Documented: Depression Creeping In
I caught depression, sneakily creeping up behind me during a trying time in my life
I feel it, like a treacherous, dark cloud looming over me. It’s grip, ever so terrible as to leave me disabled and unmoving, even frozen in fear. It’s as if it’s materializing into a pair of icy ghoulish hands, creeping towards the back of my neck, ready to strangle, ready to take hold.
Only a few hours ago, I was diagnosed with Tuberculosis. It shocked the daylights out of me since I’ve always known myself to be a healthy person. Catching such a serious disease never occurred to me as something that was possible of happening to me.
I run frequently, stay away from life-draining vices like smoking and drinking, consume insanely low levels of caffeine and I make sure to get an ample amount of sleep.
I’ve never been hospitalized in the last 20 years and up until last Sunday night, I thought I was invincible.
But fate, oh no, fate had other plans for me. For some weird unexplained timing, it was going to let me feel how vulnerable I was.
That Sunday night, I coughed up blood out of nowhere, something that’s never happened to me in my life.
You could only imagine how racked I was with fear. A million questions and a million thoughts, mostly what-ifs and scenes of the past as well as the would-be future, flooded my mind. I didn’t know which thought to hold on to. Before long, Panic was gripping hold of me. I didn’t want to show my wife these feelings as I knew it would get her to panic too so I was calm on the outside and maintained this facade up until we got to the hospital.
Before long, I was able to hold on to something which calmed me down for the next few days. Although I was positive with Tuberculosis, it wasn’t the scary drug-resistant kind and so we bought the necessary drugs to get myself treated and made the set action plans that I was to follow for the next few months — stay at home, rest, take my medicine.
My wife and I stared at each other and smiled. It was going to be okay.
Depression at the Door
Just earlier today, however, a different kind of darkness has started making its presence felt. Familiar, and yet it’s something that I could say for sure is a feeling that I barely know.
It’s a combined feeling of loneliness, emptiness, helplessness... I’ve read far too many articles about it before and I recognize depression starting to creep up behind me.
It’s the feeling of disappearing from people’s consciousness and memories. It’s the feeling of hopelessness — as if you’re suddenly this good for nothing creature with nothing to show for and nothing to offer to the world.
If I wasn’t careful just now, I would have succumbed. And good thing, I didn’t.
The thoughts that it puts into your mind, I must admit, are pretty terrifying and well, depressing. That being said, I’m quite the optimistic individual. I actually never would’ve thought I could invite such darkness to come knocking at my door. It knows full well though that everything it puts into my consciousness is all a ruse and I won’t let it have me.
If I were to outline one secret that I did to prevent it from securely fastening its grip around me, it would be — ‘Thinking about other people’. I steered my consciousness away from myself to those that matter to me. First and foremost, I thought of my wife, then my siblings, then my parents, then my closest friends. How they would be absolutely devastated if I were to fall to this psychological malady.
And that really helped me muster up the courage to say:
“Not today sir.”
Oh and, writing about it on Medium helped a great deal as well.
