#Depression

I am someone who has been dealing with chronic 'low mood' as well as anxiety my entire life, especially once I was a teen. I have tried therapy/ies and medications but I do confess to not having tried many long enough or trying enough variety to truly talk of the good of this vs that.

What I can tell you is that St. John's Wort (a powerful flower-based herbal remedy) is extremely good at stabilising my mood in ways nothing has been before. I am aware that you wouldn't notice that by me on this website as I appear hostile at times but combined with habitual deep breathing and regular meditation, this has made me never once 'lose it'. I'm not saying I need it for that, you can attribute that success to me but without it, the baseline mood is lower and more anxious.

I won't go into myself too much here but I'll confess to having experienced genuine depression in my life and during that time, I was the closest to atheist I had been. I was always agnostic overall but what changed was when the nihilism and pure lack of meaning and purpose hit me, infected my brain so much that I wondered why I was alive and didn't want to get out of bed each day and was sad I woke up.

I am serious when I say that this thread is not meant to be about me. I want to truly understand how a round-earth believing atheist can possibly fathom themselves to be anything other than a worthless being on a spinning ball in the middle of nowhere hurtling through infinite nothingness for absolutely no true purpose and that everything good or worthwhile in their life was a ridiculously futile chemical reaction in their brain just deluding them to stupidly think there was any reason to feel fulfilled for it.

This is not made to mock; it's something I, as a Pagan/Taoist thinker find the biggest drive away from even indulging in the notion that there is/are no real deity/ies or spiritual realm in life that give my morally good actions meaning and anything I ever did a permanent, pure and irrefutable purpose as at the very least I impressed the god(dess)/(e)s watching.