The Depressed World on A Sunday Night

You write or share a post about depression. A couple of people ask, Are you alright? Yes, you say. You add a few more lines just to assure them. You find it difficult to lie even to a stranger until they ask, How are you? The answer is a lie you’ve excelled at. It often makes you wonder that you certainly need help but you cannot accept it from most people. You need to have a history with them, a history free of hurt, a history full of belief and faith. You need to know that they understand what it is that you’re going through, you need to know that they have done their research before providing help.

Many people, family and friends, have offered help. You are grateful. But you have no patience to explain them what you’re going through. You perform a one hour stand up act, making them laugh at your experiences, lessons and inability to move on. You say it in a way that they are dumbstruck. All they ask in the end is, Are you sure you aren’t feeling this because you have read too many books?

You smile. Perhaps. You lie again. You don’t explain anymore. You don’t correct them anymore. Hasn’t this been your state simply because you wanted to show them who you are? Hasn’t this been your state because you’ve been constantly led to believe that whoever you are is just wrong? So, you let them believe that you’ve read too many books. People fear the unknown. They try to comprehend it through known lenses. So, you let them be because the world doesn’t need another depressed soul.

On many days you’re hopeful; hopeful enough to dream of having your own family, your kids – the ones who’ll have Haroun and the Sea of Stories for their bed time tales. You list down the things you’ll say to your daughter upon her first heartbreak. And you hope that you won’t do it alone. Marriage isn’t something you want to get into, but you want a lifetime of commitment without that social label. Perhaps then you’ll escape everything you believe to be wrong with the institution that marriage is.

These hopeful days when end, they feel like a facade – lies you feed yourself in order to believe you’re getting better. You decide to remain sad till it fades out. You don’t want to fight it anymore, you don’t want to heal or get better. You just want to let it be so that you can focus on something else in life. People said this to you all the time, they said change your focus. But, you couldn’t imagine moving forward with broken and lost pieces, you didn’t know how to walk without a ground beneath your feet.

You don’t understand what you are waiting for. On most nights you break down saying, I cannot do it alone anymore. Yet, you don’t know what ‘it’ is. All you know is that you need help, help from someone you can take it from. You have understood the stories behind your abandonment and trust issues but you continue to believe that there’s no future for you. You fear that once again you might want to explain, and fail. Fear of failure has eaten you up, perhaps. You wish you could just shut up, you wish your soul didn’t walk away from your body when you begin to talk – yes, exactly like the scene from Annie Hall.

People say that it’s amazing when you have your own back. You are fully aware of having your own back, being your own support but it also makes you awful. It reminds you that you have no one to fall back on. More than that, you feel awful about the society that preaches this. What kind of dystopia are you living in, where you cannot reassure, cannot be there with one another? What kind of defence mechanism is it to say that ‘it is a strength to be alone’?

You have been trained to be alone all your life, and that’s the one thing you never wanted. Why is it so difficult to commit to one another? Why can you not have faith in people? People tell you you’re wired weird. Perhaps.  You look at the world as a string of foolish people who have fed themselves the lie that being alone is the best thing possible in the world – independence, freedom. Freedom is the prison you don’t want to remain stuck in anymore. Why are people constantly looking to be self-sufficient? Don’t tell me it’s a good thing because we all know it’s born from the fear of being hurt and abandoned.

We are so scared of having a real connection, we are scared of something good happening. As kids we are told, ‘Don’t laugh so much, you’ll have to cry tomorrow.’ We have been conditioned to think that that the ‘good’ laughter is followed by ‘bad’ cry. We don’t question it, we internalise it. We like to play see-saw with cause and effect. ‘Something bad happened; it must be because I had a good time.’ We are not given the freedom to either be happy or sad.

So, last night you decided to remain sad till it fades out. This doesn’t mean you won’t be the amazing person who can make people laugh, most of the times. You are constantly called moody, but you love it when it’s used simply to describe you without judgment. Every Sunday you wake up ambitious, to achieve everything that needs to be done for you to move forward in life. You end up spending half of your day trying to write, the other half in the frustration of being unable to write.

Tonight, you can write the saddest lines. Sadder than the ones Neruda wrote.

But what might be the point of it when people will choose to lie in bed alone than having the courage to face their fears, go out there and bond? What might be the point of it all when you’re too scared to write this in first person?


Read Also: Saturday, for Better or Worse