Beginning of 2015, I starting to depressed myself. I felt
like I’d been living two different lives. There’s the life that everyone sees,
and then there’s the life that only I see. And the life that everyone sees, as
who I am as a family, as a friend, a student and as a colleague. That’s the
life everyone sees. And that the huge part of me. And that’s how I describe
myself. And I wouldn’t be lying but I wouldn’t totally be telling the truth,
either. Because the truth is that’s just the life everyone else sees. In the
life that only I see, who I am, who I really am is someone who struggle with
depression.
For someone who has never experienced depression or doesn’t really
know what that means, that might surprise them to hear because there’s this
pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something
in your life goes wrong, when you lose your loved one, when you don’t get the
job you wanted. But that’s sadness. That’s a natural thing. That’s a natural
human emotion. Real depression isn’t being sad when something in your life goes
wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going
right. That’s real depression. it’s hard for me to talk about it and it seems
to be hard for people who suffer from depression to talk about it, so much so
that no one’s talking about it. And no one’s talking depression, but we need to
be because right now it’s a massive problem, but we don’t see it on social
media, we don’t it on fb, on twitter we don’t see it on news because it’s not
happy, it’s not fun, it’s not light. And because we don’t see it, we don’t see
the severity of it. but the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this;
every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because
of depression. And it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away,
and it’s happening every single day. And we have a tendency, as a society to
look at that and go, “so what?” we look at that and we say, “that’s your
problem, that’s their problem”. We say we are sad, we say we are sorry but we
also say, “so what”.
Depression isn’t chicken pox, you don’t beat it once and it’s
gone forever. It’s something you live with. It’s something you live in. it’s
the roommate you can’t kick out. It’s the voice you can’t ignore, it’s the
feelings you can’t seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while you
become numb to it. it becomes normal for you and what you really fear the most isn’t
the suffering inside of you, it’s the stigma inside of others, it’s the shame,
the embarrassment, the disapproving look on a friend’s face, it’s the whispers
in the hallway that you’re weak, it’s the comments that you’re crazy. That’s
what keeps you from getting help. That’s what make you hold it in and hide it.
it’s the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you
hide it. and even though it’s keeping you in bed every day and it’s making your
life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it because the
stigma in our society around depression is very real.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your
arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you’re
depressed, everyone runs the other way. That’s the stigma. We are so, so
accepting of any body part breaking down other than brains. And that’s ignorance.
That’s pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn’t understand
depression, that doesn’t understand mental health. And that’s ironic to me
because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world,
yet it’s one of the least discussed. We just push it aside and put it in a
corner and pretended it’s not there and hope it’ll fix itself. Well, it won’t.
it hasn’t and it’s not going to because that’s wishful thinking and wishful
thinking isn’t a game plan, it’s procrastination, and we can’t procrastinate on
something this important.
The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there
is one. Well, we haven’t done that, so we can’t really expect to find an answer
when we’re still afraid of the question. And I don’t know what the solution is.
I wish I did, but I don’t, but I think it has to start here. It has to start
with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are
suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. We need to speak up and
shatter the silence. We need to be ones who are brave for what we believe in,
because if there’s one thing that I’ve come to realize, if there’s one thing
that I see as the biggest problem it’s not in building a world where we eliminate
the ignorance of others, it’s in building a world where we teach the acceptance
of ourselves, where we’re okay with who we are, because when we get honest we
see that we all struggle and we all suffer. Whether it’s with this, or with
something else we all know what it is to hurt. We all know what is to have pain
in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. But right now,
depression is society’s deep cut that we’re content to put a band-aid over and
pretend it’s not there. Well, it is there, and you what? It’s okay. Depression is
okay. If you’re going through it, know that you’re okay. And know that you’re
sick, you’re not weak and it’s an issue, not identity because when you get past
the fear of the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see
depression for what it really is and that’s just part of life, just a part of
life and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some places. Some of the parts of
my life, depression has drag me down to in a lot ways I’m grateful for it.
because yeah, it’s put me in the valleys, but only to show me there’s peaks and
yeah it’s dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light.
My pain,
more than anything in 26 years on this planet, has given me perspective and my
hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself,
faith in others, faith in God, faith that it can get better that we can change
this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance,
fight back against intolerance, and more than anything learn to love ourselves,
learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the
world wants us to be. Because the world I believe in is one where embracing
your light doesn’t mean ignoring your dark. The world I believe in is one where we’re
measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. The world I believe
in is one where can look someone in the eye and say. “I’m going through hell”
and they can look back at me and go, “me too” and that’s okay, and it’s okay
because depression is okay. We’re people and we struggle and we suffer and we
bleed and we cry and if you think that true strength means never showing any
weakness, then I’m here to tell you, you’re wrong because it’s the opposite. We’re
people and we have problems. We’re not perfect and that’s okay. So, we need to
stop the ignorance stop the intolerance stop the stigma, and stop the silence
and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth and start talking
because the only way we’re going to beat a problem that people are battling
alone is by standing strong together. I believe that we can.
