Jonathan Rottenberg

make you appreciate normality, if that's a phrase, in a more robust way than if you hadn't had this experience in the first place.

I know.

This is one thing that keeps me going, the knowledge that I was able to persevere.

And none of us, I hate to say, is immune from depression or even suffering.

Suffering is inevitable.

It's really how we are able to tolerate it and work with it and hopefully integrate it into our lives that really enables us to move forward.

It's probably true.

I'm not arguing that we should all encourage ourselves to be depressed, so we'll process the world in a more accurate way.

But I think we should also be attuned to the ways that being in a good mood is consistent with having some

you could say, positive illusions.

So we temporarily suspend or put to the side big things like that we are mortal, that we are all going to die, and that all the people that we care about are going to die too, that we temporarily suspend

don't focus on the suffering and the bad news that's happening on every continent.

And that's totally understandable in that when you're depressed, you become much more attuned to these hard truths is very much a mixed blessing.

But it is something that is a part of this low mood syndrome that we think about things.

We think about things deeply and that we don't look away from the pain or the painful things.

In fact, we immerse ourselves in the pain and the difficult things.

Oh, it definitely helped me find my purpose in life.

There's no question about that.

And strange thing to say, but I think truthful thing to say is that I feel grateful that I was able to...

make this big change in my life, even though it was extraordinarily painful and it put me at risk.