of the most potent surefire ways to sustain happiness in your life has to do with relating to other people – for example, cultivating and maintaining lots of friends. The more friends you have in your life, and the more you interact with them, the happier you are statistically likely to be.

Another aspect that science knows about making people happy is the amount of time people spend seeking out how to make other people happy. One of the greatest predictors of happiness turns out to be how outwardly focused you are on the needs of others, including volunteering and doing charity work. People who give out of the abundance of their heart are at lower risk for depression. They seem to receive as much as they give.

One counterintuitive idea concerns what does not make you happy: money. Pas a certain amount of income – enough to keep you our of poverty – more money doesn't make you statistically much happier. Millionaires are not substantially happier than even the lower middle class.

The absence of happiness is depression. Depression is serious; it can be life threatening. At its core, depression is an unusually negative reaction life. But it's not just feelings of being blue, which might occur, for example, after a divorce. And it's not just bereavement, which might occur, for example, after a death. Those are all normal reactions to life's hard events – not depression.

Depression involves a profound change in mood that explicitly affects a person's ability to function. There is often a chronic hopelessness associated with it. This type of hopelessness, which is described by an idea called learned helplessness theory, is usually accompanied by other changes in behaviors.

Sometimes, stress is our enemy. Some other times, stress responses are our evolutionary friends. Photo by Elena.

If you go down the depression road, you not only feel hopeless, but you also feel different. Your sleep habits often change; you either start getting too much or not enough. Your eating habits become altered. You lose the ability to focus and to make decisions. You quit enjoying things that used to bring you a tremendous amount of happiness. A hallmark is a loss of interest in sex.

Depression affects many people. About 17 percent of all Americans will experience it at some time in their lives. It also skews in the direction of gender. Upward of about 25 percent of all females experience depression (that statistic is an overall lifetime risk); upward of about 10 percent of all males will.

Depression also afflicts people in different ways. About 40 percent of anybody who suffers a major depressive illness do so exactly once, recover from it, and never get it again. About 50 percent of people who suffer a major depressive illness don't get that luxury: It will recur again after a period of recovery. About 10 percent of the people get depressed and never recover. This is called chronic depression.

There is a severity issue to contend with as well. Some people get severely depressed. Some people don't experience depression but deal regularly with something called dysthymia, which is a low-level depression that tends to stay with you for years. You wake up in the morning and are immediately persuaded that life sucks, and that low-level blue mood follows you throughout the day.

Dysthymia is not as intense as depression, but it is a mood disorder. And it's not all that uncommon. About 2.5 percent of all Americans will suffer from dysthymia at some point in their lives.

Both depression and dysthymia are opposites of happiness. The interesting thing about depression is that these days it is very treatable. Taking advantage of mental health services if you are depressed is about the smartest thing you can do.

The biological origins of depression have been under investigation for decades, but it has yielded its secrets only grudgingly. We know that some types of depression involve an aberrant balance in the concentrations of neurotransmitters between specific neuronal circuits – specifically, their reuptake, which is where one neuron spits out a bevy of neurotransmitters to its neighbor during signal transfer.

Reuptake is recycling. It's the process whereby neurotransmitters return to their origin. A change in the balance of this trafficking is thought to undergird the disorder. Depression is often called a chemical imbalance, in part because of this insight.

Progress is certainly being made. We've tried to learn about depression by examining closely the molecular mechanisms of the of the most prescribed classes of drugs: antidepressants. There are many kinds of antidepressants. One of the most popular classes of antidepressants is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). They appear to be inhibiting the reuptake process and, in so doing, make some people's moods substantially better.

There are many mysteries regarding what antidepressants may or may not reveal about the disorder. First, many antidepressants take a long time to exert their therapeutic effects. Six weeks is not unusual. Second, they don't work for everybody. A person often has to go through several antidepressant medications, or several concentrations of a single medication, before he or she arrives at an effective dose.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

There are many practices known to reduce stress in the vast majority of people, from deep-breathing exercises to progressive muscle relaxation. Photo by Elena.