“I wish you were never born,” enlightened my phone-screen. I was lying in the bathroom in the misguided euphoria of observing the tip of a steel blade. I pressed it against my skin, waiting for the blood to come out with my eyes full of tears.
My life hasn’t been easy; I guess no life is. I was bullied when I was younger, my teachers told me that I wasn’t going to succeed in life. Then I became the thing I hated most, a bully.
I’ve been struggling with depression since I was 13. Truth is I was raped by my own cousin when I was a nine-year-old, and after I realised what happened I attempted suicide three times. Twice by cutting my wrist but my brother was there to stop me. The third time I lay on a busy street waiting to get run over, but when it was almost about to happen, and I thought my suffering was going to end, my two best friends rushed in and saved me. Made me promise never to do it again. I was an angry child and took it out on my friends.
I hated coming home because my parents and I were always arguing. Yelling nonsense at each other, but finally, things got better. But I felt betrayed, abandoned, and lonely. Every relationship I ever had was a failure because I couldn’t commit. I felt that people were just going to end up leaving me anyway. It wasn’t until later on when I started belieing in myself again that things got better. I do have my moments at times, but I try to see the positive side of life more often.
The incidents I mentioned earlier have led me to the diagnosis of what we call ‘depression’. Depression is hard to explain. But I’ll try anyway. You see. It’s like a disease. It tears you a part. The activities you loved doing like playing video games, watching sports, and YouTube videos, designing things, drawing etc. – it doesn’t matter. You can’t find any joy in them anymore. You don’t smile much because there isn’t a reason to do so. It doesn’t matter how good you have it. Depression makes everything feel worthless and hopeless. It can make you do many things. Some people are cured, for others, it can be lethal.
People think depression is sadness. People think depression is someone crying all the time. People think depression is dressing in black. But people are wrong. Depression is the constant feeling of being numb. Being numb to emotions, being numb to life. You wake up in the morning just to go back to bed again. Days aren’t really days; they are just annoying obstacles that need to be faced.
And how do you face them? Through medication, through drinking, through smoking, through drugs, through cutting yourself. When you’re depressed, you grasp on to anything that can get through the day. That’s what depression is, not sadness or tears; it’s the overwhelming sense of numbness and the desire for anything that can help you make it from one day to the next.
Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or are cut off abruptly.