I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

‘Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night’ —Sarah Williams, The Old Astronomer

What happened to the little girl I was? When did she die inside me? How do I resurrect her? What could that girl have grown to be?

No matter how much I have, it isn’t enough. I fixate on people I barely know without even the slightest provocation. I expect transcendence. I expect permanence.

I’m talking about the ‘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’ sort of anguish.

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 ask that a person pay a price before we allow them to hurt. In short, you can’t be depressed if there’s nothing wrong or if you have no real problems.

Statements like these suggest your salvation lies in a choice you are simply electing not to make, but of course, that is categorically untrue.

At the heart of this disarray is me. My hair is unkempt, my lips are chapped, and I’m huddled on the floor of my dry shower cabinet crying

hysterically.

My breath comes in gasps as I rock back and forth, heaving with sobs. The tightness in my chest does nothing to deter the deep, guttural sounds that escape from me against my will. It’s as if my senses seamlessly teeter between being heightened and dulled: my puffy, leaden eyes are blinded by the bathroom lights though my vision is hazy, I’m awash in noise that jangles my nerves but it all seems to be coming from far, far away. Even the tiled floor feels stony and jagged against my unnaturally sensitive skin. In this moment of physical discomfort my insides match my outsides. My body may be at war with my surroundings but it’s oddly welcome, distracting me from the other, invisible war being waged in my mind. I clutch my knees and cry until the tears no longer come, until my body is as spent as my mind, then I slowly peel myself off the floor and return to the bowels of my bed. On some days this bed is my home, on other days it is more like my captor. I’m unable to tear myself away from it, unable to even sit upright. Each time I muster the will and energy to lift myself up, I’m pulled back into its depths by some overpowering magnetic force. I lie in bed and stare unseeingly at the ceiling. I’m exhausted and in pain.

It’s been the same for days: emptiness peppered with unexplained torment. 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. Then, the pain comes. It comes in waves; it wells up inside me without warning, and suddenly it’s as if the anguish of every living thing in the world is being fed directly into my mind. I can’t stop feeling it, can’t stop thinking about how much pain there is in the world—how much s...

But this is just what torments me today. 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 to test the waters, to test me. I try to contemplate nothingness, try to envision what it would be like to be free of my mind. In the moment it feels like...

dead. I’ve learned over the years there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and wanting to kill yourself. When I’m in the eye of a particularly fierce emotional storm like this one, I often wish myself out of existence or that I’d never been born at all, but I am no closer to killing myself than those without suicidal thoughts are. For me, these thoughts are entirely passive. ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I were dead?’ is really a thought akin to, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I had wings and could fly?’ While it’s nice to dream of having wings and the freedom they’ll allow me, there’s no impetus to actually do anything to change my wing...

I feel lucky on days I actually know why I’m sad.

When you’re in the throes of what feels like all-consuming pain, sleep is respite.

one. 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; things like alcohol, unhealthy food and endless reruns of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

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.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same

window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

‘It is impossible to know the consequences of suicide until one has undertaken it,’ says Andrew Solomon. ‘To travel to the other side of death on a return ticket is an attractive idea: I have often wanted to kill myself for a month. One shrinks from the apparent finality of death, from the irretrievability of suicide. Consciousness makes us human, and there seems to be general agreement that consciousness as we know it is unlikely to exist beyond death, that the curiosity we would satisfy will not exist by the time it is answered. When I have wished to be dead and wondered what it would be like to be dead, I have also recognized that to be dead would defeat the wondering.’

‘I imagine death so much it feels like a memory,’

‘No one understands how I feel,’ is in all probability the most frequently thought and spoken descriptor of depression of all time, and I think that’s because it’s true. No one can truly understand how you feel because the pain you experience is unique to you.

Your mind’s every response is a product of experiences that are yours alone and pain routinely taps into every single one of them. It takes your whole life, and every single incidence and coincidence that has ever happened to you, to make you who you are. Every cut, every scrape, every hurtful word, every heartbreak, every good or bad thing you have ever done, every mistake you have ever made and so much more come together to make you the beautiful, complex, perfectly messy creature you currently are, and it is precisely this self-definition that makes sadness such a solitary and isolating emotion. 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.

questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is life? Why am I alive? I didn’t ask to be born, why do I have to die?

I don’t mean to suggest that others without depression are less cognizant or self-aware, but perhaps they possess a more refined ability to tune out this awareness and get on with their lives. Maybe it’s just that the depressed find it

harder to ignore reminders of the transience of life in everything that surrounds us. Maybe all we see is a flashing neon sign that reads ‘futile’.

I learned early on in the experience that finding the right therapist, like finding the right relationship, can take a great deal of patience and willingness to occasionally be disappointed.

no one can disrespect you or shame you without your permission.

depression had made me bitter and angry.

It had negatively impacted everything in my life from my health (I was always ill and suffered from chronic pain) to my pursuit of a career, and I was sick of it. My pain slowly began to twist and contort into rage. Everything made me angry. I was angry about how I felt, about how little control I seemed to have over my own mind. I was angry about the choices I had made because of how I felt. I was angry about how I was floundering while

everyone around me was succeeding. 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 was angry about who I was, and I took it out on the people I loved.

living with depression isn’t easy but loving someone who lives with depression isn’t easy either.

‘We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.’

I began to see my symptoms as defining personality traits rather than what they were: side-effects of a troubled mind.

tired of being restricted by tags of negativity and pessimism. I wasn’t negative or pessimistic, I realized. If I was an inherently negative person, I would never have been able to survive the havoc my mind wreaked.

The only reason I made it through so many of my darkest days

was that I had hope, a sense of humour and a steadfast belief that my pain didn’t s...

a hazy fear of the Feeling’s return. In fact, I almost believe I’ve seen the last of it. Almost. I’ve been here a hundred times before, relaxed and forgetful, but I know now from all those previous times that it won’t last.

As surely as I’m happy now, I will be sad tomorrow. As surely as the Feeling has left, it will return.

But that’s okay, because my life is no longer about running away from depression. It is about le...

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. All the positive, alive moments of life seem like distant, long-lost memories and all that you can see in the rear-view mirror is the pain you’ve left behind.

You’re exhausted because you’re always pretending to be something you’re not. You’re constantly trying to reach this non-existent, ideal state of emotional well-being. It’s not real. You’re being set up to fail.’

Take off the mask. You aren’t happy? Fine, you aren’t happy. One day you will be. And then you’ll be sad again. Accept that and stop wasting your energy chasing something that doesn’t exist. You can’t spend your life feeling bad about feeling bad.

most of our problems in life stem from the quest for permanence.

In this age of instant gratification we want everything in our lives to come without an expiry date. We want everything to be permanent—relationships, love, beauty, youth, happiness. But the truth is permanence is an illusion, and like everything else in life happiness also comes and goes. Trying to be happy forever is like trying to stop water from slipping through your fingers. It’s not possible, and the only way forward is to realize and accept it.

And oddly enough, it’s this one truth of life that causes me so much distress and it is also the very thing that helps me feel better. On the one hand it’s the awareness of constant change and transience that sends me into a spiral of anxiety, while on the other it’s hugely freeing to realize that nothing I have now, not even my emotional state of mind, is going to stay the same.