The Good Thing About Depression(& why you should embrace it).

✨What doesn’t kill you gives you clinical depression. ✨

Or has at least 50% chance of doing so.

If the universe is being generous, you might get a two for one deal and have anxiety slapped on as a bonus; perhaps PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) or a free gift of any other available mental illnesses in stock.

Although I am not one of those fatally optimistic people who must see a bright side to everything or perish trying, but experience has made me realise that depression actually gives something good back to its protagonist.

So if you are currently living through the collective trauma that is Nigeria, this might be a tiny silver lining.

What you will learn in this article, is that there is at least one good side to depression. A gift, which in it’s truest depth, few other experiences have the ability to grant you.

It is called compassion.

But to understand how this gift flourishes, you must first enter the mind
of a depressed person.

What Depression Feels Like

Lets imagine you’re depressed.

A depression diagnosis will often stun you more than it will relieve you to finally know the cause of your lethargy, demotivation and suicide ideation.

A psychiatrist will inform you that your brain does not produce the best amount of chemicals to help you live a mentally comfy life. But they can not tell you why your brain has become this way too. After all, God didn’t make psychologists to starve.

What you will learn from them, however, is that the lethargy means
your brain is tired of sending out multiple electric impulses which help you meet your daily goals. Plus demotivation points to the lack of convincing psychological or chemical arguments to get it to reconsider.

And suicide ideation reveals that…ahh…this one is special.

It reveals that you have been granted a bespoke membership to what I call ‘the dark cycle’

There’s an image that best describes what TDC looks like, but for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find it. So I’ll try my best to give an adequate description.

Imagine the ground around you is suddenly covered in fine sand. A sink hole appears in the ground fifteen inches away from you; drawing, from all directions, the sand around it like waves on a beach shore.

As it pulls the sand, the sand drags you with it. So, with both hands and feet, you frantically try to scramble away from the hole. But the sand’s current is strong. And you find that no matter how hard you struggle, you cannot move further back from the hole than fifteen inches, but if you slow down you’ll be drawn closer towards the hole.

If you give up or tire out and slide into the hole, you will experience a crushing pain in your chest akin to a cement block being pressed on you by someone the size of Dwayne Johnson.

You keep falling, pressed down by this excruciating weight on your chest, and when you finally land, you discover that you have landed on sand and it’s moving.

One glance reveals the same sinkhole fifteen inches away and an irrepressible fear jolts you into another frantic struggle; only now, there is an additional pain in the chest that weakens you.

The cycle will seem endless. Your struggle against the current, futile.

It will then occur to you that the cycle is powered by your consciousness.

You could become temporarily unconscious through self harm, alcohol, drugs
and other negative coping mechanisms, but you will return to the cycle a weaker fighter.

You may try positive coping mechanisms like exercise, knitting, art or a hobby that becomes a fixation.

But in the midst of this, it will occur to you that if you could permanently end your consciousness, you’d be free.

It’s no wonder the favourite moustache man of contemporary philosophy,
Fredrich Nietzsche, who experienced his own elaborate dark rollercoasters, once said “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”

Dear visitor, when the depressed mind you are masquerading as finds some psychotherapy, it may discover that the sands are composed of actions and inactions that have brought them pain. And that what gives these sands motion is a lack of meaning — a confusion that makes them even more painful. The scarlet ‘why’.

The doctor may prescribe pills to help you slow down the cycle to a near-static state. The therapist may assist you in mixing the sand with cement so the hole can be sealed neatly and serve as a concrete foundation for self-awareness.

However, the gift of compassion is between you and the cycle alone.

A Gift of Imperfection

Depression is an adaptive reaction to the malnormalities of human society.

Malnormalities, not abnormalities, because evil is normal for our world. For instance, it happens so frequently that it is not abnormal when someone opens gun fire on people going about their business. But it is malnormal.

Compassion, in it’s original Latin form, means ‘to suffer with’. In popular language ‘you can relate’.

But to relate, you have to know. And remember that annoying adage that says experience is the best teacher?

The good thing about depression is that you have suffered so much and so deeply that you can understand almost so many types of mental pain.

Because you dragged yourself in the dregs of your humanity, whenever you hear of a suicide you do not feel repulsion, amazement or indifference, you feel compassion.

Since you have experienced hopelessness and shame while you struggled against the dark cycle, you are inclined to encourage people around you because they may need it in the way you desperately did.

You are more inclined to notice the symptoms of pain, even when they live behind wide smiles. And the things you needed while you suffered in silence, you are inclined to provide. You will have more tools to engage the scarlet ‘why’ and you will offer it to others for free.

Those who have suffered greatly, have a greater ability to give strength by suffering with others.

This might seem like a bleak or even more depressing reality, but consider this:

A person’s heart is full of pain and they come to you. You find your heart instinctively open to help them lighten the load. An inexplicable connection is born; the experience of which uplifts you both from the depths of your souls.

It may be a passing moment or a lifelong friendship, but you have made someone else’s world a little better by being in it.

Then you will understand the gift depression has given you, and you will embrace it tightly because you’ll realise it’s a super-power.

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May the souls of all the departed, find peace and rest in it.