Category: Depression

How to School Someone on Depression

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Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day, a widely successful Canadian campaign to spread awareness about mental health and stigma surrounding it.

I started this blog to talk about my mental health issues, but that hasn’t really been happening (Hi, procrastination!) So I’m going to share screenshots of a conversation I recently had with a close friend, who good-naturedly thought I could get over my depression by just “relaxing”.

I used this extremely informative Ted-Ed video for help, which explains differences between “feeling depressed and sad” and “clinical depression”.

Here’s how our conversation went (some words & sentences are in Nepali) :

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Not everyone can write stories or make movies about mental health issues, but what each of us can do is talk to one other person beside us, learn information, share information, change minds, feel accepted, accept others and extend the conversation beyond #BellLetsTalk day into the rest of our lives.

 

 

 

The Song I Wrote For You

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I am sitting here in the library on a perfect little metal chair that is freezing my behind, while the air conditioning above is sweltering and sucking the air out of my chest. Listening to Coldplay with a chem book in my hand, I am trying to compose a poem or write something meaningful about life, and experiences and love and joy and little butterflies and rainbows and unicorns and magic. I am writing a song for you right now, only it isn’t a song, rather a jumble of words that make no sense, everything pouring straight out of my head as I type it with no filter.
But I am singing.

It is a sad song. A song you sing when you are sad and are sitting on the bathtub with the shower running over your head, half empty beer cans rolling around near the trashcan, the yellow light in the ceiling reflecting in the bathroom mirror, bouncing off the smooth cans into your eyes and all you can see and think about is how drunk you want to get, not because you enjoy drinking but because you do not enjoy being sober and feeling all the feelings and all these raging emotions inside your head.

Your heart bleeds and you laugh a little because the hammer you used to shatter it into pieces is in somebody else’s hands now. You handed the hammer to that person because self blame hurts, self guilt hurts, it is easier to tell the world that it was that one person who broke you, rather than shouldering the responsibility for your own mistakes.

You cleanse yourself in the water, sit there under the shower, teeth chattering because you’ve been sitting too long and the water’s getting cold because your skin has gone numb to the warmth. You get up, gather yourself, wear fresh track pants and jog outside to meet your friends in the park. They ask you why your hair is dripping at 12 in the midnight and you tell them you just swam a mile in the Pacific ocean just to meet them and they all laugh at your dedication and pass you the blunt, every single one of them with wet hair and loose grins and bandaged wrists, and tattooed scars. You light up the joint, smoking in the warmth, your insides feel light and gooey and you sit there watching the fumes that you breathe out dance with five other dancing fumes, taking the pain away for one another day.

And smiling, you sing the song I am writing for you.

The Fish that Flew Out of The Tank

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Have you ever felt like a lone fish in a huge fish tank, where all your little fish friends have died and their skeletons float slightly above the rocks every time you try to bring them back to life?

You watch the world outside, the light patterns refracting in every surface that is between you and the infinite space of air. You are just a fish, but you know all too well that lights cause illusions and the world is never as it seems.

Sometimes you want to break out of the tank, but the thick glasses separating you from your freedom seem to stretch for miles, that one tiny crack you made months ago by hitting your head first into the glass seems to dissolve if you glance at it from a side angle.

You are alone. You and your dead fish bones. There used to be dreams too. But dreams come from your imaginations, and your imaginations are choosing to float away, one air bubble at a time.

Life outside the fish tank looks beautiful. You can see rainbows and unicorns, and oh look there’s the green field and the sun shining on those pretty pink pansies. You cannot wait to get out. The tiny crack you made months ago now suddenly seems larger. I have to get out. I have to touch the rainbow. One push, two push, a thousand pushes. I shall not give up until I smell those pansies. The crack finally gives in.

You flow outside the fish tank, the amount of water that falls on top of you is enough to make your own little pool, until it starts seeping and soaking down the thick carpet below and you look around to see little wet rainbow pieces and torn pansy pieces making paper islands in the vanishing pool. The air doesn’t seem so fresh anymore, and you flop around hoping that someone will pick you up and lay you down among your fish bones, for you realize that in pursuit of something wild and beautiful, you forgot that you were just a tiny little fish who didn’t know how to breathe out of water.

Band Aids and Bullet Holes

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I think this is going to end up becoming a depressive rant and that scares me because I haven’t felt an inch of sadness since I started my meds. But there are some kinds of pain that even medication can’t control. You try to cover the hurts with a band-aid hoping for them to heal, but what good are band aids when the hole in your heart is from a bullet.

I’ve been shot. I can’t explain how or why here, for the fear of being speculated and probed and incised by untrained surgical hands of my dear friends. I fear that I will bleed out.

I will nurse my bullet wounds, cover them up with band aids, and try to walk like no one notices the flinch on my face every time I draw a breath.

Social anxiety, my psychiatrist labeled my feelings.

Caution, I say. After all look where it got me when I opened up.

Depression: Why I am Finally Speaking Up About It

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I think it is physically very difficult to explain what depression is like. The thought of forming words to explain how you are feeling chokes up your throat and all you can do is breathe. Breathing. Intense breathing is what I used whenever I felt the slightest stir in my mood, shifting into the dark box of sadness even on the brightest of days.

“Are you happy? You seem to be, but I don’t think you are.” These lines were what my psychiatrist said while observing me with her kind eyes. I knew I was unhappy. I had been suffering from depression since high school; but that exact moment was the first time anyone acknowledged that they had seen my unhappiness.

Many people around me know about my depressive episodes. I always felt that mental health issues should never be hidden, so I made a point to explain what I was feeling.

“That’s okay. I feel sad sometimes too.”

“I think you are just stressing out too much. Learn to have some fun.”

“You should stop reading all those articles about depression. Maybe you’re getting some ideas from them.”

“You look very happy.”

The instant that I heard those responses, I regretted my decision. I’m not saying my friends were bad people; they simply didn’t know how to act around me. I don’t blame them. Depression is very hard to come in terms with, especially in your loved ones. People tend to back away and not talk about it in hopes that someone more “experienced” will step up to offer better advice and take charge.

My ADHD fueled my depression and vice versa. The stress of not focusing led my mind to crazy corners that broke me down every single day. And the fact that I didn’t have anyone to talk to distracted me even more. Books and movies and tumbler posts became my escape because I could not bear to be alone with my thoughts.

I am 19, an adult on my last teen years. I always felt that I was too young to be depressed. I hadn’t faced any real pain in life. It took me a lot of courage to talk to my doctor about it, and only when she told me you can’t compare pain, I realized that I deserved to get help.

I still cannot write about the intricate details about depression, what and why I feel at such moments, but I believe this is a start. I don’t want any sympathy or empathy. I have a good life, great friends and a loving family. Despite of being “blessed”, I am clinically depressed. Depression doesn’t look at your status or intelligence, it just is. I hope people can see that we do not need a special treatment, but just someone to listen to us without judgment and be there.