Depression

Why write about despair?  It isn’t the most pleasant word in the world.  However, it is a part of the human condition and we will all feel it or have felt it at some point in our lives.  Let’s go ahead and take a look at the meaning of despair in our Webster Dictionary. Despair-1.  a complete lack of hope or feeling of hopelessness. Daily Wisdom Word Meaning of despair-1.  A part of life that we don’t like to dwell on, but are most likely to go through in our lifetime.  Despair can be caused by inner feelings we don’t quite understand, brought on by depression, caused sometimes for no reason externally in our lives, but an internal chemical imbalance in the brain that may be present, or brought on by an external situation that one goes through and although it may be temporary, It still brings on feelings of depression and hopelessness because of the way it makes us feel. I will talk about two sad examples of despair felt from a chemical imbalance in the brain and another caused by external reasons that would cause the feeling of despair with anyone.  The first example of despair is the feeling of hopelessness caused by a feeling brought on due to negative consequences in one’s life.  Life isn’t always fair, but we seem to expect it to be when things like this happen.  My sister spent her first 30 years of her life, raising two girls all by herself and working full time to raise them without a penny of child support.  She has always loved her girls immensely and they are wonderful daughters, but just two years apart bringing on a lot of arguing and bickering between them as well as vying for their mother’s attention. They are all grown up now, and wonderful girls.  Long story short,my sister who is still at fifty quite beautiful, wondered all of her adult life if she would ever find love to share with another man where he wasn’t screwed up but normal and she met that perfect man just as the girls were finally gaining independence and wanted their own lives.  They had known each other since childhood but had only been friends.  They ended up after 18 years of losing contact, falling madly in love and were married six months later.  My sister was elated but found out right before the wedding she had oral cancer.  Oral Cancer is nothing to joke about and most people would rather have stage three breast cancer than suffer as my sister has which such a treatment resistant cancer that grew so fast.  The doctor’s had to cut out a large margin of her tongue out and found it in one lymph node. She asked if she could wait a month for the radiation treatment, and by the time they went to do it, the cancer had spread further at a very rapid rate.  Talk about feeling of despair.  I was in her wedding and she was so grateful although she has always had a million friends, and the last thing she said to me before me boarding a plane back to Denver is , “wouldn’t it be sad if after all this time, of looking for love and never finding it and now I have, if I died from this”?  Now she just had to have an even larger part of her tongue cut out and four molars pulled.  She is in the hospital on a feeding tube and tracheostomy and it is so sad.  My mother is there with her, and her new husband as much as he can be, and we still don’t know where the cancer stands because it takes a week for the remaining testing of the lymph nodes and jaw to see if it has spread even further.  I wish so much I could do something to help her, but the problem is I broke my leg two weeks before we were due to go to California for this last set of surgeries. Another form of despair we can feel in our lives can be psychological, due to something sad happening in our lives, and our brain chemicals getting distorted because of this thing that causes despair, but not to the degree that would be normal to feel it.  This type of despair is brought on due to a chemical in the brain. Fortunately there is medication that one can temporarily be on that will stop this type of hopelessness and despair in life because when we are feeling it, we don’t quite understand why we are when we stand back and look at the situation objectively.  There are other types of feelings of despair that don’t last nearly as long that we are able to pull ourselves out of over our lifetime, but the important thing to remember here is life goes in phases for all of us, some happy and some sad times.  There is no such thing as Karma here because if there were, my sister would never be going through all that she is health wise as she certainly does not deserve it. Thanks for reading about despair with me today.  When your done reading this article, please scroll down to the bottom of it and where it says, “join the discussion”, leave a comment, poem or quote about despair and start a discussion.  It is so helpful to others when you do. Samantha Leboeuf/DWW   http://dailywisdomwords.com/thanklessness/        http://dailywisdomwords.com/mishaps/