I've Never Been (un)Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  ‘No one understands how I feel,’ is in all probability the most frequently thought and spoken descriptor of depression of all time, and I think that’s because it’s true. No one can truly understand how you feel because the pain you experience is unique to you. Negative emotions draw deeply from who you are and your unrepeatable set of experiences and insecurities, which is why they’re so different for everyone. Your mind’s every response is a product of experiences that are yours alone and pain routinely taps into every single one of them. It takes your whole life, and every single incidence and coincidence that has ever happened to you, to make you who you are. Every cut, every scrape, every hurtful word, every heartbreak, every good or bad thing you have ever done, every mistake you have ever made and so much more come together to make you the beautiful, complex, perfectly messy creature you currently are, and it is precisely this self-definition that makes sadness such a solitary and isolating emotion. Your pain, like your fingerprints, is unique to you.

  In other words, you can buy happiness off the rack—but sadness is tailor-made just for you.

  When describing our emotions, words can only take us so far, yet words are all we have. So often the problem isn’t with the emotions themselves but the language we use to describe them. The drawback of using language as much as we do—as our dominant method of interaction with the world, those around us and even ourselves—is that we sometimes forget how limited the code of language is. Sadness is not created, encoded, stored and decoded in language alone, yet language is the only vessel through which we can communicate it, providing us with only the barest representation of our feelings.

  Think about the word ‘hot’ for a second. Think about reaching your hand out towards the flickering flame of a candle. Think about the rapid changes in sensation you experience as you get closer and closer to the light—how the warmth is pleasant and spreads through your fingers and down your hand as you approach the halo of the flame, how the sensation intensifies and escalates meteorically with every passing nanosecond, how before you’ve had the chance to register and assimilate the satisfying part of the experience that enjoyable warmth has been replaced by a vague discomfort and a mounting sensation of burning until, in an instant, you snap your hand away from the flame and cradle your fingers in your other, more temperate hand, shooting a nasty look at the tiny little flame that wanted nothing to do with you in the first place. Now consider how effectively the word ‘hot’ describes such a discovery and understanding of the state of the flame. How effectively can any word we make up describe the throbbing, consuming ache of sadness and pain?

  In my opinion, the reason depression is so misunderstood is that there is no truly adequate way to relay what it feels like. It’s why the only people who really understand it are those who’ve experienced it first-hand, and even then, their experience of it may differ greatly from your own.

  This is why I sometimes wonder if words are where it all went wrong.

  Human beings created language, and to distill aeons of semantic theory, we used that language to identify a feeling and give it a name. If we strip all of it away—the words, the constructs and concepts of mental illness or the boxes we create to slot and control—what are we left with? A feeling. A feeling that expresses itself as a series of questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is life? Why am I alive? I didn’t ask to be born, why do I have to die? Over time and generations these questions have come to be rote, but clichés are cliché for a reason. It is upon the bedrock of these very questions that human consciousness is built and everything we do in life is an attempt to answer them; to explain our state of being and come to terms with the perturbing inevitability of our ceasing to exist one day. Yet, faced with a lack of clarity to these impossible questions we never really answer them; so we choose to forget instead. We neatly tuck the questions away or find resolution through faith and get on with our lives because that’s all we can do if we want to live lives that are not bogged down by fears we have no way of assuaging. It’s why so many of us shy away from talking about the unresolvable predicaments of life—death, depression, feelings. With the absence of concrete answers we simply choose to move on with our lives rather than painfully ponder the questions, and we make peace with not knowing or fully understanding the circumstances of our existence.

  I sometimes wonder if my only problem is that I have a constant and more acute awareness of the impermanence of the world around me, a visceral link to the laws governing my life. Man-made laws, to a certain extent, I can control. Physical laws I can’t—and perhaps it’s from this helplessness that my issues stem. Maybe cognizance is my only problem.

  I don’t mean to suggest that others without depression are less cognizant or self-aware, but perhaps they possess a more refined ability to tune out this awareness and get on with their lives. Maybe it’s just that the depressed find it harder to ignore reminders of the transience of life in everything that surrounds us. Maybe all we see is a flashing neon sign that reads ‘futile’.

  ‘It is this acute awareness of transience and impermanence that constitutes depression,’ says Andrew Solomon. Is that true? Is that what depression really is? Think, to be bogged down by a fear of impermanence in a world that isn’t a permanent place to begin with. Then how does my place in the world matter? Why agonize over my purpose in life when both life and purpose are fleeting?

  Maybe all I possess is a big-picture vantage point that I’m unable to clamber down from. The world around me is being put into constant, unfiltered perspective, and while others can push it away and forget about it, I can’t.

  Maybe my only problem is that I’m one of the ones who can’t forget.

