About a month ago, I was hurt in a very personal way by somebody I trusted. The process of healing from those events has been gradual, and since then I have attempted to regain a sense of self. Mediation, honesty, and exercise have contributed to my current stability, yet it has also been influenced by an unexpected source: The contents of my Economics class.
The opening lines in my textbook describe Economics as the study of how and why decisions are made at the margins. In fact, this concept of marginal analysis is the heart of economics (at least micro-economics, though even that is somewhat beyond my current fluency in the field). Basic economics is concerned with how decisions about resource use are made. Since these decisions represent change - deviations from the constant - it is the periods of change themselves which drive how their systems are perceived and judged. This concept applies well to Political Science, my field of study and a topic I am alot more familiar with. The Presidency, for example, is scrutinized as an institution when it is closest to entering a transitional period - while political theorists might pontificate year-round, the average citizen doesn't really care about what the Presidency is until the Presidency is about to experience transition. In other words, value is almost always assigned to the constant through a form of marginal analysis, during a time when the margins are most visible.
Coming to view myself through the lens of this theory allows me to separate away the traumas which have haunted me . The sick power of depression is its ability to trick you into believing the pain you feel is integral to your personhood - that the self is the sum of its traumas. In other words, that the constant is the sum of its margins. Learning marginal analysis made me realize that I had been using it to keep myself trapped in a cycle of internal disempowerment. I had conflated the marginal traumas which deviated my life out of normalcy with my life itself. Now able to identify the margins and the constant as separate, I was able to begin redefining the things which remained with me into these two realms. I learned how to live again.
I've since identified the margins of myself and am now in a better place then I've been in years. I hope that anyone else who feels lost in themselves can use this method to start the process of reflecting on what has hurt you - and how those things don't define you.
