I am a 33-year-old healthy, white, American male- those facts alone seem enough to negate any hardship or personal difficulties I might discuss, especially when compared to the vast majority of people living on this planet. But my blessings only start there. I grew up in a loving and supportive home with everything I needed, in what must be one of the safest and most beautiful places in the country. My parents worked hard for everything they had and everything they provided to me and my sister. When I look back, I know I have it much easier today than they did back then. Beyond necessities and practical comforts, I have also been given ample opportunity and enough intelligence to pursue nearly any path I want in my adult life. I have experienced little to no real tragedy or unexpected loss in my 33 years. I consider myself lucky and I am grateful.

I am not financially wealthy, but I now have what modern society might generally define as “everything”, including a long list of accomplishments and two graduate degrees that have landed me in a dynamic and challenging profession, one that ought to be continually rewarding. My income (and my wife’s currently larger income) allows me to live comfortably in our 2,200 square-foot house, in a beautiful neighborhood, in another one of the safest and most beautiful places in the country, as well as one of its greatest outdoor playgrounds. We have enough money to take wonderful vacations when we find the time, as well as the ability to frequently visit our geographically-scattered families for long weekends. Our two-car garage stores the two cars as well as our road bikes, mountain bikes, snowboards, snowshoes, etc. When my energy levels and obligations allow, I spend my “free” time riding amazing mountain bike trails, cruising over powder on my snowboard twenty minutes from home, and running out my front door onto river trails with our Golden Retriever…and that’s the short list. I consider myself lucky and I am grateful.

My circle of friends is probably smaller than the average person’s, but between the closest of those friends and my tight-knit family, I have more people who love me and whom I can lean on than I could reasonably ask for. It may be an overused cliché, but the truth is that I married my best friend 5 years ago. She is intelligent, beautiful, and unbelievably supportive of me when I am sure that my own patience would falter were I in her shoes. Counting my blessings would take much less time if she was not in my life- most importantly, the blessings of intimate laughter and shared adventure and a beautiful reflection of the best parts of me. When I am with her in our best moments, I am uninhibited, free of self-consciousness, and simply myself. Is there a bigger blessing than finding that in another human being and then discovering that she’s willing and eager to spend her life with you? I consider myself lucky and I am grateful.

I’ll keep counting: I have two healthy parents that have built a marriage of 36+ years together and whose most important mission in life is simply to love and support their two children without reservation or limits. My wife’s parents are a mirror image of that longevity, stability, and love, which they continue to give to her and her brother, also without any apparent reservation or limits. One gift of our marriage was the doubling of that blessing for each of us. Although two of them have now passed on, I grew up with four grandparents who did the same and filled my childhood with too many loving memories to recall. My parents have grandchildren now and their mission has not changed. It is only extended to them- my sister’s daughters, my two nieces, who are two of the most beautiful and perfect creations I have ever known. They aren’t my children, but my nieces are mine. They hold in their faces, their expressions, and their curiosity so much of those I love the most, and even a little bit of me. They have literally restored my faith in humanity. I say those words with laughter sometimes, but there is no hyperbole to the statement. They are also two pieces of the mosaic of people and recent messages from unexpected sources that have restored my faith in myself, and begun to lift a depression that at times has seemed like it would swallow me whole. I consider myself lucky and I am grateful.

In light of so many blessings and a life that I acknowledge has been privileged, how can I possibly experience intermittent but nearly overwhelming depression and/or anxiety? Why is there a need for restoration of personal faith? I have spent hours in reflection and self-loathing thought trying to figure out what is wrong with me. Why am I not happy in the midst of such abundance? Why do I have a crushing sense of guilt and lost opportunity? Why do I allow so much of the joy of living this life to be robbed of me so frequently?

My most recent blessing is that I have started to find a lot of answers to these questions- I have been helped by books, by counseling, by family and friends, by what feels like the universe itself and the truth that flows through it and through me. While I continue to have my moments, my days, sometimes my weeks spent in dark psychological woods, I have started to experience hope and validation that is consistent, undeniable, and soaked in an authenticity that has not been part of my spiritual experience before. I have concluded that this validation, these messages, these truths and the changes they demand from me are too powerful to ignore. What they are telling me, in short, is that I have something unique and valuable and authentic to offer the world. They are telling me that while I have not buried that individualism and the gifts that come with it, I have for the most part set it aside in the interest of fitting in to the world I live in. They are forcing me to look back and recall the moments in which I’ve acknowledged that spirit and vowed to live my life consistent with it, only to get caught up in the external world and its mundane demands time and time again. And they’ve shown me that while I continually run away from authentic individualism to catch up with practicality and the popular culture, my spirit has relentlessly pursued me whether I knew it was there or not.

Those same messages and truths are also showing me that my neuroses, my anxieties, my depression are simply the destructive fires sparked by the friction between the life I’m living and the life I’m meant to live. The friction between a life devoted to becoming the person that society and culture tells me I should be and the person that I have always been and that I must return to. The friction between recognizing the superficial, destructive nature of modern culture and its priorities, and the admission that I am too often just a hypocritical cog in the wheel. I now believe that if I were to continue to minimize or silence those messages, that collective friction will continue to build up and likely ignite larger and possibly catastrophic flames. If I continue to live selfishly and subconsciously in terms of my personal impact on a world that needs every caretaker and advocate it can find, my life will be an offense to it both in the literal as well as the spiritual sense.

If I don’t turn around and attempt to meet the individual spirit, or soul, that is chasing the pragmatic person I have become, if I decide to run faster from it or continue to set it aside for future consideration, I literally risk the death of that spirit. If I don’t turn around, if I allow that death to occur, I accept an existence that is completely devoid of its most authentic meaning. Instead, that spirit has spoken loud enough for me to look over my shoulder and stop running for a long moment. The flames have become too large and too destructive, and the collateral damage too painful to tolerate any longer. Instead of having to wonder how and why those fires started, or burdening myself with trying to put them out one at a time while the others smolder, I have been shown their source and I have started to learn how to decrease the friction. I have stopped, I have turned around, and the view is much different in this direction. I consider myself lucky and I am grateful.