I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

Self-destruction is the only way forward. I want to separate. To isolate myself from everyone around me. I want to stop being looked at. I want freedom from the concern of people. Freedom from their love. I haven’t felt like this in a long time. This broken. This watched. I haven’t wanted out like this in a long time. I want out right now. No more. Not one more second of it. Enough.

Somehow, against all odds, I’m in constant anguish.

‘there’s-a-deep-unexplained-sadness-in-me-that’s-eating-away-at-my-hopes-and-dreams-and-skin-quality-and-makes-me-want-to-jump-out-of-this-window’

The assumption is that if you have a happy and comfortable life, you have no cause for, or no right to, the despair you’re feeling.

We’re taught early in life to keep our emotions hidden and we’re especially taught that negative emotions have no place in a public domain.

The overwhelming narrative is that succumbing to pain or sadness indicates weakness and that they’re the sort of feelings you ought to keep to yourself.

On the worst days it comes to me as myself, as everything I could have been and as everything I will never be: immaculate, and completely without fault. It taunts and belittles me, obscuring my successes and highlighting my failures, reducing all that I am to a loathsome, insignificant speck.

For the most part I feel hollow and lifeless, like I will never experience another positive emotion again, like I must go through the rest of my life with ice for insides.

suddenly it’s as if the anguish of every living thing in the world is being fed directly into my mind.

Yesterday, I was treated to a highlight reel of every negative and damaging moment in my own life, and it played on without pause until I was convinced I did not deserve to be alive.

So I begin to fantasize about death again. I imagine falling off the top of a building, face forwards, arms outstretched. I consider what I’ll feel when I hit the ground and for how long I’ll feel it.

These thoughts come unbidden; my mind always seems to lead me back here when I’m overcome with an episode, as if...

I try to contemplate nothingness, try to envision what it would be like to be free of my mind. In the moment ...

on some days I simply wish I were already dead. I’ve learned over the years there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and wanting to kill yourself.

The feelings of sadness and discomfort intensified

all ambition and drive sucked violently out of me.

Robbed of such cognizance it’s like you’re locked out of your own mind—cast out and isolated by even yourself. The rest of the time the anguish is insufferably faceless; a fire that started with no spark. Most days there aren’t even tears. On days like that I walk around with a persistent lump in my throat, trying desperately to break through the undetectable veil that seems to keep me separated from the rest of the world, from life.

It still amazes me how well camouflaged it is, this internal maelstrom I’m caught up in. More often than not, no one can tell there’s anything wrong. Sometimes I wonder if I built and moulded my entire personality in a way that would better help conceal my worst days.

I wonder if over time I purposefully grew quiet so people wouldn’t notice when I in...

In an instant I’m filled to the brim with familiar self-loathing. Every insecurity I’ve had as a child and teenager comes roaring back. I hate everything about myself; I hate everything that I am because I am none of the things I should be. I am not kind, intelligent, attractive or interesting.

Then, out of desperation, I take to believing I’m not supposed to be here, that I was never meant to be born. I convince myself I don’t belong on this planet, because if I did, I would know how to be here. I feel like a lost and confused child who is being forced to navigate her way through a very adult world. I often wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like forever, if I will always see life through this veil of despair. ‘If this is life,’ I think, ‘I don’t want it.’

I was crumbling under the weight of self-created expectation. I was never good enough.

It is said that most addictive behaviours are caused by underlying mental and emotional issues. When you’re depressed or anxious you’re desperate to feel good, or at the very least desperate to feel less bad. In order to avoid feelings of stress and sadness we turn to not-so-great things that will help us feel better;

come back to the same dark, unrelenting, painful place in my mind. When low, my moods had begun to border on hysteria, and I felt like I was trapped in a life I had no idea how to live.

lurks in the shadowy parts of my mind, keeping up a running commentary that centres around my impending annihilation.

There seems to be no end to the number of ways in which my mind chooses to disrupt my life. You’d think it would do its best to help. But no, it’s just one thing after another with the reckless thing.

likening depression to parasitic monsters that drain us of our joy or dark shadows that consume us.

No one can truly understand how you feel because the pain you experience is unique to you. Negative emotions draw deeply from who you are and your unrepeatable set of experiences and insecurities, which is why they’re so different for everyone.

Your pain, like your fingerprints, is unique to you. In other words, you can buy happiness off the rack—but sadness is tailor-made just for you.

I can’t speak to the challenges that other people face but for me, my inability to communicate was my biggest hurdle.

Depression robs you of the capacity to love. This is because a depressed person

is so often incapable of seeing, giving and ...

By the time I was in my early twenties depression had ...

angry. Years of wrestling with my moods had taken their toll, and I had almost come to resent people wh...

Worst of all I was angry because no matter how angry I was about the state of my life and no matter how much I wanted it to be different I just couldn’t make the change happen.

I made depression my identity. It robs you of your energy, skews your thoughts, dries up your motivation and when present, it can dramatically alter your personality, leaving you a stranger to yourself.

But this is what depression does; it robs you even of joyous hindsight. It poisons your mind and obscures all the good in your life.

I’m a control freak, and I don’t trust other people, and these traits as a combination don’t lend well to submission.