After decades of gruesome depression, I am now free from it.
Imagine that… I have managed to heal myself with little or no
help at all, refusing to take any medicine.
It´s been a terrible journey in the most unthinkable barren desert.
Others with the same predicament have had the fortune of having
understanding people around them. Not me…I had no one beside me to give me a hand, except some indirect help I´ve been totally on my own, my only companion being my trustworthy inner voice – my saviour.
It´s been an Odyssey into utter loneliness and darkness.
In Hades – the worst thinkable hell. Hell, because no one was interested to know. To understand. To speak about it. No one wanted to listen. They all in some way or another face it, yet due to shame and twisted vanity they feign it away.
What is blatantly significant is that the true healing from depression entails deep spiritual transformation, with other words – this may sound far-fetched – if you want to heal thoroughly, you almost have to eventually get “enlightened”. My new and beloved consorts which seem to no longer leave me in the lurch – Joy, Tranquility and Ineffable Force – point that way. To illumination.
So I have found this post which in my opinion is until now the most articulate and well-formulated article about how depression feels.
Here it is:
Depression is humiliating.
It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune.
It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed.
You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it.
And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.
If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier.
No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life. It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you.
If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.
Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest yet be judge.
