Day 12 : About Depression

The book I am reading right now is about a high school kid who is suffering from clinical depression. The writer of the book has taken a lot of effort to get the reader better understand the pain and hardship somebody suffering with this disease goes through. He really has been successful at it to an extent. There are parts in the book that would make you cringe, some would make you let out a nervous chuckle because you are not sure if something that horrendous could really even be possible. It is. There are some parts that would make you feel to darn sad and forlorn. This is not a happy book. There are parts where you begin to relate to the things writer is taking about. Parts that makes you think.

Depression.

This is the sort of thing that until recently would've been thought as a illness only inflicted upon the weak-minded. People were taught - if you are to be a successful and a respected member of the society, you have to lift yourself up by the bootstraps, keep you chin up, take the best along with the worst, keep the fight going. You know the sort of motivational mumbo-jumbo that they feed you when they get tired of your whining and have no constructive advice to give you. Nobody ever liked to get their hands dirty on somebody else's mess. Don't ask don't tell, didn't always apply to the gay-rights law they implemented in US armed forces. It used to be the norm when it came to many things that made people uneasy.

I am sure that people back then too got anxious and stressed about stuff. But my guess is that they probably had more gumption than us. They had deeper understanding between them. They were able to cope with it, because they were there to help each other when it counted. In today's world of too much, we don't have enough of that. Media, entertainment, gossip, work, pressure, greed, hate, love, anger, fear. Everything. We have lot of those. But people themselves haven't progressed with the pace in which the things around them have. Sometimes it gets a little too much for us. We all have a tipping point. Where our brains just decide that it cannot handle of this all the time. It simply just goes on a snooze. And it blames you for it. Which in turn makes us feel even more shitty.

I guess there is a term for what I am doing right now - Yellderly. But heck, it is the book talking not me. Not entirely.

I really do thing we take on too many stuff on our plates. It would be good to take a break from all of this. They have even started to have these zones in some cities of Europe where they promise to have no tech or internet signal. You just go there and sit and relax for a bit. Get away from everything. Doesn't that sound marvelous.

I guess that doesn't exactly fit the bill for what clinical depression exactly is all about. That's for the doctors to talk about. I feel that everyone has the possibility of being depressed in life at some point. Not everyone always has to face it. But then nobody is exempt from it either. Some do manage to cope with it by themselves. By the help of medication and therapy, or in the case of a lucky few, wonderful friends and family that help through it all. In the end, feeling alone is a lousy thing. And if you have a disease that makes you feel like you deserve to be sad and alone, it makes life all the more tough to handle.

I guess, what I am saying is, you are not alone. Not truly. Whoever it was that created us, created like billions of other people in here just to ensue that we are not alone. And if you just give it a chance, I am sure you will find at least a few people out there who you could relate with and who would hear you out and give you a friendly embrace.

Sometimes that is all that is needed. Listening to each other. Just talking to someone who care about you really does help. Unloading your worries. To know there there is at least on other person on this planet who knows you and the shit that you're going through. There really are such people. Always.

You are not alone.

Day 76 : The Mercy of Passion

 I am reading a book called 'The Burden of Proof' by Scott Turow. It’s nothing exciting or anything. Just another bland legal-crime drama with the usual familial intrigues cliché "gotcha" twists. I liked one of Turow's longer books called 'Laws of Our Fathers', which comes under this same Kindle County series this book comes from. So obviously I thought to give another of his book a shot. So far, it’s pretty daily fare, haven't really come to appreciate it yet.

As with every book I read, there comes a page or a sentence or a phrase that is so well coined and expressed it makes sense why a writer has made it big when all of the other wannabe writers get lost in the vast nothingness of self-published amazon books.

The phrase in question - "The mercy of passion"

The context of it wasn't as jarring as the implications this phrase can take on. At that moment, as is usual, I put the e-reader down and go on the mental somersault of weird philosophical contemplation or letting the grey matter between our ears go on a trot. Usually ends up in a rather depressing state really. But I sort of enjoy having the luxury of being able to go on this little excursion every once in a while and pretend to be able to be using our brains for something other than the mundane routine of our daily lives.

That's where I guess the passion part of today's discourse comes in I guess. Not many people are lucky enough to have found the one big passion of their lives. The one thing that drives them and eventually shapes their whole life. People spend almost all of their adolescent life trying to find it, adult life trying to chase it, and all their elder life regretting that they never chasing tails all their life. And also, having that passion in you in some ways makes you invincible or rather immune to a lot of things. You will be excused with having to endure a lot of mundane things in life you have this image of being passionate about something. "Oh, he doesn't attend social gatherings like weddings and such. He believes these commitments compels him to take away his time better spent following molecular biology." "Oh, she doesn't do dating. She believes it being a figment of patriarchal tradition trying to shove misogynistic ideologies down women's throats." "Oh, he cannot pay the rent this month. He believes paying for rent makes him short of funds better spent gambling."

A lot of people are passionate about a lot of things in life. Not everything that would be considered good by everyone. But the thing is, I don't think it matters really. If you like what you do. And by pursuing it you are not breaking any laws or harming anyone. Well, more power to you. Go ahead, follow your heart’s desire. At least you are not dragging your lives one day at a time, evermore closer to your deathbed. So what happens if you don't you don't achieve your dreams, at least you can tell yourself on your deathbed that you tried. Maybe this mercy that you can grant yourself on the deathbed would be the one that decides if yours was a life worth living or just another live that was. 

I don't really think there is anything on the other side of death. Once you die, that's about it. Done. Fin. Nothing but a vast blackness that pours over you until the end of time. You just don't exist anymore. You as a person, as whatever name they call you and your body now, is done. So what defines you is what you do of your life while you have it. And passion plays a big thing in that. We all just need to find something that we are eagerly and honestly passionate about. It doesn't have to be something like an unattainable goal. It just can be something that you enjoy doing that you can just keep doing every day and not be tired of. If your day right now doesn't include more of that, ensure that tomorrow does. Make plans to spend more time each day for that thing that you feel you are passionate about. That way as the years pass on there will come a point in life where you find that your whole day is spent doing that one thing of which you are passionate. And that one day. That one point in life. That is Heaven.