The lockdown changed almost everything in my life. My attitude, my perspective, my goals, and my habits — all drastically changed. 2020 is the watershed in my life.
This was the year I met depression. Social isolation, among other factors, was a reason for it.
When I look back at those dark times, all my body knows is that it was the worst period of my life, and I don’t want it back at all. Depression turned from something “cool” to an illness scarier than the gates of hell.
My mental health suffered greatly for years.
I know horrible it can get in your mind. For those in a similar boat … I hope you fight and win.
I am not a therapist. I am just your friend who is here to share her experience and mistakes for you to learn from.
(Note: This is not professional advice, so don’t treat it as such; I penned some of my anecdotes. If professional help is accessible, please do not hesitate from approaching it.)
Your sadness is NOT beautiful, dear
Once upon a time, I was the “sad girl” of the town.
(This was before 2020.)
You’d never see me smile brightly, or laugh carefreely. My every action was mixed with a tinge of sadness. In fact, my heart feared happiness — it felt too fleeting, too ephemeral.
I had nothing much to be sad about then.
This phase occurred during my early teens, full of hormonal imbalance and realisations about life’s truths. Yet, I did have several things to be grateful for.
Only after years I understood why I deliberately kept myself in such soar moods.
Fairy tales affect us all profoundly.
Every time I used to emerge after watching them, I would think of myself as the princess in the movie. A beautiful, lonely, helpless and abused girl — saved by the power of magic and love.
These wrong depictions made me develop a toxic mindset: I romanticised sadness.
I thought that if I remained depressed, curled up in the corner of a library with a book by Sylvia Path, and shed some tears, something wonderful, wonderful was going to happen in the near future.
When I realised the gap between fairy tales and reality, the sky came crashing over.
The endless and depressive wait for a great end was for nought!
The truth was hard, but worth the pain.
Despite what you've witnessed, your sadness is not beautiful, as said.
No one will see you in the bookstore and want to save you. Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare!
After you cross your teens, you are on your own completely.
The onus of dealing with your problems is yours and yours alone.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
You see, no heroes are coming for you.
Grab your sword, don armour, and brace for the battle to take as much joy out of life as possible ahead. You can sulk over your insufficiencies. Or, you can make the best of the cards you have been given.
Be proactive.
What's your call?
Don’t negate your experience by thinking that ‘others had it worse’
Often, trauma survivors think that their experience is invalid because others have had it worse. But trauma is trauma. If a person drowns in 2 feet canal or a 20 feel lake, she is still dead. The intensity doesn’t matter here.
If you find yourself wishing for some more bad stuff to happen to validate your experience, that means you already have been harmed to that level.
Don’t demean what you went through.
No, you aren’t seeking attention. Yes, you matter as well.
Making an effort MATTERS
"I believe depression is legitimate. But I also believe that if you don't exercise, eat nutritious food, get sunlight, consume positive material, surround yourself with support, then you aren't giving yourself a fighting chance."
- Jim Carrey
I know how it feels to lose hope. I have been there.
But you need to give yourself a fighting chance. There’s a brighter, better future ahead if you are ready to give an effort. To have the will to live, mere curiosity about your future can be enough at times.
Eat good food, try to socialise, and spend plenty of time surrounded by nature. It all works.
Stop identifying with your illness. Your suffering can't end otherwise.
If your sense of self is tied up in your suffering, anyone or anything that attempts to separate you from it will become the enemy because, whether consciously or subconsciously, you will on some level believe they are trying to take away a part of who you are.
Love yourself; be kind to yourself
The more you're struggling, the kinder I need you to be to yourself.
It's going to make it unbelievably harder and more painful for you if you're beating yourself up for what you can't do right now, or blaming and hating yourself for all the ways that your struggle is inconveniencing your life.
See — your mental health is like your physical health.
If you break your arm, you do not put any pressure or expectations on it. You merely wait for it to heal, giving it time and aid.
Your mind works on the same principle.
As one therapist says, if your mental health is starting to affect your physical health, treat yourself like you're sick (because you are sick).
Minimum of 24hrs to yourself. Nap as much as you can. Drink plenty of liquids. Catch up on movies you've wanted to watch. The world can wait.
