I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

Depression is a common mood disorder and a serious medical illness.

manifests

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.

It taunts and belittles me, obscuring my successes and highlighting my failures, reducing all that I am to a loathsome, insignificant speck.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had unwittingly kick-started an afflicting relationship with food that persists to this day.

feel lucky on days I actually know why I’m sad. There is deep satisfaction in being able to trace the genesis of a feeling, especially a negative one. When you can identify the source of your sadness, you walk into the feeling armed with an understanding of and familiarity with yourself. 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.

began slowly—the odd low mood, an occasional barrage of intrusive negative thoughts, a flurry of unexplained tears—

‘God, but life is loneliness,’

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

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.

moods were constantly waxing and waning, and when there

cloaked myself in silence.

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.