5 Things that Depression dragged me into
Constant scrutiny of self-existence and several rechecks on what you are doing with your life is something that my brain is getting accustomed to. It’s dark here, revisiting the memories that would make me feel happy and in the very next moment missing them and complaining about it, is my new hobby. I know I am losing my mind. I want to cry out loud, need a whole army of sympathy but at the same time do not want to be judged about it. Why do I need sympathy?, yes in the modern world this word does not carry the memento of pride, but for me, sympathy is a soft cushion that is warm inside, and I would like it to wrap around me for some time. Just let me just peep out of the blanket, to look through the window, and see the dense green tree swayed with the wind. I want to see the clouds passing by, and want to dive into the deep blue skies to feel the weightlessness of my soul for a once.
For once, I do not want to be held responsible for all the mistakes I have done, for all the wrong decisions I have made, for all the sorries I am in debt. God’s honest truth, I have tried immensely hard to do the right thing, and that’s too not only for me but for everyone who gets affected by me. I was never born a selfish person, and my love for movies made me more firm on my principles. The movies validated my being of selflessness and expect nothing in return because I am the hero, and heroes are meant to live alone. Not disturbing anyone around them, and be there when the world needs you.
But I also think that following the movies too closely made me feel more particular about emotions in general, that otherwise are not taken into consideration that importantly.
In India, we have a culture of hugging a relative very warmly when you meet them after a gap of a few days or months. When my uncle did not care to even stand up from the sofa for me, that gave birth to a huge sticky thought, which can be compared to amoeba to get a visual reference, and made me go mad at the person whom I loved the most. It was eighteen hundred kilometres worth of ride from my place to his, travelled with my wife to surprise them.
I was newly married then, and my uncle and all the other relatives from Kolkata were there at the wedding, and the ceremony was filled with fun, so I assumed they really loved us.
They being a bong (Bengalis are referred to as Bong), and dancing to the tunes of North Indian music made me feel so joyed that my wife is a North Indian and has been accepted by my entire family. That was the last impression I had there in my mind. And we planned to take a drive to Kolkata, with a chiller on the back seat, summer goggles and Spotify on the music system.
Undoubtedly I had the best drive of my life. Driving for straight eighteen hundred kilometres was something that made my marriage stronger. What would you do when you are stuck in a car with a wife and you have nowhere to go, but just sit a few inches away, and be there for the next fifty hours? We got to know each other. You get to explore your partner’s perspective. You get to see her support for you because driving along can be pretty hectic.
After the most wonderful 50 hours of drive, when you get a cold welcome from the same relatives who were dancing at your wedding like no one else in this world exists, cannot be simply categorised into a specific vault of right and wrong. I am not so proud about it but an over-thinker, and hence to date, it has been there back in my memory. But why do I keep thinking about it? That’s the real question because what happened in the past and has happened? Nobody can change it, and you are the only one who is still thinking about it, so instead of grinding it into more bitter pieces be happy about it, that you were the only one who was able to see something that others did not. I recognised a gesture that made you feel bad, but why do you need an answer about what you thought? Why do you keep knocking your brain with questions like, why did they do that?
A THOUGHT:
I am a very thoughtful person, let me put it this way, I am someone who is always full of thoughts back in my mind. I love to speak, I love to share and I love when people listen to me, that is because I have a lot on my mind. I want to channelise it, but do we really do anything about these thoughts that occur to us? Not really.
My uncle not greeting me made me think of myself as a rejected family member who has lost the respect of that one person whom I thought of as a mentor in my life. That’s the “root-thought” that this particular incident shouts out. But for a moment, let’s leave what I thought, what it meant and what might have gone wrong when this situation made things awkward for both of us, let’s focus on the basic essence of the situation and that is, I expected my uncle to give me a warm hug when he saw me. It’s my expectation, and when you see it getting unfulfilled, the right course of action should be walking to him and asking him on his face, rather than asking your brain again and again why he did not come to me, ask him.
People who talk, who know how to communicate a feeling and expectations and think less about their repercussions, tend to be the people I feel comfortable with. Because it’s easy, to see through the person and there is a very less chance to get ditched by such people. But if these are the expectations that I carry for my partner, don’t you think your other half deserves the same?
COMMUNICATION:
Depression uses a large chunk of your brain to overthink over a simple stuff, draining your energy so rapidly, that even spending a day time without feeling lethargy is never gonna happen. Hence you lose the appetite to use more of the energy to make yourself and the people around you to understand what you feel.
Not communicating your repeated sob stories to your partner will make you go crazy. Why think about how your partner will react to your sob story? Why do we need to follow the standards of conversation where both the adult needs to stand smartly, and hold their positions like there is going to be a peace treaty signed?
