It is difficult to explain what deep depression is to someone who’s never experienced it. Of course everyone gets sad, but deep depression is sadness without hope. Even saying that, people still fail to grasp the meaning. People look forward to a variety of things, despite feeling sad about something. For instance they may look forward to going home to dinner with their family, they may look forward to payday, they may look forward to a vacation or even look forward to a new episode of their favorite show.
When a person is in the depression abyss, they look forward to nothing. Truly, at that moment in their mind nothing in their life has value including themselves. They either ask themselves, over and over again, “I have no purpose so what’s the point?” Or they are in so much emotional pain, they just want it to stop. Well I’ll tell you the point here. There is hope, regardless of whether you can see it in a moment in time or not. I struggled for years wondering what purpose I had, thinking nothing mattered, including myself and praying for the pain to stop. But I have learned through self awareness and awareness of people and situations around me, that I do have a purpose because as ironic as it may sound, people that suffer from depression, care. We care about living and how we’re living so when we have a vision of how we think we’re supposed to be living and we aren’t, emotionally it sends us somewhere we don’t want to be.
In my book I talk about the square peg not fitting into the round hole. We often give too much credence to expectations, like when society thinks a career should look a certain way or our bodies should look like a movie star’s or a man should always be the breadwinner or even your family thinks you should be doing a certain thing. When I did things because other people expected it of me or thought it was best for me, it felt unnatural, meaning it didn’t feel like I was living MY life and expressing my true self and when I didn’t do something that was expected, I fed the negative feelings. So it would continue to drain me leaving me emptier and emptier inside.
So I went on a mission (metaphorically speaking, I didn’t actually go somewhere specific) to discover my true self. I had let outside factors influence me so much, I couldn’t see the line between my choices and someone else’s choices for me. When I started learning to answer the question, “What do I want and what is best for me?”, I began the journey of learning who I truly am.
