When darkness falls

I read a little while back that suicide is significantly higher with comedians than with any other celebrity group. This became more apparent when Robin Williams, a seemingly together, successful and 'the happiest person on earth' was found in a most dire situation. I guess its harder to admit you're depressed when everyone expects you to make them happy. The irony! But Depression is real. The person seated next to you, your mother, brother, spouse, best friend, could be depressed right now. You will probably never know.

Depression sneaks up on you. Small triggers. A disappointment here, a failed project there, a minor, or sometimes major disease around the corner, a major event, a feeling of inadequacy along the way and finally something pushes you off the ledge and you just have no more strength to hold on....and you don't care. Depression is a strange little thing. It holds on to all your negative past until it becomes your only reality. However small the hiccup was in the past, you remember it, you hold onto it, you meditate deeply on it, you write poetry about it. Your mission in life becomes to make it right. Your accomplishments, however large and significant, start to fade in comparison. So you work harder towards a 'seemingly perfect' world. A world where everything you do works and people can simultaneously praise you while you can still be behind the scenes. Its irrational but then again, isn't all mental illness?!

You lose interest in everything but you fight harder to act normal. So try and laugh more, and with time, you learn to make your laughter, your voice, your facial expression real....you know, not like robocop or a transformer, but like a real boy. You train yourself to walk, to stand up straight, to fight. Everything is an act. You are a performer in the stage of life. And since you are such an excellent performer, you are the best at alot of things. You are not just the best at being yourself. You have to wake up in the morning to work. So you wake up. You have to work to pay rent. So you go to work. You have to eat to sustain yourself. So you eat ( sometimes not the best food, but you eat nonetheless). With time, the routine becomes common, comforting even. The worst days are when you don't have a routine to fall back on. Weekends, holidays, leave days. Because that is when you are truly yourself and you don't like what you see. You have nothing to wake up to or dress for or pretend to smile at. So you just don't. You lock yourself up with your demons and let them take control

If you are lucky, you have people who love you enough to get you out of it from time to time. They give you things to do, they take you out of your own head and out of your own space. They give you a support system, something to hold on to, something to fight for. Because you know better than anyone else, the more you are left with your demons, the more consumed you become with your failures, your hopelessness, your personal darkness. So the people you love, despite themselves, give you hope. They become your daily miracle.

I guess for everyone, coping mechanisms are different. I guess, that is why it's easy to hide. Some drink, some starve, some do drugs, some over work, some stop working completely. But the fear for everyone is the same. That some day you will be unable to fight the darkness anymore. That it will consume you, eat you up and no one, anywhere will be able to save you. Because when the fight ends, the demons shall rise, and everything will end. Completely. And you won't care. (PS. However sometimes people who drink are addicts and people who sleep too much are just lazy)

Depression is a deep darkness. It's deeper than just sadness, or disappointment,or pain. It is consuming and always there with you. Always. And it is very, very shameful. It doesn't segregate, discriminate, pick preferences. It attacks like a snake and its poison runs through the veins until it finally overtakes everything completely. Everything else loses meaning.

I am writing this because I have suffered various degrees of depression for a while now. It feels like I have been walking around with it for so long in fact that I have made it my friend. We can now dine together, watch TV, maybe share a couple of laughs. It has kept me in bed for days on end and I have lain in bed worrying about nothing for days on end as well. I have tried to drink it away, without success. So I moved on and looked for other ways to cope. Sometimes, which are become more frequent now, I feel like I have won the battle. I now know which situations and people send me into a dark spiral so I avoid them completely or as best as I can. The struggle is real and daily. It's hard to explain to people when you don't know what you are explaining exactly . It's odd. And especially since it is such a personal shame.

Everyone has their own personal battle. I believe all most people want to here is that 'You are not alone'.