Depressive Minds

Everything seems to stand still when we wait. Days lose its brilliance, nights lose its mysteries, people lose its interest, things lose its grace, and life may loses its value. Then comes depression, and with its inactions erodes and rusts your best motives and intentions, obscuring your thoughts and your vision, which almost imperceptibly also misrepresents your reality. And so, slowly it takes away its reason, its meaning, its goals and your joy of living.

Initially, your escapes will be characterised by fair excuses, which will slowly undermine the clarity and ability to reflect on the events of your life. And the apologies over time become your gateway, your initial armour, a fragile shield of protection. Until total seclusion is perceived as natural, acceptable, comfortable and normal, for after all, life no longer gives you meaning outside of this new reality.

Your start to see the outside world as deluded savages, those who force you into a system that you no longer feel like to be part of it, the community survival system. And though you feel comfort in this seclusion, something will always be missing in the new world. There will always be a hidden desire for salvation.

As surprising as it may seem, it will also be sunny days in this darkness, for in loneliness sleeps a needy heart, which though accustomed to its melancholy, intimately cry out for help.

However, taking the first steps will be the rungs of the most giant ladder of your life. Where the short-weakened legs by almost nonexistent willpower will hesitate to venture the uphill.

Oh! how confusing is the universe of a depressive state of mind. There you self recognise living the sadness sometimes without explanation. There it will lie inertia, paralysing you in uncertainty, in hurt, and in self pity. There, you get trapped in the refuge of yourself. But is also there where the answers will be found, and the whys of the silent tears will be revealed, if you allow yourself be helped in understanding what have led you there.

There are so many reveries caged in the labyrinths that the mind has built through the pains of the soul, that the well gets deeper and deeper, the walls get higher and higher, and, If you do not wake up in time from this dark night of the soul, your true essence is lost in the pitchblack of the disordered mind, and of sadness.

Life in its perfection, and in spite of you, it passes without giving or waiting for consolation if you shut yourself. But what drives a depressive to continue living, and what drives an optimist to die? They are halves of the same coin, unity of the the most simple and sublime elemental truth of our spirit...Love, and only Love! The depressive suffocates it in himself, but love is his true pursuit, while the optimist will die without it, for he lives love in its fullness.

By Jacky Sewell

Note: This text I wrote in late 2014, after coming out of a deep depression. Today, I found the text in my old notebooks and writings, and decided to publish it.