A thought is like a caterpillar. It grows very slowly, and its evolution needs the caterpillar to shed its birth body and leave the place it was born to become a beautiful butterfly gliding through the bunch of flowers in a Green Belt. Similarly, a thought takes birth in a cocoon, but it requires it to become a conversation, in some way or other. You cannot suffocate it, the evolution and nature require it to come out of that funny brain cocoon of yours.
Don’t let the depression take over the free flow of conversation in you. Whenever I feel heavy, I start writing. It is the only way I feel balanced, confident and in charge of myself. I feel that someone on this earth might share the same pain, and we might validate each other, but why do I need Validation?
VALIDATION:
One major setback that depression built in me was, that I needed a constant validation of my doings. I always wanted to be right, and that became the centre of my inception. Why I wanted to be right because I lost something in the past and people judged me for it. I wanted to yell out that I did not fail purposely, I tried hard but just could not. Nobody heard that because you yelled that in your cocoon and never let it out in a conversation. Making you feel bad about yourself and labelling yourself as a loser. Since we blame ourselves for the failure, now we need to be pretty sure if things are being practised in the right way or not. Every validation acts like a confidence booster to me, it reassured me that this time I am not wrong.
But this practice can go very very wrong. Why do you need an outsider to validate you? All you need is wisdom that guides you through the rights and wrongs and plays the game that your skill asks you to. Your navigation is your experience, and your driving thrust is the learnings that your life gave and the motivation should be a future that you build for yourself, not somebody else.
If that’s true, then why do you write to find like-minded souls and re-validate yourself about it?
I don’t need validation, nor the other should, whose story resembles mine. All I need to tell this soul is that trust me, it’s okay to be easy on yourself. First of all, stop judging yourself for everything you do. The morning sun does not come with an itinerary and neither comes with strings attached to yesterday. It rises alone, with no contracts or promises. It does recap your yesterday in the morning. The footprints are there, and yes you cannot just ignore them, but could you trust the sea to merge those footprints on the beach of time, sooner or later? No beach has ever withstood a footprint that lasted very long.
LEAVE YOUR PAST:
My wife is a big-time coffee lover. She always refers to the past with a cup full of coffee that was meant to sip but stayed hours and hours under the ceiling fan with no one sipping it, and now stands spoiled. Now, what would you do? Reheat to save it?
Actually, something that is spoiled should be allowed to fulfil its destiny to meet the other spoils in heaven. You should not try to revamp their lives, likewise, you cannot and must not carry your past because it altered your life. Doing so has always made me a slave of my brain that catapults all the historic failures of my life and throws them with a fire at me.
We need the cup to be empty so that a new day can be poured and sipped. Your brain needs a cool environment to function, and dragging your past will only bring rigorous friction into it.
I and my wife have been in a relationship since 2010, and we got married in 2020. It gave us ten years to understand each other, know each other but I fell in love only after my marriage. It all happened on that road trip, where I was riding with my wife, and saw all the reasons that made me stay with her. It all happened because I went on that trip with an empty cup. I have mastered the talent to let go of the past because I picture it like a cow dunk. A past can be very useful in the long term, but if it’s fresh, it is going to stink a lot. Want to harness it as an alternate source of fuel, you are most welcome to keep it, but keep it where it won’t smell back to you.
ROADMAP:
Being depressed always sank me a level deeper into the darkness. During such times, I always wished that someone can reach out to their hands so that I can come out of it. The roadmap went missing, and the inability to reconfigure my route to the future blind-sighted all the clues that I had around.
The fear got a better hold on me, and it kept pushing me inside the crust. Before I could have realised what happened to me, I was already fifty feet down the crap. Now the shoulders gave up, and all I could see was the silhouette of the sun on the surface above me. Like a sea-bed has stopped the sun to enter, and I am sinking more and more into the dark oceans.
One fine day, while sleeping on my bed I kept staring out of the windows. I was lying under the lights of the moon that pierced through the windows into my room. I loved that cinematic blue night light, it appeared like the light of wisdom to me, and I would get most of my solutions during that time. One day I realised and diagnosed all the issues that I was facing and came up with a simple formula:
I made sure that my thoughts are multiplied by communication, where validation stood as a variable which had no effect on the equation and I purposely subtracted the past from every new situation that I was into. This is what I found, and this is what worked for me.
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” Said Laurel K Hamilton, and I say, you gave chance to pain and accepted it open-heartedly because as per you, you deserved it. Open your heart once more, and give chance to the light, by adapting 5 simple practices, to a new tomorrow.
