If you’ve ever struggled with depression, you’ll probably fill my fridge with meat when you read the headline. But since I’m a rabid carnivore, I’ll consider it welcome. By the end, maybe you’ll try to get your meat back… or maybe not. I’m just telling you how I felt when I was depressed.
With a self-defense system set up better than the American pentagon, I went through life with smiles and trumpets, a lot of laughter, self-irony, and a baby’s sleep, which was activated when things got tougher. And they got tough. But I never wanted to feel that toughness. Because yes, it’s a choice, even when you’re doing nothing: to let it overwhelm you or stand up to it with everything you have and everything you don’t have. Although I sometimes felt it breathing down my neck, I stubbornly defied it with all the weapons I had. But that made me think I was losing my sensibility.
I used to think that I couldn’t resist through tough times without at least one armor layer. Until this year. When the heavy burden came from all sides and hit me in what hurts me the most: in the people dear to me, and did it mischievously… also through the people dear to me. Others. Crossfire from all sides. If it had hit just me, as before, it would have been fine. But now it hit something that wasn’t just about me. And in the throes of my brain, I thought that maybe it came because I always challenged it, and I didn’t let myself feel it in all its beauty. So I stopped fighting. I, the lifelong fighter, who always fought the status quo, almost gave up… I couldn’t believe it either.
At one point, in the dark period, when I kept insisting that I wanted to stay like this, a good friend asked me a key question: “But what benefit do you have if you let depression overwhelm you?“. And I tried to answer myself.
Cause this weight… this depression, so dirty, macabre, violent, meandering, is at the same time terribly beautiful if you can let it be for a while, without going off the rails. The risk is high. Cause emptiness is the heaviest. How can a void, this emptiness be so heavy, I wondered? So heavy that it bends people? But this burden is still yours. And the depression comes with at least one benefit: it forces you to meet with yourself.
Depression pulls your ears and wants to pull you down. To drown you. So you won’t move. But it does it because you didn’t move anyway. Because you don’t move. Because you just let yourself be pulled. From morning to evening in all directions. Without wondering what you want. And then it hits you in the head.
It wants to suffocate you. To make you stop breathing. But that’s because you are not breathing anyway. You’re just taking in some air. Enough to survive, not to live. So it makes you lay in bed and lose interest. It makes you don’t want to get up. It makes you want…nothing.
You want to hide from the world and everything around, including yourself, but depression puts a new mirror in front of you, a mirror in which it is not very convenient for you to see yourself. To show you to others as they have never seen you before, to show you as you have never seen yourself before, and then, perhaps, to see who loves you anyway and who loves you only when… stuff. Who takes your depressed face in their palms and kisses you and strokes your hair… literally or figuratively. But most of all, it makes you see if you, you, you are able to love yourself as you are that moment and take your depressed face in your palms and stroke your hair on your own.
Because that’s the first gesture that can save you. To love yourself even so depressed. Even if you hate yourself. To look at your helplessness and imagine that she is your best friend and that now she comes to tell you something that you don’t like. And you take her and kiss her and hug her, even if she rejects you or holds you in her arms or wants to hug you. Depression “divides you between you and yourself, between what you are and what you would like to be,” as a poem dear to me said. But it’s still yours. It’s not from the outside. It’s not a tragedy. It’s a drama. Even if it started with a tragedy. It’s inside you, even if it’s a reaction to something outside. And without love, she can’t go away, and you can’t go on.
They say happiness is the difference between how you imagined your life would be and the current reality.
Depression comes with this benefit. It’s coming to tell you something. Something you don’t want to hear. Or you hear, but you don’t want to listen. It’s coming to talk to you about you. If you take a picture of yourself when you were a kid and look at it, while you are paralyzed by indifference, helplessness, or lack of interest, and you look at what the kid in that picture says, you will hear. You will listen. You’ll see. You will know. What you used to say to yourself when you were a child. What you dreamed of. And what you are doing today. You dreamed of saving the world, and now all your efforts are directed to… .money maybe? Or to a man/woman who doesn’t want (you) or can’t embrace all (of you)? You look at that kid until you hear him. And give him back his dreams!
No, it doesn’t matter if you think you’re broke inside right now, and you don’t see any way to give him his dreams back. The way will come. But first, you have to work it out with yourself. No, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have stuff like your friends if you dreamed of playing, not collecting stuff. Play! No, it doesn’t matter… anything you don’t want, even if others want it for you. Do you want a man/woman who loves you? But do you love yourself? You have to put something in before getting something out.
Depression has another benefit. But only for artists. Somehow, depression increases your creativity. It cuts off your appetite for life, but it will choose an art if you let it express itself. You may not be Picasso, but if your heart cries somewhere and you manage to let things go through it and then express it, you will “purify” yourself as an artist friend says, something will come out of you. For this is the essence of art: the expression of things passed through the heart, not just through the head. And the things that go through the heart reach the others also to the heart, not to the head. You don’t have to be smart to understand art; if it’s passed through your heart, that thing will touch you; you will feel it. It’s not always important to understand what the artist meant, but if you get the goosebumps when you hear a song, you see a play, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, or any form of art, if it warms your heart, it makes you laugh with all your heart, or cry or makes you angry, if it makes you FEEL, that’s art.
I would like to tell you that a psychotherapist helped me through it, but it didn’t (maybe I didn’t find the right ones, and I’m convinced that it works for others). I would like to tell you that it’s easy and that someone gave me the answers, but it’s not, and they didn’t (no one holds your answers no matter how much “marketing” they eat just to convince you that you’re “broken” so you will buy their solution). The definite things I can tell you are that you are not the only one feeling this way and that you are not broken! You are also like that. We are all like that, no matter how much shit some people eat that they are all smiles and rainbows from morning till evening.
I’d like to tell you that it worked out on its own, but it didn’t. I’d like to tell you that I succeeded on my own, but I didn’t. My family, friends, faith, sports, writing, poetry, and theater helped me. But I’m lucky to have the first two: family and friends. And I’m grateful to heaven and back. But I also know that their input is external and works up to a point. The rest is up to you. The last five were up to me. And I worked my ass off.
Because no matter how many people hold your hand, you have to find your way to yourself on your own. It sucks, but it’s true. As in death…also in life you are alone, even if you are not alone. And no one else is responsible for your life except you.
P.S. Goodbye, 2016! I won’t miss you, but not at all! But I will always remember you as the year I almost died. And like the year when, look, I didn’t die, u bitch!