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  All the while, my mother had been hard-pressed trying to help me in spite of not knowing what the problem was. And all I did was shut her out and pretend I was fine. She’d nudge me gently, suggest I see a psychiatrist or psychotherapist often enough, but I’d aggressively shoot down her advice each and every time. However, soon after my suicide attempt, I sat my mother down and slowly and shakily unburdened myself of the mountainous load I had been carrying all on my own. I told her about how sad, despondent and lost I had been feeling and how afraid I was. I didn’t exactly tell her what had prompted this long, overdue confession but I said everything I could to make her aware of the gravity of the situation I had found myself in. She listened quietly, her face growing from concerned to resolved. When I was done she held me in her arms and said, ‘Don’t worry, darling. I love you and we’re going figure out what’s going on and deal with it together.’

  If you’re anything like me, you’ll scoff at the idea that a stranger can teach you things about yourself that you don’t already know. But as humans we’re full of unconscious motivations and historical explanations for our current patterns of behaviour. Psychotherapy or talk therapy provides a non-judgmental environment in which you can share your thoughts and feelings and feel supported and understood. Some forms of therapy are insight-oriented and help increase your self-awareness, while other forms offer specific, research-based techniques to help you challenge your negative thinking, manage stress, improve your mood and enhance the quality of your relationships.

  Meeting a psychiatrist was no longer an option, it was the only option. My mother had understood the pain I was in, and while she recognized whatever I was grappling with was not to be taken lightly, she knew it was not for her to decide what was wrong with me. The very next day I was in the waiting room, nervously readying myself for my first therapy session.

  The road to a diagnosis began there. I was ordered to do a series of blood tests which revealed that among other things, I had extremely low levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter considered one of the primary contributors to feelings of well-being and happiness. Further sessions of psychoanalysis, therapy and psychological testing confirmed I was dealing with major depressive disorder and soon enough, I started on medication to help alleviate the severity of my symptoms.

&n
bsp; I can’t say I took to therapy easily, or that I was thrilled about being branded mentally ill and needing anti-depressants, but I had finally understood what I was going through was much bigger than me and my personal state of mind, and that I had to try everything I could to feel like ‘myself’ again. Even then my depression was not miraculously cured and some of my worst years were still to come, but within a year of that frightened attempt at suicide all desire to end my life left me, and it never came back.

  As a teenager, I hadn’t yet learned I could help myself with the right tools like talk therapy, medication and exercise and most importantly, had the realization that relief could be achieved at all. I also didn’t realize the effect being a teenager was having on my depression. Our bodies experience an extraordinary number of chemical changes through puberty. We’re flooded with hormones that affect our moods, which have a marked effect on our neurochemistry. Whether you’re depressed or not and whether you’re prone to mental illness or not, being a teenager involves developmental turmoil. It took the settling down of all these chemical reactions in my body to finally allow me the chance to accurately assess my situation for the first time.

  By the time I was in my early twenties, therapists and psychiatrists had become a regular fixture in my life. I learned early on in the experience that finding the right therapist, like finding the right relationship, can take a great deal of patience and willingness to occasionally be disappointed. We’re all built differently, and we all respond better to different forms of care. All psychotherapists and psychiatrists have their own personalities and varied approaches to healing, and therapy is most successful when you find someone you communicate well with. I went to several before I settled on one who suited me, and once I found a rhythm and established a good relationship with my therapist, I found the experience to be invaluable. After all, what is therapy but an education in yourself; an opportunity to elevate the way you live your life? I’d recommend therapy to anyone, not just someone who lives with mental illness.

  I faced a similar struggle with accepting medication. I was afraid of the implications of it, but in retrospect I realize that my aversion to medication was baseless and just a pre-conditioned response that came from ignorance and misinformation about anti-depressants. With a similar amount of trial and error I learned that chemicals in my brain could be regulated and I didn’t have to go through the rest of my life feeling so bleak and devoid of hope. It wasn’t a miraculous solution that fixed me overnight. Anti-depressants don’t make you giddy with joy and happiness, and they definitely don’t get you ‘high’ like so many people believe. Antidepressants simply make you … less sad. They make your moods and your pain manageable. They help make depression feel like a controllable challenge rather than a dark, unyielding monster.

  However, in dealing with depression, further cures are necessary. I had taken the first steps towards healing myself, but I still struggled with being labelled ‘depressed’, and in particular its characterization as a mental illness.

  I grappled with what it meant for me and for my identity to be labelled as someone who had a mental illness. It was already incredibly difficult to confess to the magnitude of my sadness, but once the tag was added to the mix, it seemed to get even harder. There was a marked difference in the way I felt I was perceived when I told people I was clinically depressed. When I was sad, I was just sad—I was someone who was struggling under the weight of difficulties life was throwing at me. But when I was depressed, I was either damaged or a drama queen; there was something fundamentally wrong with my make-up as a person.

  While people’s reactions were varied, for the most part they contained nuggets of either fear or scepticism. They were either unwilling to believe I was depressed, preferring to look at me as someone who was lazy and melodramatic, and if they did believe me, they saw me as someone who wasn’t entirely stable. Even then I knew that caution and apprehension were natural reactions to things that are not fully understood, but it was difficult not to take these reactions at least a little personally, especially when they came from ‘adults’.

