Have you ever felt something like this?
The broken heart of a comedy legend.
Famous Hollywood actor Jim Carrey, who suffered from depression for many years, told Elephant Journal about his battle with it. He knows first-hand how severe suffering can be and how difficult it is to free oneself from it.
The actor became popular in the 90s, but the years when he was at the peak of his fame were overshadowed, and not by “copper pipes”.
Kerry’s father, a musician who worked as an accountant, lost his job when Jim was 12. On the day he turned 16, he dropped out of school to support the family.
At 20, he first encountered depression. But Carrey found a way to channel his depression into something constructive. At 21, he made his first appearance on The Tonight Show.
“Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you’re not desperate at some point, you’re not interested.”
D. Kerry.
“I’m not depressed at the moment. Depression doesn’t exist,” he says. “Now when it rains, I’m not afraid it’s going to drown me. It’s just rain, and I know it’s going to stop.”
Carrie voices a non-trivial conclusion that he came to after many years of fame: it is completely pointless to spend your entire life forming and nourishing the image of the “ideal self.”
“It’s all ego: the desire to be important, to be somebody, to matter. In fact, this greedy search for our own specialness brings us only pain and suffering for three main reasons.
First, it introduces a division between us and all other beings, which devalues our supposedly unique character. Second, it misleads us into thinking that circumstances should not change – it is we who should not change.
Thirdly, this endless search for ourselves deprives us of peace, because it makes us feel that something is constantly missing in us.
The antidote to this suffering is to let go of this desire to be “someone.” Kerry says, “Feeling whole has nothing to do with the ego.” To feel whole, we must let go of trying to maintain an image of “me.”
People talk about depression all the time. The difference between depression and sadness is that sadness is just an accident – no matter what happened or didn’t happen. Depression is your body saying “screw you”, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to maintain this avatar that you’ve created in the world. Take off that mask already!
You have to think of the word “depression” as “deep rest.” Your body needs a deep rest from the character you were trying to play.
“There is no depression in my life anymore – literally no depression. I have sadness and joy and contentment and gratitude.”
There’s probably something to it! Everyone should take off their mask sometimes, like Jim Carrey did.
