Depression! Sounds cliché, doesn’t it? When you hear news about a certain event incessantly, you are bound to become desensitized to it. To no longer resonate with the weight it carries because if you do something often enough, it becomes routine, a part of you. In all forms of media, there are myriad campaigns, tidbits, discussions, and whatnot along the lines of mental illness. What it means, how we can protect our own,and how we can be there for those who are struggling. In the depth of my depression, this was both a promise and a curse. I will explain that in a bit, but first, let us tell this story properly. Imagine you are a bird, and you just learned that your wings can carry you to the clouds. Imagine the feeling of unending euphoria and boundless hope. You are on top of the world, and you feel like you can pierce through the sky. This is how I felt a lot of the time. My life was picturesque, everything was moving as it was projected to be.

A firstborn son, studying a highly profitable and prestigious course at the best university in the land. I was enjoying school, I was enjoying my friends’ company, and I was never bored for long. There was always something to look forward to, a new excitement to experience, a new smile to discover. This largely sounds like paradise, and in many ways, it was. Yet, in many ways, it was not. One of my close friends recently told me after I mentioned that I was living moment by moment, “For you, you use moments as an escape. ” It was a statement that cut deep, sinking its claws and drawing me to self-reflection. Could it be true? Could my persistent effort to only face the present without leaving room to reflect upon the past or think about the future be a coping mechanism to avoid feeling things that are too uncomfortable or painful?

I took self-administered depression tests online around three times. Each time, I hoped the score would reduce, yet each time, it stayed the same. Black letters are so stark in contrast to the white background. I was clinically depressed. For some, diagnoses bring a sense of relief. It gives a name to whatever affliction they have and at least offers a direction of action. For me, it was my nightmare realized. I am in medical school. I had the worst-case scenario outcomes of depression at my fingertips. I knew them so well, in fact, that often, I subconsciously visited each of them. I kicked a chair to tighten a noose around my neck. I searched my ulnar arteries with surgical blades. I slipped into an endless sleep, a bottle of prescription pills carefully hidden from view. I thought about dying a lot!

In Roman Catholicism, there is a doctrine of a place called purgatory. This is a place between Heaven and Hell where the souls not good enough for heaven and not evil enough for hell are sent to be purged and made clean so they can be accepted into eternal light. It is believed that the weight of your sins determines how long you stay there, and it also determines how much you suffer. Tradition compares it to Hellfire except that instead of punishing, it purifies.

Depression felt like purgatory. There are many allegories that could aptly illustrate that feeling, and yet even in that vastness, they fall short. In his book on depression, William Styron describes it thus: “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description. ” Science tries to give it a universal definition through signs and symptoms, but from experience, I now know that depression changes face more times than the weather. You cannot dismiss another’s experience just because it differs from your own.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment I started to promenade with darkness. I still wonder if the endless fatigue I felt in primary school, the intermittent melancholy that plagued me through high school, or the agitation that still follows me through university were all acts of a sinister play with me as an oblivious actor and depression as a brooding and calculating director. What I can do with ease, though, is talk about the episode where things started to go berserk, and in losing control of myself, I handed the reins over to my mind. 2020 has been called the year the world went to sleep. I still remember my father’s broken voice as he begged me to tell him what was wrong on one of the days I was pulled under. I held an amused smile, wondering if this man who meant the world to me would ever understand, and in that moment, I knew he cared for me, but I was not able to accept that care. You see, depression is a charmer, and it enchants with its deception and a promise of feeling like you are home. Of course, I knew that everything was amiss, but I did not have the language to communicate to my own father. Such is the power of stigma; it can gag you so no one can hear your screams for the help you so badly need.

Have you watched a video that has you in it before? It’s like you know this person, but you also have not seen them before. An interesting fact I saw the other day was that none of us has ever directly seen ourselves. Interesting, no? How we often so firmly believe in our self-awareness, yet all we have seen before are our reflections in mirrors, in photographs, in other people. For a while, I watched myself deteriorate the same way you would watch a black and white film whose characters you do not understand and with a story line you do not really follow. Seven months, and each day faded into night, and each night gave way to day, and yet, in each of these, I agonized and cursed life, shook my fist at heaven, and came down to that dreadful question. Is life worth it?