  It was my father who taught me a long time ago that no one can disrespect you or shame you without your permission. When I was eight-years-old I came home crying from school one day because a classmate had called me stupid after I failed a test. ‘Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being stupid. I’m stupid,’ I remember my father saying, talking loudly to be heard over the sound of my furious, rather theatrical sobs. ‘Only stupid people can learn things, beta. Smart people think they already know everything.’ ‘But I’m not stupid, Papa,’ I said, tears streaming down my face. ‘Then what’s the problem?’ he shot back. ‘If someone calls you stupid and you are stupid, then it shouldn’t bother you because what they’re saying is true, and if someone calls you stupid and you aren’t stupid, then also it shouldn’t bother you because what they’re saying is not true. Neither the truth nor lies should trouble you.’ That lesson has stayed with me my entire life and it’s what came back to me during those days when I was first learning to cope with people’s reactions to my condition. People labelling me depressed needn’t have bothered me because it was the truth, and people construing there was something wrong with me as a result of my being depressed needn’t have bothered me either because that wasn’t the truth—and deep down inside I already knew that. I had to take the power out of the words people were using and put more power into what I was telling myself.

  The reactions I got weren’t all negative, however. I also received an overwhelming amount of love and patience from those close to me. Even if they didn’t understand what I was going through, they made every effort so I would feel safe and loved. And in the midst of their care and understanding, I began to notice the effect my depression was, in turn, having on them. I had spent years gazing intently inwards; I hadn’t stopped to consider how my ups and downs impacted other people.

  My own relationships suffered because I lacked an awareness of my actions. My moods were constantly waxing and waning, and when there were downs, my predominant coping mechanism was to shut down completely. From my very first depressive episode, I both consciously and unconsciously shut out the people who were nearest to me. Like so many depressives, I cloaked myself in silence. My family and friends suffered at the hands of my brooding silences, and my romantic relationships suffered in a myriad of other ways. I was unable to talk about how I felt and the few times I was, I didn’t believe the people I loved were strong enough to hear and contain what I had to say. I can’t speak to the challenges that other people face but for me, my inability to communicate was my biggest hurdle.

  Depression robs you of the capacity to love. This is because a depressed person is so often incapable of seeing, giving and receiving love.

  By the time I was in my early twenties depression had made me bitter and angry. Years of wrestling with my moods had taken their toll, and I had almost come to resent people who were capable of being happy. It had negatively impacted everything in my life from my health (I was always ill and suffered from chronic pain) to my pursuit of a career, and I was sick of it. My pain slowly began to twist and contort into rage. Everything made me angry. I was angry about how I felt, about how little control I seemed to have over my own mind. I was angry about the choices I had made because of how I felt. I was angry about how I was floundering while everyone around me was succeeding. Worst of all I was angry because no matter how angry I was about the state of my life and no matter how much I wanted it to be different I just couldn’t make the change happen. I was angry about who I was, and I took it out on the people I loved.

  In its worst moments depression affects your ability to love as well as to be loved, and it leaves you unable to do either. So it’s hardly surprising that some of depression’s greatest damage is in the realm of relationships. While the psychological and emotional wear-and-tear that depression causes is palpable, the hushed, corrosive effect it has on relationships might not be as obvious at first
. I’ve lived with depression for all my adult life, but it’s only now, seventeen years in, that I’ve begun to understand what depression means to me and for me. It’s taken all these years’ worth of depressive episodes to become familiar with the particular texture of my sadness. The mistakes I’ve made and the hard-won truths I’ve learned I did so the hard way—through relentless experience.

  Before these lessons, I was often oblivious to a very simple fact: the person living with depression is not the only one who suffers at its hands. Every family member, romantic partner and close friend suffers too. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, living with depression isn’t easy but loving someone who lives with depression isn’t easy either. It’s challenging enough to live with a depressive person who has learned how to navigate their episodes and has understood the impact they can have, but living with someone who does not understand what is happening to them is a whole other type of challenge.

  Depression is such an internal and solitary process that try as you might there is no way of truly explaining what it feels like and the fact of the matter is aside from providing you with love and understanding, there’s not much anyone close to you can do to help you through it. The snag is that relationships in general, even the ones that don’t have mental illness to contend with, are notoriously burdened with unrealistic expectations when it comes to understanding and problem-solving. You believe that the other person should ‘just know’ exactly what you’re going through, while the other person believes it is their responsibility to help you feel better … but they often can’t. The truth is someone is never going to fully understand how you feel unless they’ve been through the same thing (sometimes not even then, and they’re certainly not going to understand if you don’t explain it to them), and it is not their responsibility to cure you of your sadness. And that’s okay—it’s a survivable reality—but it’s a reality that takes time and effort to come to terms with.