Personally, I do not like to talk about depression. A successful man might say, it is essential for growth. Newspapers print ‘tips’ to ‘fight’ depression. Of course, there are chemicals available in the market that stabilizes your mood and emotions, makes you happy, as a poet said somewhere, “euphoria packaged in a box.”
I’d love to try those antidepressants someday. For me, depression is one of those bizzare human problems. Not bizzare in the sense that I’m disregarding it, but everything that leads to a person getting depressed, the circumstances, the hurt; everything is absurd. This is also to say that existence is absurd, society is absurd, culture is absurd and so is human relationship.
That was a bold thing to say. Another bold thing to say is “Mothers can be a bitch” to someone who worships every mother. Camus urges to embrace absurdity like it’s a beautiful thing, something to be loved, as if it’s not mere disorder in one’s little inner world that conflicts with the disorder of outer world every long day.
Well, what is depression then? Just a bad word like every other not carrying the feeling(now more than ever). I think depression is boring and just, sad. If I was a good poet, I’d compare it with a fairy hiding a black rose. Who lives inside a deep well whose head is also too tall that one needs a ladder to peek through. You cannot climb the well without denying the black rose. It shatters when one looks at the face of anxiety. Many people get hurt and start hurting others. I just couldn’t do it.
It’s like a scar that must be hidden. Like some dirty secret.
Sadness is also scrolling a screen. You know the world is going crazy when people are dying to get viral unironically. When you can’t stand anything anyone says, when you don’t have the guts to reply a message, when you can relate to nobody but the constant chatter inside your head, it’s loneliness. There are easy and good escapes to loneliness, like being rude and having hobbies, worshipping a god, having fun and earning money and so on. There are moderate escapes such as drugs, alcohol, abuse and sex. Perhaps the hardest escape is suicide, but an escape nonetheless. You cannot pretend you don’t see the ugly.
Sometimes I think about an imaginary little french girl in the 7th century who is crushing the purple grapes with her feet to make wine, inside a decorated wooden vessel, smiling. Each evenings, I imagine her touching leaves of bushes as she returns to her house after glaring at the sunset for 5 minutes or so. I try to watch the world with the aesthetics of her blue eyes and everything that’s reflected there. Then, depression meets me again.
People say happiness finds you. Sadness finds you too.
A book simply doesn’t get completed without sorrow and grief. Maybe except if it’s about economics. Modern economic science ignores suffering like a lion who who ignores other zebras after devouring one of them. Maybe humans wouldn’t have to feel so inferior by birth for their parents being poor or unhappy, if the plain contraction of ‘judgement’ didn’t exist. Even if there is no judgement, the illusion of it exists. Sorrow comes with agony to children and never leaves them. We just learn to accept it and continue to act ‘normal’.
I don’t know how to end something like this. I couldn’t face words, I suppose? A conclusion is just a supposition, and one can only conclude when there’s clarity. Sadly, I do not possess any clarity. One can only be so much clear about life and it’s elements. But I wanted to say I’m not frustrated with depression. Neither I am obsessed with it. I cannot express it in words. I don’t think anyone can. I fell in love once, even though I was never loved, even if I didn’t know what love was. And then my love was humiliated. Not that it was the only thing that was humiliated. Depression comes and goes. Anyway, the past will disappear someday. The flowers will grow and ‘I’ will be happy again.
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