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Where do you start?
My mother grew up as a 60's flower child and by proximity, I grew up around the "exotic". We always had these remnants of her life-before-marriage around the house; strange religious texts, witchy herbal potion books, etc. Even though I spent a lot of my formative years looking at the Bhagavad Gita or Buddhist scripture, I never actually saw what I was reading. It was all just the allure of the foreign, something atypical in the Kentucky landscape I grew up in. I've been dealing with major depressive disorder since I was about twelve-years-old; I'm now twenty-two and nothing has changed. I've tried therapy, medication, drugs, sex, filling my time with unhealthy relationships, self-mutilation -- I can't find mental quietude. A few days ago, I found myself sitting across the room from my gas stove in my apartment, seriously considering suicide. I've had fleeting ideas about killing myself before, but this time was a genuine, rational consideration. I am so physically and mentally exhausted, after countless false starts, being overwhelmed by depression repeatedly -- to the point that it feels useless to strive for mental health, knowing a depressive relapse is just down the road. In retrospect, I realize that I don't want to die, but the false promise of peace I felt in front of the gas oven is haunting me. I don't want to feel that desperate again. I'm an atheist, but I still feel you can nurture yourself spiritually without acknowledging a "higher power". I think this lack of spiritual nourishment is why I keep failing every time I give into my extreme depression. I would like to give Buddhism an honest try -- as a philosophy. I've read through scripture excerpts and the ideas all seem like a clean breath of air. But where do I start? Again, I live in Kentucky -- were I looking into Christianity, it would be as easy as walking into one of our hundreds of city churches and asking where to begin. Here, I don't even know where to aim myself. I'm the kind of person who likes to do things well if I'm going to do them at all, so reading little snippets of scripture isn't going to cut it for me for long. I'd just love some insight on where to begin! more