Why meds don't always help your depression

And what to do about it

Welcome to another installment of Life Intelligence. I like my new schedule these days. I wake up, walk my dog, and while having my tea, I write for a couple of hours while staring at a bunch of trees right outside my window. It even occurred to me that I can cook my oatmeal now instead of putting it in a jar, pouring hot water on it, and eating it cold later at work. Bulgarian oatmeal doesn't work that way anyway. It wasn't coming out as expected because it's not "quick-cooking." I am not surprised. Nothing is that quick here, which I suppose is the point.

Thanks again to my paid subscribers for their support, likes, and comments. Your ranks are growing slowly, too. As an added bonus to this post, I am including things I see in Bulgaria that I never see in the US —a study in contrasts.

When I graduated from my Master's in Psychology program in 2015-ish, I also graduated from a 100-hour life coaching program with Tony Robbins. The two-year process earned me not only a degree and a certification but also gifted me with massive amounts of personal transformative energy, majorly shaping my being and becoming.

Let me tell you about two things that stand out before I tell you how this relates to the topic of meds and treatment-resistant depression.

From my Master's program, I vividly remember a Transpersonal Psychology class working with "the shadow" through indigenous means. In other words, before Freud and the field of psychology emerged to splinter in various directions, such as transpersonal psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc., indigenous people knew how to reach the dark dungeons of the psyche and heal people from within. Intrigued, I headed to the Amazon and sat under a hut for a week, chugging down ayahuasca to see what came out.

Long story short, I returned, gave away the yoga studio in a contest, and regrouped professionally. I still vividly remember the visions and the experiences of that time. It took me a couple of years to decypher and assimilate everything and basically unravel my life as I knew it. Personal transformation, it turns out, takes longer than instant oatmeal, even longer than reading a book and telling all your friends about it.

Also, it sucked. It felt as if something inside of me kept pushing in a direction, and no matter how I tried to rationalize not following through, it kept pushing. I wasn't the happiest person then, but to the world, I appeared driven, focused, and confusing AF, considering that I spent 14 years or so successfully "building a community" out of that yoga studio. Remember the "Yoga for Life" TV shows and the newspaper columns? Yep, I did a lot, and it looked like I was walking away from it all.

On the personal front, similar things occurred, and I ended a 7-year relationship with all the drama imaginable. No, I don't regret it.

From my Tony Robbins education experience, the thing that stuck the most was a simple question, "What are you here to give?"

If someone asked me for $60,000 promising to rearrange my brain, I'd tell them to go to hell. I can think of 60,000 ways to spend $60,000 but I must've really needed a new chapter in my life, so I spent them on education. I wish I knew they'd forgive student debt because I would've gotten some. Instead, I worked full-time while in school (again!) and paid everything off just a few months after I finished both programs.

This makes me a self-reliant, responsible person. But it doesn't make me who I am. And to answer the question, "What are you here to give?" I had to figure out who I was and what I had to give. The labels and functions bestowed on us, earned or not, deserved or not, beneficial or not, are just aspects of our lives. Regardless of how deeply we identify with them, they will remain just aspects of our lives. If that's all we rely on for our identity and self-worth, we will forever remain fragmented, especially when these aspects exist in conflict.