My bout with depression – A personal account

Recently, there has been a lot of activity on social media regarding depression, signs of depression, how to help someone in depression and whatnot. I am sure several people have also shared their personal experiences, even though I have not come across any, maybe at a subconscious level, on purpose. Everyone was urging people dealing with the sickness to speak up and others were being asked to check in on their loved ones. But I kept wondering what a person as private as I am could do.

For more than a decade, I kept fighting with myself without letting anyone else know, because being vulnerable was not something I could do. I did not even talk to my family about this, so friends and strangers were a definite no no. And writing this isn’t much easier now. The only reason I decided to pen down my thoughts was with the hopes that some extremely private person somewhere might find this useful.

My coping mechanism

A lot of different factors contributed to my depression and for a long time all I had known was the perpetual cloud cover that fogged all of my thoughts and daunted every happy moment I had. It got to a point where I thought that the happiness that I was enjoying was not mine at all and I had stolen it from someone else. What’s even worse is that until a couple of years ago, I had not even realised that I was in depression.

But by the time I did get to know, I felt I was in a much better place and thought that maybe it had passed. I was working by then and was surrounded by people my age, and had many friends whom I could turn to. This continued when I went to Kottayam for my PG Diploma, where I was living with my classmates, two of whom are among the best people I have ever met.

It was only when I started living in Chandigarh alone, did I realise that my depression hadn’t been cured, it had been overshadowed. I was at a loss as to what to do and how to get back my sanity, a sanity which I had not been truly familiar with for over a decade now. But something needed to be done.

It started when my best friend Aashna asked me why I didn’t go out and have fun. I had not really ever thought about this and it took me a moment to zone in on the reason – I felt like I had done nothing in my life to deserve going out and having fun.

What followed was a series of questions from her as well as my sister on what I believed I did that made me undeserving of going out and having a good time. When I started detailing everything where I thought I went wrong, it turned out I was hating on myself for not being perfect. I was hating myself for being human. And once that realisation set in, it changed the way I looked at myself.

An important thing that I learnt from my sister and my best friend was to assess if I would be telling my loved ones that they did not deserve to have fun if they had the same “flaws” that I saw in myself. And the answer was simple. I would never tell the people close to me that they did not deserve to have fun, no matter what reason they had. So why couldn’t I extend the same courtesy to myself? Because I was unnecessarily being too hard on myself.

That would be my suggestion for the first step towards healing yourself. If you believe you hate yourself or that you don’t deserve good things in life, make a list of reasons that make you believe that you are unworthy. Just that step alone might put a lot of things in perspective. Assess each one of those reasons. There is a major chance that you added some reasons just to find ammunition against yourself.

As for other reasons, if you find that you actually did make some mistakes in the past, you must remind yourself that that doesn’t make you a bad person, that makes you human. You are not your mistakes. What matters is repentance. There could be people who might hold your mistakes against you, but do not be one of them. It is important that you forgive yourself. You have to understand that making mistakes is human, and if you have made a mistake, try not to follow the same path. Repentance is the only redemption and you are worthy of being loved no matter what mistakes you have made. Remember: Everybody’s pace and path of growing is different.

When you look back at your younger self and cringe at some of the things you did, it means you have grown, that you are now a more mature version of yourself. Finding mistakes in what you did earlier is a way of growing and it is natural. It is important to remember that who you were earlier and the mistakes you made do not define you. What defines you is your willingness to make up for those mistakes.

Once I realised that, I did one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I forgave myself.

I stopped invalidating my feelings. There would be times when I was feeling particularly upset and someone would tell me about bigger problems of other people. Sometimes perspective is important, I understand. But sometimes, I just needed to feel what I was feeling without it seeming like I was insensitive towards other people’s problems. My problems were still my problems and I did not understand why there was a need to belittle them when they were just as valid, to me at least.

Sometimes, this kind of a perspective was important, where I needed to feel like my problems were not big enough, but that was usually when my problems were crushing me and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But other times, when I was already questioning everything, I did not need to question my feelings too. For a long time, that kind of a thinking made me bottle up my feelings. As a result, I started putting everyone before me and everyone became a priority but myself.

It was only recently that I realised I just needed one person, one, who would understand when I needed to be told that my problems were not that big in the larger scheme of things and when I needed to hear that feeling upset over my problems was okay. For years, whenever someone was sharing their problems with me, I would ask them whether they wanted a solution to their problems or just someone to listen. I decided to apply that same approach to myself, and whenever I was upset, I would ask myself what I wanted. And then, it became simple for me to tackle my problems. Because if I wanted to feel upset, I could do that and my funk would pass subsequently, and if I needed a solution, then I would come up with one myself.

