I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

I’ve learned over the years there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and wanting to kill yourself.

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.

Maybe cognizance is my only problem.

‘It is this acute awareness of transience and impermanence that constitutes depression,’ says Andrew Solomon. Is that true? Is that what depression really is? Think, to be bogged down by a fear of impermanence in a world that isn’t a permanent place to begin with. Then how does my place in the world matter? Why agonize over my purpose in life when both life and purpose are fleeting? Maybe all I possess is a big-picture vantage point that I’m unable to clamber down from. The world around me is being put into constant, unfiltered perspective, and while others can push it away and forget about it, I can’t.

‘If someone calls you stupid and you are stupid, then it shouldn’t bother you because what they’re saying is true, and if someone calls you stupid and you aren’t stupid, then also it shouldn’t bother you because what they’re saying is not true. Neither the truth nor lies should trouble you.’

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

‘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.

I remind myself if happiness is fleeting, then so is sadness. I remind myself depression is the weather, and I’m a weather-worn tree. I remind myself even the worst storms pass. I remind myself I’ve survived them all.