At times it’s good to just withdraw from the crowd. Jesus did it again and again.

When I was away I came to realization that there is a difference between breathing and being fully alive.

Unfortunately majority of us are just breathing.

Most of us are lost in the cares of this life, with our hearts being overburdened with a lot of anxiety with what the future holds. Majority of us are worried about so many things that we no longer living but surviving. We have lost ourselves, we no longer have peace, smiling has become a struggle, what happened to the child in us? We forgot how it once felt walking barefooted, we forgot how it feels walking through the long walks, and we no longer notice the sounds of birds praising their creator.

What happened to our free spirits?

I know many will ask what is expected of us considering life has just become difficult…I got far too much in my plate, that’s OK I’ve been there before but I can tell you without fear of contradiction that worrying will only add to your predicaments. In fact when you are too anxious, worried; your judgment becomes clouded.
You are prone to making very wrong choices at this state of anxiety and worry.

Some people say they need time alone when things are hard to maintain their sanity. Guess am not one of those people. When I isolate myself it’s often a sign that things aren’t going on well. More often than not it’s a sign that there is something very wrong in my life if I haven’t left my house all day.

But that begs a bigger question, a tendency I see in not only in myself but also in people who am close with.

Why do we isolate when life sucks?

Why do depressed people tend to isolate more and what can we do when we are in such a situation?

A simple reason is that when we isolate ourselves we tend to think and believe that

we don’t want to risk anything, the small part of us left that would make it worse.

Withdrawing is a bad idea as much as if feels like the right thing to do, it doesn’t help long term.

However we withdraw not by choice, we withdraw because the band aid is the best solution we have right now.
Isolation and loneliness means it will get worse that our minds will venture into darker places.

We see ourselves doing this but not doing something to change things.

 It takes more effort than we think we can expend.

I have made an active effort to not withdraw when life becomes hard when life hits me in the jugular but I still fall into the perfectly rational tendency all the time. But like everything in excess, withdrawing myself turns toxic. And isolation is one of the most lethal habits we fall into. Although I consider myself to be reflective and introspective I am very much an extrovert who gains energy from being around others. Being at work for 8 hrs feels less suffocating than 3 hours alone.

So the question here is not why we isolate because we will never have an answer good enough to solve that problem.

The question is how we deal with isolation when it suffocates us.

From experience my answer is to hold on and be vulnerable with people in our lives who are too precious to lose.

 

Nancy Wyna
Latest posts by Nancy Wyna (see all)