I used to live for many years on the other side of the iron curtain. To give you a picture of what it was like, imagine your life with basic needs satisfied, no risk of dying of hunger, no homeless people, and always something to wear. On the other hand, you know that you are limited to everything being very basic, and in order to get something better, you need to violate your own values (i.e. join the comrades, or cheat or steal ... yuck!). That was quite gloomy life if you think about it first, but we learned to cope with this. We studied and acquired lots of encyclopaedic knowledge. We had lots of time to cherish the relationships (we had plenty of time for that, because there was not much to do anyway). We perfectioned whatever we could perfection (your house, your bicycle, your car, your summer house if you had one). And then there was the most powerful one.
We joked. And we laughed.
Joking and laughing was extremely powerful. It was immediately lifting the cloud of gloom and enabling us to survive the day-to-day struggle. There were millions of jokes in circulation (today is not even close to that) - I must have been hearing at least 10 new jokes every day. Some of them had a flavour of being 'illegal', for touching the political scene or the realism of the life in the Superior System of Social Justice, but I cannot remember anyone ever getting into trouble because of a joke. Yes, they (the police equivalent) could use it as a precedence to arrest you, but usually it meant that they saw you as a more serious trouble maker. Actually, the authorities supported quite substantial level of laughing at the system itself, with very sharp satiric shows aired on public TV and radio (non-public was illegal, so it did not exist... at least formally). So we joked and laughed.
Why am I telling you all that? Because this is the strategy that I am using when I am depressed. Until I get down to extremely bad mood, this is what helps me throughout the day. I joke with everyone, I can be a bit sarcastic, I can be self-deprecating, in every situation I am looking for a way to say something funny or to reframe the problem so it appears lighter than it is.
Does it work? Yes, in approximately 60% of situations. It allows me to get through the day, the week, the month, without falling into the black hole of worrying. It is my Patronus, if I am to use J.K. Rowling's language; it provides food for the Dementor (so the latter does not feed on my mood).
Unfortunately, many people expect me to be serious rather than turning things into humour. This is the challenge. They think that when they state a problem, I am ignoring it or that I am not taking it seriously.
Nothing more wrong. Usually when I am reframing a problem to humour, it means that I am taking it very seriously. So seriously that being serious does not allow me to think about the solution, think out of the box. When I can turn a problem to something that appears lighthearted, it immediately breaks the spiral of worry, and usually I can very quickly address the challenge.
And now my challenge is that very few people understand it. Some do though!
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