A Funny Thing About Depression

When you feel you cannot trust your happiness.

It’s a strange, somewhat mysterious thing that happens. You become afraid of feeling relief. You become afraid of feeling good.

For some, it’s a matter of identity. You have come to think of yourself as the same as that heaviness that has rested upon you for so long. And the longer you have thought of yourself that way, the harder it is to think of yourself as something else.

But you must. You must gift yourself with imaginings of you at your highest, of you at your brightest. You must see and continue to see that allowing the self that you are now to die for a new self to be reborn will be worth all the pain and struggle that it will require.

It is not easy. Feeling good, even for a moment, can take so much work. Especially at first. I would not blame you for giving up. My mother did. Perhaps someone you loved did, too. But if you are to be all that you are meant to be, then you must do it.

For others, maybe those of us who have been fortunate enough to taste moments of freedom, however fleeting, and realize how precious they are, the fear is different.

We know what we must become. And we’ve tried again and again to become that person. Sometimes we succeed, but we soon learn that success is not a title that, once achieved, can never be taken away.

It is a constant process, a constant nurturing and cultivation. We embark on a journey to understand ourselves more deeply than we ever knew was possible. We find our deepest darkest parts and bring them to the light so that, at the very least, we can wrest from them the control of ourselves that we have unwittingly given up for so long.

We find success. We find understanding. We find acceptance. We think we have healed. And then we slip again.

A new trigger, a new problem. Or rather, an old problem reborn in a new light. It is an opportunity to take our self-awareness even deeper. But so often it feels like a betrayal.

I worked so hard, we say.

I came so far. I thought I was rid of you. Why have you come again?

It’s hard in those moments, when we have been high and flying free only to come crashing down again, to see the gift.

But again, we must. I must. Because to choose to see it as a curse would mean to sign my own death sentence. To choose to see it as the shackle that keeps me down, never to be broken, would be to rob myself and the world of the light that I have within. I will find a way. I must.

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This post was previously published on Modern Identities.

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