Time is composed of moments: millennia, microseconds, and everything in between. Life comes with questions; the question of one’s purpose, the question of one’s favorite color, and myriad others in between. It is in the small spaces that I found salvation after I had attempted to find it in grand things. I collected the scattered memories where I was happy, like collecting fireflies from a dark forest, and decided that I wanted those back and even bigger. The leap that it took for me to jump from one step to another was difficult, but I also knew that it was necessary.The path out of depression is very much like depression itself in that they are both labyrinths without directions. Everyone has a different journey; everyone travels differently. Some people find their salvation at the bottom of a bottle, others in smoke from sticks they roll in their hands, and some from altars. I found mine in someone listening to me, and fortunately, they related. It was a catharsis like no other, that conversation. That time I laid it all down without worry that I would not be understood, without fear of judgment or that my vulnerability would be thrown back at me, and I’d be told to forge a spine out of it, to be a man.

Every once in a while, I think about my friends and remember how they saved my life then, how they save it even now. It throws me to my knees with gratitude because I have seen God hold out His hand, and in that moment, He had one of their faces. It is on this premise that I continue to draw my hope to live and to share. We are not made for ourselves, and our tribes exist, calling us even as we search for them. I have learned that community can be a wellspring from which you draw continued strength to face the day and sometimes to even face yourself.

“If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want and perhaps deserve to perish: if depression had no termination, then suicide would indeed be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease—they are countless—bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

—Styron, Darkness Visible.

Dear Lincoln,

I am not sure about which version I am writing this to. I hope it is relevant to the one who lives in the past, the one who lives in the future and the one who is both of you as he survives one while he creates the other. I am well and at this moment, I am filled with one of my favorite feelings, contentment. It is nothing as exciting or dispiriting as you are probably used to. I have learned to locate peace in the shades between black and white, light and dark, high and low. There is life in those too and life must go on.

Contrary to your worst fears or hopes, you are still alive. Even with an imagination as rich as yours, I am sure you could not have seen any of this coming. Not in your wildest dreams, not even in the times you were reasonable could you have thought up the life that you lived after you thought you were going to die. Is that not the beauty of second chances? It is kind of like rolling dice and although you know that there’s a chance they could fall off the table, you still try. Sometimes, they are exactly what you need, perhaps not what you may have wanted. Games are meant to be enjoyed after all.

You are not so lonely now even if you are alone much more. You met a lot more people, made more friends and some friends, they made you. You can attach a face or a name to so many incidents and I am not sure if the fact that they are sometimes many is a bad thing or a good thing. You do not go home as much but the relationship with your parents has bloomed into a nice familiarity with shades of more respect even.

Med school has not ended yet so I must be writing a tad sooner than expected but there is something to write about and I’m home in my body and mind and so, that is not a problem. Remember the features you found awkward? Your chest big as a barrel, your teeth that met edge to edge and made you feel like you sneered when you smiled, your unruly hair that looked like grains of sorghum sprayed on your scalp? Do you remember the times you felt like you were unworthy of many things that you could only be around specific people that you were not deserving of presence? That is something that has changed. You once stared at a mirror so long you found yourself in your reflection and then decided that you did not choose this body. But it is your own. It is your home and henceforth no one has to give you permission to live in it and neither can they criticize it. Your shorts got shorter and you let your hair grow.

Your essay, “Notes on depression” touches lives even now as evidenced by the sporadic likes on your WordPress account. If you are left with no material with which to build yourself, always remember that you have lived and someone will need your story and it may happen to be what saves them. The way Keith told you a story and you laughed while you sobbed and you decided to live.

Depression remains your guy even now. It is a typical foe to a lovers’ story. Some feelings about the other never go away. He visits you still, knocking on the door, asking if he may come in. While I wander when he learns manners, he immediately bursts into the room. He still doesn’t like to wait. Depression is not patient, not like death. It is difficult to say if you have survived the worst he has to offer seeing as we are still intending to live long. What we do know however is that you survived once and so you will survive each assault he may bring.

You will come to accept many truths about yourself and you will thus be set free. It is important to accept these as they inevitably will influence the community you build around yourself and how you present yourself to them. I cannot overemphasize the importance of friends. Make them and keep them, cater to the parts of themselves that they show you and let them share your vulnerability. We all need someone we can tell about our crazy days and someone (who could be different from the former, that’s okay) we can tell about the mundane nature of the other days. Your truths are valid and who you share them with is important so tread carefully in that regard.

The world is your oyster sir. It forms you and it will break apart over and over so you can come into the light. You are made of the sea and rock. You are made of a kaleidoscope of dreams long held by your ancestors and passed to you by your mother and your father. It falls upon you to dream new dreams, to claim your life as your own over and over. You must correct all who call you by a wrong name because if they do it long enough, it’ll become an identity. Reject everything that does not resonate with your spirit. It is compromises like those that lead you down to darkness that was hidden by the mirrors of external approval.