Winston Churchill called it the black dog. A lot of people also compare it with a black hole. But for me it was never so.
I was a happy child. Although I didn’t have a lot of friends, I loved reading, and could easily escape into a different world through my books. I also loved music. You would often find me playing my flute in my room, and even more often my spontaneous singing could be heard through our house.
For me depression caught me totally unaware. I was only sixteen. It was not as if one day I was happy and the next day depressed. For me it was more like going out for a picnic, enjoying myself, smelling the flowers and reveling in the sunshine, never realizing that, unnoticed, the fog has sneaked up on me. I was lost, trying in vain to find my way out. Nobody could reach me without getting lost themselves. I had no sense of direction and everything seemed distorted. My soul was cold and desolate. I felt so abandoned – as if the world has forgotten about me and nobody cared. The worst was the fear. I was scared to go to school; I was scared to cross the road. My whole life was ruled by these totally irrational fears. I couldn’t trust anyone. And the bigger the fear become, the more I withdrew – getting lost even more in the never ending fog.
I can remember often standing at my window, looking out at the cold, starry night. And then I would say: “God, please take me home, this life is too hard, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”
My parents only realized something was wrong, when they noticed the silence in the house. I wasn’t singing anymore. But by then, I was already long gone, completely lost and unreachable in my misty world. Their effort to reach me, was not real to me – like mere figments of my imagination….
I cannot imagine the suffering and despair of my family in that time. They kept on reaching out to me, over and over again, with no result. I was lost in my own world, oblivious to anybody. O, the helplessness that caused my mother to fall on her face in front of God and cry: “Please God, I can’t stand it anymore. My child is here, but her soul is lost Please bring her back to me….”
It was only then that the fog started to lift...
It took me a year to recover, but only after many visits to a psychiatrist and the use of anti-depressants. I still have my bouts with depression – occasionally - but those are more normal, due to crisis or trauma in my life, like dealing with unemployment, my father’s stroke and his eventual death from lung cancer. But I have determined that depression will never have the victory again. So I battle and fight my way through it. And yes, sometimes I do go and talk to a professional, and if necessary take anti-depressants for a while. But mostly I have found the inner strength to stand firm, because I know my enemy and I know the warning signs. The surest way to get caught is through constant negative thinking – a spiral that invariably can lead only way – back into the endless fog..
Today, I know there is hope – there is always hope – as the sun always breaks through and clears the fog away….
(607 Words)
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