Conclusion
In 2019, 1 in every 8 people, or 970 million people around the world were living with a mental disorder.
The statistics are alarming and rising.
The numbers display the failure of society as a whole.
Even if you aren’t affected, you should empathize and understand this ado. You should stay kind because you never know what the other one is going through.
An Interesting Greek Myth
I found this myth sweet:
Do you wonder why red roses are a symbol of love?
After all, roses have thorns which prick, and a thousand other flowers can compete with their beauty.
In Greek Mythology, all of the roses were white. All of them.
Aphrodite, as her nature goes, was boasting about her powers.
Love is the greatest emotion. It runs through her veins and moves by her fingertips. She could make anyone develop feelings for anyone.
(For that matter, she made a queen fall for a bull. But that is a story for another day.)
Her continuous bragging irked the gods. Zeus in the hope of teaching her a lesson pulled a prank…
Why You Should Read ‘The Bell Jar’
I was scared to pick up The Bell Jar.
Scared that my expectations would be dashed. Scared that mental health would be portrayed superficially. Scared that this topic wouldn’t be served justice.
Even thinking about reading this book signifies that you’re in a deep crisis.
In my defence, I have suffered from mental health issues from the beginning of adolescence, and still, now and then, circumstances put me on the verge of falling back into that hole again.
I was desperate to get into the perspective of a woman on a similar footing.
I was desperate to be understood.
Safe to say, Sylvia Plath’s masterpiece did not disappoint me. It hit home so hard that my eyes were on the verge of tearing up.
What is this book about?
Esther is a young, brilliant, and talented woman who finds herself unable to find happiness. She is an aspiring poet, but how her life turns out can be turned into the greatest poem of all times.
Sylvia Plath traces her journey from achieving success early in her life and not knowing what to do with it to her mind breaking down through the years that follow.
To understand this semi-biographical account, we have to understand Plath’s life.
Plath had a creative and brilliant streak since childhood, writing journals, publishing poems, and painting scenes, with an IQ of 160.
Plath attended Smith College, a private women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She excelled academically.
Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City.
This experience was what served as the inspiration for her only novel.
Tragedy after tragedy struck soon. After an upheaval concerning romance there, Plath slashed her legs to see if she had enough “courage” to kill herself. Next, she couldn’t get admission to the Harvard writing seminar.
Another thing weighing on her was the loss of her father at a tender age.
Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother’s sleeping pills.
Esther’s journey is similar.
From a hugely successful start, her condition begins to deteriorate terribly, self-doubt filling her. Circumstances, such as the loss of her parent, the unfaithfulness of her partner, and a rape attempt on her, play a role.
Esther finds trouble in basic activities like sleeping, eating, reading, and even filling a page with words!
It led to self-harm. It led to half-hearted suicide attempts. It led to insanity.
It led to the Bell Jar enveloping her mind.
The book used beautiful metaphors and terms to explain the condition to people unaware. One example is The Bell Jar itself; another is the metaphor using a fig tree.
People usually complain that Plath wrote with an egoistic perspective.
The voice did not come as self-aggrandizing or absolutely depressing. Instead, it was filled with witty comments, hilarious liners and shrewd observations Esther makes.
Even though published in the 1960s, this book won’t ever cease to be relevant.
The book is well ahead of its time
We can link Sylvia Plath’s depression to misogyny.
Sylvia Plath alleged Ted Hughes, her husband, beat her two days before she miscarried their second child. He wanted her dead. Hughes left Plath for another woman in 1962 and even burned her journals after her death.
Esther loathes marriage and childbirth in the book. It is a curse for the woman.
Her views are amazingly modern and blunt as compared to the times Plath lived in.
She’s a complex and incisive woman, who sees through society and points out its flaws.
“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.” — The Bell Jar
There are several pages where Esther analyses how marriage is a trap for women and how gruesome and cruel childbirth is.
I found her points justified. The feminist inside me was proud.
While this novel has a hopeful end, her life doesn’t.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963, at the young age of 30. Even if her life was cut short, her book continues to apprise the masses about this terrible, horrendous illness and gives hope to people in shoes similar to hers.
May this book be a blessing to you as well.
You will laugh. You will cry. And above all, you will feel that you’re not alone in this, and you can always rebound.