Depression is a place we all visit from time to time. Some of us only go as far as the suburbs, stay awhile and find our way home. Others get drawn into the darker streets, and though vaguely familiar they present many dead ends and easily confuse.
It is a barren place which can be difficult to find your way out of, some of us live there, in a state of passive misery, where even contemplating the future can seem threatening.
A person who lives in this place never feels secure and safe, they exist in quiet despair, it is a silent place where no one shouts out in mental anguish, no breast beating or wailing can be heard. Much more it is a place of quiet preoccupation and isolation.
It is hard to breathe here as the air feels heavy with a sense of failure, time has no purpose, and each hour passes slowly.
T.S. Elliott wrote “Lying awake between midnight and dawn, calculating the future, trying to unweave, unwind, unravel, and piece together the past and the future, when the past is all deception, the future futureless”.
Depression is easily triggered by feelings of inadequacy, of being unworthy, what is it we feel unworthy of? Self worth is not measured by achievement and the accumulation of wealth, these things don’t always bring happiness; success can be miserable. It is better to believe that situations can fail without anyone being a failure, acts can be unworthy but not necessarily the person committing the act.
We cannot always change life but we can strengthen how we respond to it, and how we see ourselves in that response. We can learn to value ourselves and reinforce the notion that if depression is a place, then there is always a way out, sometimes we may need the help of a guide to find it, but when walking away we don’t have to look back; we can look forward and know that we will be happy again.
Title quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald.