Fight off the Gloomy Weather; The Fight of My Life

Photo taken by yours truly @Merese Hills, Lombok Indonesia - August 2018 

When your mind won't let your body move.

One of the hardest thing to explain to other people about depression is that it robs you of control not just over your emotions, but over your physical body as well. It can begin as a general slowing of your mental and physical processes, and worsen into a near-paralysis. Of all the things I hate about this illness, I think this tops the list.

I don't just mean that it's hard to move; I mean it's practically impossible. Let's say there's a box of Ferrero Rocher in front of me, waiting to be eaten. Ferrero Rocher is my favourite and I love to eat it while its cold (frozen); I like to put it inside the fridge. But when I'm severely depressed, I can't summon up the energy or will power necessary to make my hand move to the table and grasp it. The Ferrero Rocher just sits in front of me, taunting me while it melt; who's "frozen" now?

I rarely feel like going out or doing fun things and nothing is interesting enough to motivate me to be creative or adventurous and it's hard to be active, involved with others. Eventually, people get tired of asking me, listening to me and waiting for me to "get over it". I'm feeling more than just a little defeated. I don't know why, why I'm feeling so drawn to the negativity recently. I don't know why I'm feeling so hung on emotions that should have left me long time back. But I just do. And I try to control it, but it gets so damn tiring. I'm tired of trying to be happy.

The illness is usually seen as something that requires medication to relieve and sometimes it's simply taken for granted that you must learn to live with it forever, more or less. But if you really understand depression, you know it's truly frustrating and feels pretty hopeless when you think of taking toxic drugs on a daily basis just to be able to get out of the bed or act like you're okay at work. Your life kind of wanders past you without noticing that you exist. Medication is sometimes helpful for a short while to allow me to mellow out to get some strength and control, and feel some internal support while you start working on steps towards my recovery. Although the pain subsided a bit from pills, I still could feel that underlying sensation that something was off. I knew deep down that there was more action for me to take in order to feel like my true self again.

I couldn't find any more strength or courage or fight just to keep those around me from finding out how bad I truly felt. I was so conditioned to "man up" that when the pain, sorrow and thought of suicide ran through my mind, I had no answer. I couldn't yell or puff my chest at depression. Depression didn't care how much I could lift or what car I drove or how much I earn. Depression knew the real me. It knew the little boy who could never face his real problems head-on because the society in which he grew up wouldn't let him. He was too busy pretending to be strong, too busy pretending to be a "man" to admit he lived with depression.

With the recent blip in my own mental health, I realised I had been attempting to drown out my negative thoughts. I was so frustrated by feeling low again and frightened of 'taking a step back' that I did anything I could to feel other than the way I did. I drowned myself in podcasts about being present. I tried to yoga-it-away. I thought maybe I needed to get out more and have some fun. I attempted to meditate to make all the emotions and feelings just stop until I asked myself, "What would happen if I just faced the way I felt?".

The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs. You may sound incoherent. Your skin might shine with sweat. And there was no way anyone seeing me could have known what I was feeling, no way they could have appreciated the strange hell I was living through, or why death seemed such a phenomenally good idea.

But I truly believe Allah swt can handle my doubts, frustrations, failures and darkest moments because He is an astoundingly gracious God. He loves us through it all, because that is simply who He is. Tears roll down my cheeks when I hear someone say they want to kill themselves as it crosses my mind, always. Empathy is powerful. It enables us to comfort others and know how to pray for them. There are lies out there that swirl around and whisper to our deepest soul in weak moments, when we've lost our grip, and things come crashing down. We feel the need to hide the scars. We feel like the brokenness has rendered  us useless in life. We feel beyond repair this time. We feel tossed aside. Forgotten. Shamed. Rejected. As we sit on a shelf. Yet Allah swt breaks through all that mess. We are never beyond healing. We are never too shattered for repair. Don't be ashamed of the scars, of the deep crevices that line the soul, or the broken doesn't mean that we are un-usable set up on a shelf. Just because we've been broken doesn't mean that we are forgotten.

As I am healing from a session of deep depression and anxiety, I got to sit next to a young man during one of our support group session couple of months ago, who was in thick of it. I listened. I offered my story. Tears streamed down his face as he whispered a thousand Me toos". I put my arm around this man and prayed for the things I myself had needed just a few months before.

Ultimately, Allah swt will always use us to bring hope to others who are struggling, hurting, because we've been where they are and made it to the other side. Hope means the most when it's come stumbling, out of the dark places. Wallahu A'lam.