Depression guilt trips you, it makes you self-destructive but most importantly, it makes you feel like a failure. No matter how much you have achieved in life, depression will outright dismiss everything you have ever done and make you believe you are bound to a life of failure.
I had never been clinically diagnosed of depression or any such mental health issue before this but right after my birthday at the start of this year, things started to get hazy. Towards the end of January life seemed to make absolutely no sense to me. I started questioning my accomplishments, my life choices, and my relationship with God but most importantly I started questioning the reason why I was alive. Nothing seemed as purposeless as my own body on the face of earth. While I struggled with this new wave of emotion, I also struggled with occasional suicidal thoughts. I had always been sensitive to situations, easily cried at the most minor inconveniences, got sad easily but this was something new. I was sad when I did not have a reason to be sad. “I have everything that I need. Hell, I have everything that I want” I would tell myself at multiple occasions.
Nothing annoyed me more than being sad. I had always been the happy go lucky girl that everyone knew, this change did not only make me uncomfortable but seemed irreversible to me. While life was shattering one day at a time for me, it became almost impossible to enjoy anything. I would come home from university, sleep and go back to university. I had not spoken a word to my family in months, I refused to go out or even meet my friends for a good part of this year until one night I stayed awake crying. I had, for months stayed up thinking about the kind of enormous failure and the good for nothing dependence that I was on my parents, but nothing like the one this particular night. I had absolutely no idea what was happening, I cried uncontrollably while my sister slept beside me and told myself that I did not have to go through this. So I decided to give up because it was impossible for me to explain what was happening to me.
In the morning, I showered and did not cry as opposed to the multiple times that I had in the past year. I reached university and while I had planned to not live this life of misery and give up completely, I saw myself walking towards the wellness center. I had never been there. As I stepped in I started to cry uncontrollably without a reason when one of the counselors, a young man asked me if I wanted to make an appointment but left that thought at the sight of me crying and whispering “I don’t know what’s happening to me” between sobs and struggles to breathe.Inside the counselling room he asked me what was wrong and I told him what I told everything, that I didn’t know. Later during the day he advised me to seek help even if it wasn’t from him. I did so. During our fourth session we focused on thought records. I had my whole life, sold myself short because I had always compared my achievements with the achievements of the people around me, so this was life changing. The thought record is a board with five columns that are as follows:
1. Situation
2. Thoughts
3. Emotions
4. Behaviors
5. Alternate Thoughts
I did mini thought records for myself every day. This meant that I was constantly challenging my negative thoughts, especially the ones that had no evidence to support my failure. I do not go to therapy anymore and I have not stopped comparing myself to others but while I do all that I also constantly tell myself that people grow at different paces and so will I.
The author Maryam Ahmad is a third year student at Habib University, passionate about social change through her writing.