Once I started realising that my feelings were valid, it led to me resolving my issue of seeking validation. For a long time in my life, everything I did was a way to seek validation. I built my interests around what I thought people would like me to do. My entire life became a giant cry for validation – from anyone but myself. But once the fog of my self-hatred started fading out, I realised that the people I was seeking validation from could be divided into two categories.

The first would be my friends and family. I wanted to be perfect for them because that is what they deserved, but they did not necessarily validate my efforts the way I wanted them to – because they did not even know I was seeking validation. I was pushing myself to extremes trying to achieve what I thought they would want from me. As an example — When I sang, I would judge myself for even the slightest waver in my voice, the slightest bit that indicated that I was human and not auto-tune. Gradually, without me knowing, instead of it being something I enjoyed, music became tedious for me. My natural pitch is Alto, which means I sing in the lower notes, but I would spend days trying to sing on the pitch that Lata Mangeshkar does. My voice would not support it and I would hate myself.

A few days into the recovery process, I realised that I needed to distance myself from music. I was trying to become something that I wasn’t because I thought that was what would get me validated. I figured that the people from whom I was seeking this validation love me. They would want me to be healthy above all else. My mental heath made sure that I stayed alive and I doubt anything else would matter to them more than the fact that I stayed healthy. And yeah, maybe they had expectations from me, and I would try till my last breath to fulfil them, but I would not reach a point where my last breath would come sooner than it is supposed to just because I wanted to fulfil these expectations. These – my family and friends – are the ones for whom I want to be better.

But the quest for validation doesn’t just end there. A second category of people also existed, whose validation I was seeking. These were the peer group – not necessarily my friends but people my age, whom I wanted acceptance from. A lot of my life also went trying to fit into this group of people. I always felt like an outsider and, well, when you are a kid, you just want friends, which I unfortunately did not have. It manifested into me trying to change myself and fit in. Without going into much details, I’ll just say that for years, I made myself believe that I wanted a future that my peers thought was right, even if my brain passionately hated that future. It took me going into my first job to acknowledge and accept aloud what it was that I wanted from my own future.

Little pressures like these snowball into a habit of suppressing yourself, and I did that to myself. It also soon turned into my need to seek validation on social media. Social media – the place where everyone tells you you are problematic because you saw a joke and decided to laugh at it. Social media was supposed to be a platform where people could share their views, but it has become a nightmare where people are told to change themselves because a random Tom, Dick and Harry has a problem with you. Random people who are “woke” tell people to kill themselves because of a difference of opinion – yes a difference of opinion. Where a difference of opinion on something as murky as politics is made out to be a valid reason to boycott a person.

A few of my, well, let’s say friends, decided to block me and end their friendship with me because I had a different political opinion than theirs. They forgot all of the times when I listened to them cry and talk about their problems, when I helped them in every way I could, all because I voted for a political party they did not like. And it makes me laugh now, the stage we have collectively reached. What a person is like has now been narrowed down to their political preferences, and this narrowing down has been done by the very people who say that people should be judged on the basis of their personality and not anything else.

I have seen people on social media talking about being aware of depression, and I have seen these same people feign depression to get out of having to work.

Are these the people I want validation from? No. I can’t pin the blame on them. They are the way they are, and changing them is not up to me. What is up to me, however, is changing who I want validation from.

The answer is simple – myself.

For long, I was pinning my approval for myself on the validation of others. These few simple thoughts and double standards quickly changed that for me. Because I can look at all of these people in the eye knowing how they act mighty when they are anything but. At the end of the day, I have to just be able to look myself in the mirror.

Three months into my recovery, the day I realised that I had no guilt because anything I was holding against myself was baseless and exaggerated, I looked myself in the eye and said with conviction that I validated myself. And when I did, I felt light – lighter than I had felt in years.

I still have a long way to go before I can completely heal, but knowing that I have the power to decide whether I want to do something or not was one of the most important steps in my recovery. For almost a month now, I haven’t had the urge to hate myself. The instinct of putting myself last is fading. And I am getting my music back.

One question, just a simple question four months ago changed my life, changed who I thought I was. And sometimes, that is all it takes – a simple question.

So here it is – Why do you think you do not deserve to have fun?