How can we define despair? This term refers to the loss of hope, to the feeling of an inner emptiness, to the fact that there is nothing left in the wilderness that surrounds us, that all our efforts are now futile. How could we face the loss of strength to move forward? How to cope with despair?
When this sensation invades us, doubts arise, why should we continue to make efforts? Why do we have to keep getting up every day? People who have experienced this emotion feel that they can no longer cope with their work, their daily lives with their obligations, and that the best solution is perhaps to renounce to stop suffering.
For this, despair can turn out to be one of the worst enemies, because it blindfolded us and gradually removed the forces and envy. He does not let us see beyond the wall that hides the light: he whispers to us that it will not pass, that nothing can improve, that everything is finished and that we only have to accept to live like this. In the face of this panorama, how to cope with despair?
Despair confronts with patience; with minimal work, but with a huge effort, with small steps, with small successes. By surrounding us with important people who help us get out of the abyss and make us see the wonderful things that remain to be experienced and for which it is necessary to continue to live and continue to fight.
Despair, our worst enemy
When despair invades us, the worst thing we can do is to be pleasant with this guest. Perhaps he entered, but from there the solution rests in the fact of making efforts and (above all) to be intelligent so that it will come out as quickly as possible. Despair frightens, he knows the fears of the one he attacks and feeds on them. Thus, if we learn to manage our fears, despair will have no food from which to feed and eventually come out.
In this sense, all the emotional management tools we rely on can help us to cope with despair. The range of possibilities is wide: we talk about the tools that cut the negative cycles of thoughts, but also of those who make us socially and intelligently clever in the choice of strategies.
Maybe we can’t see beyond what we have now: when we’re in the dark, it’s hard to see the light on the other side. On the other hand, let us not forget that we can ourselves succeed in being a very powerful home of light if we give a turn to the key that will allow us to “light”. From this principle, despair will be able to flee especially from within the people who dedicate their resources in order to organize their patterns of thought.
“Despair is based on what we know, which is nothing, and hope for everything that we ignore, that fits everything.”
-Maurice Maeterlinck
Your best weapon to face despair is your desire to live
This is most important: you are more than a current situation, you have gone through hard situations and have managed to overcome them, you are able to achieve value goals. You have faith in you, and it is important to maintain it. Tell yourself that your mind works with what happens to you, but that it works even more with what it thinks will happen to you. In reality we are more what we believe or what we are willing to believe that we are what we think.
In the past we have experienced very difficult situations that we have managed to overcome. Moreover, thanks to these situations, we now have resources that make us stronger. In the immediate future, the opportunity to continue living presents itself to us. Finally, for a more distant future, we can make plans; illusions that continually generate in us the motivation to act.
This reasoning, simple and easy to elaborate, is parallel rather difficult to maintain, whether by fear or for the times when destiny has not given us time. On the other hand, it does not cease to be worthwhile in the same way as the people who have stayed with us, although the time is difficult and we know and recognize not to be the most pleasant company. If they believe, “why not give us the opportunity.”
In other words, despair continues to be an illusion. An impossibility: to be blind in the face of the alternatives that make it easier to exit. On the other hand, as worrying as it may seem, it is difficult to maintain when we promote values in relation to fear… or confidence in us in relation to anxiety.
