How many of us really understand depression? How many of us have not experienced it, veiled or intense, but so real? How many of us have not hit the wall of misunderstanding and incomprehension by others? Our sadness, caused by bigger or smaller causes, manages to erode us, consume us, undermine our resources, darken our perspectives, block us from being new. Depression exists and happens. We are aware of it or not, each one according to his own model of processing reality, according to his own pattern of reporting to himself and to the world.
Depression hurts us and then numbs us, suppresses our senses and sinks us slowly but surely into a deep state of hopelessness, like an abyssal slide to nowhere. We leave ourselves in her hands and accept her power... because it is easier than continuing a fight that exceeds our strength. We sink, with thoughts and emotions, with our whole being, into the darkness from which nothing can be seen. What good is it all? Nothing makes sense. We have no direction. Why so much pain and so much effort and so much complaining? We are covered in black tar from which we can no longer detach, it sticks to our fingers, our arms, it makes us helpless, it blocks our eyes, so that we can no longer see the face.
Depression exists.
Depression exists, but it can be defeated. We can fight... with a drop of help, with a drop of will, with a drop of motivation, with a drop of hope... with all these drops we can produce a potion from which we can sip and heal ourselves. Let's reconfigure, rebuild, be reborn and find ourselves. Maybe better, maybe stronger, maybe more resistant. Why not accept that we can be sad, that we can sink, but only to be able to rise to the surface, to find the meaning of our existence. Maybe only after a depressive episode can we pull the wave before our eyes and understand what our meaning is. And the meaning, whatever it is, is a living one, it is to be, to continue to exist, with good and bad, as life is.
This power, the awakening, the rebirth, does not happen without effort... no, not at all, but it happens as a labor, as a violent and assiduous work... and it happens when we decide that we have endured too much, that we I dived too deep. But it happens. Little by little, we find ourselves, unfold our numb wings and relearn to fly with them. That's how big our resource pool is. And the more capacious it becomes, the more we strive to populate it with other and new resources, which we never thought we could ever possess. We are so strong and we have so much regenerative power.
I say all this because I have worked with depression. I accompanied many and diverse people in their struggle with depression. I was with them and guided them on the labyrinthine road to the exit. I lived with them through their deep sadness and then their high joy of having overcome those moments. I felt their helplessness, I felt their pain and sense of helplessness, I felt their despair and lostness, I felt their exhaustion and giving up. But later, I felt their joy at having broken free from the sticky nets of sadness and I felt their desire to recover, to catch up on lost time, to look at those moments of sadness as a history of life, like a story from which they have something to learn, like a personal lesson, like a portal they had to go through to really prepare for real life.
And all this return is possible, so possible that sometimes I wonder if we all should live depressive episodes so that, when we get out of them, we can enjoy life with greater vigor, fight to exist meaningfully , to set our goals and enjoy the way to reach them. This winding road that is life itself. We probably have to be sad for a while, because otherwise we fail to understand and appreciate what it means not to be sad.
Depression exists, but so does the return from it. And the healing becomes all the sweeter as the whole process is not only about coming back, but also about rebuilding, changing, changing the perspective. With or without depression, we are the same. It is the vision that changes. It expands, becomes wider and more comprehensive as when new sense organs appear to us to absorb fresh information and to process it healthily.