“Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”
– Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive.
At what point does life get too much for one to continue holding on? This was a question I incessantly dealt with in my nascent stages of battling with depression; at times, during my recovery as well.
When I was struggling heavily with depression, I remembered viewing my world in a shade of grey, metaphorically and literally. Thick grey clouds forebodingly loomed over my skies and quotidian downpours followed. I was just there, standing in the middle of that downpour – cold and soaked from head to toe. Daily, I carried the burden of those clouds in my heart.
Weighted down, life and routines got increasingly harder for me to trudge along. As impossible as it sounds, I could physically feel being weighted down. Some days, I found myself heavily pinned down and debilitated on my bed – no matter how much I begged to be released of those invisible clutches. Most days, I walked around with unbearable weights on my shoulders and my head in flames. Most days, I had to go about with constant aches in my heart – as if someone was tightly gripping and ripping it into two. Every inch of tear came with silenced screams of pain. All of these, veiled with a mask of someone who was trying to show everyone that she was fine.
There were days where sunrays managed to penetrate through the cloud bank, ceasing the downpour. Those days also meant that the warmth of the sun wrapped me in lieu of the blustery cold winds. Just like the warm sun, I shone the brightest on days like those. However, such days were very much evanescent before the storm returned. This cycle of rain and shine continued perpetually. It was as if someone had dunked my head underwater and lifted it up for me to catch a breath temporarily, only to commit the same act again.
At that point in time, I have sought various avenues of salvation – albeit, my mental health condition was considered to be treatment-resistant. Eventually, life got too suffocating to continue living on. I remembered feeling very smothered by life to the point that I was constantly gasping for air. I unceasingly begged to be reprieved of such pain. “I tried. Again, and again. Why has every day got to be this painful?” This thought replayed in my mind daily...