The Annals of Depression

Yet another gloomy, pessimistic document found recently...

Sometimes, when we are overcome by a sense of loss, or grief, following a particularly exacting phase in our lives, we turn to God to help us recover. Recover our joy, happiness, wonder, humour, amazement, our very faith in the goodness, the rightness of continued living. What good is life, we say? Look how it has tormented me so much recently. Look at my misfortunes. And some of us lament the unfortunate turn of events that brought this to come to pass.

There are others.

I speak not of the others who bear the burden of life, with all its troubles, cheerfully, and with a chipper face, blissfully (yet, I think incorrectly) content in the rationalisation that all the medusas of the world are balanced by the aphrodites.

Some believe that. I, alas, do not.

You may be surprised at what I believe. You may even call it a fatalistic point of view. Indeed, you would be accurate in that assumption, for that is exactly what I categorise it as as well.

You see, I believe that Muphy got it bang on target when he coined his famous law. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong in the worst manner possible, at the worst possible time. You may have heard a slight variation. The essence however remains the same.

The world, is out to get you. And what's worse? It will succeed one day. For even if you don't give in, trying to put your best face forward, all dapper in the misfounded determination to not let unfortunate events affect your cheerfulness, you'll still be giving in. For you'll ignore the truth. The plain and simple truth. To try to plod through life by ignoring life's attacks is not to live at all.

Yet, all men are just that, men. They have to fight back. To struggle. To not give in without a fight. Yet, men are but beings of finite resources. The most important of which resources, is of course, the cliched will to live on. The will to survive, to fight back, to wriggle out of any situation detrimental.

The most important resource, yes, but still finite. And so some men are broken. Some are crushed by poverty, some by loss of love, or loved ones, some by HAVING no loved ones (a very slow, yet very lethal poison), some are crushed by the loss of control of their lives.

Some are crushed by the realisation that their life was nevre meant to be theirs anyway. They were indebted to duty the second they were born. Many forsake this duty, for they have a resilient enough sense of honour and self-esteem, that they can renounce all others' claims on themselves, and be the master of their own destiny. Yet many do not.

The human mind can rebound healthy from many setbacks. Yet betrayal, total and complete betrayal, of values, of trust, of friendship, of respect, of love, of kindness, of honesty, of dedication, of duty, of blood, of decency, of time spent together, of so damn much! That, I do not think many minds can recover from. I know for a fact that mine cannot. And will not.

I am at a crossroads in my life. As usual, I don't know the right path, yet now, when I look back, look around, I see the path that i was following earlier, was an illusion, a fantasy, a false impression created by my mind.

Did I not see the truths? I would like to think I did. If I didn't, I would have been pretty stupid, now, wouldn't I? But, I think there is another reason. Perhaps, the human mind has the decency, or you could say kindness to self, to shield itself from the more unpleasant things in life. I suppose I didn't see because I did not want to see. Perhaps my mind shielded me from the more unpleasant aspect of the circumstances of my life.

I had so much. And I chose to through it away. But later it was revealed to me, that I never had anything at all. The ultimate irony, wouldn't you say?

And so I was broken. By finding out that I was never whole in the first place. Illusions can create the impression of the presence of something that was never there. My whole life was an illusion. I know that now. The question, as everyone will probably be wanting to ask is, now what?

Now that you are at the crossroads where you have to chose between keep fooling yourself till the end, or tread a new path, now what? do you chose a new path? Do I chose a new path? Is the path even there? Is any path really there?

For you see, as I was crossing the center of the intersection, I had a revelation. It was for the briefest of moments, but I saw that all the world is based only on illusion.

All of it. every single aspect. There is no one truth, no higher reality that accounts for this world wide web of illusion. It is omnipresent. Some would interpret this as a proof of my belief in a malicious, menacing God. It is not. I just contend that this is the state of the world as I see it.

And so, it is the world to me. It will always be this way. For to change something in the world is possible, but to change the world in your mind is not, for it is to change your mind itself. And it may be just my weak mind, but it cannot change itself.

I'm not rambling, or using up copious amounts of rich language shrouded in verbosity. I just need a bigger vocabulary to express myself better. There are some things that the human language, any human language is incapable of expressing accurately. This is, I suppose, one of them. I've been having a lot of these lately.

The final question that would logically arise is, now that I see no hope in life for life itself, why live? Shouldn't I just end this existence? People have this (to me) inexplicable taboo of suicide. Human society has made it up to be a bad word. It is a crime, in many countries. Even in democracies. People seem to have this subconscious belief that your life somehow does not belong to you. That is true in many, no, in almost all cases. All cases actually, if you keep honour, duty, and other such obligations in mind. So, does that mean that an individual doesn't have even the right whether to decide if he wants to live or not?

Every human being has a right to live. There is enormous outcry whenever a mass-murderer or serial killer is executed. But why doesn't a man, not held by obligations, which no longer bind him, for their betrayal by the party to whom the obligation is owed, not have the right to die? Why? It is a question to which I have never been able to receive a satisfactory answer, from anyone.

Coming back to the original question, why live? The answer to that is that my mind is so weakened by loss, by betrayal, by the upturning of my world, that it no longer has the will, or the power to think straight, let alone make any kind of resolve. I do not decide to die, because I no longer can. I am incapable of deciding anything of substance.

These days my mind is a creamy haze, with random thoughts barging through on their own trajectories, asking noone's permission, caring for no one in their path. I have lost conscious control over a lot of my mind. I now realise what mental breakdown means. What loss of mental cohesion means. What meditation seeks to prevent. What therapy seeks to remedy. And fails miserably, by replacing reality with yet another illusion that helps replace lost false self-confidence.

It's a hopeless world, and I have lost hope.