“You’ve never been depressed—yours is a gift”
I’d like to dedicate this post to unhappy, lonely, emotionally-spent, awkward people.
If you and I share something similar, we share a label that was given to us involuntarily at a very young age. This label would go on to define us, or define who we thought we were, and would be the cause for why we feel different in social settings. Allow me to personalize this label for a moment before I speak to you heart to heart.
The doctors told my parents when I was nine that I was clinically depressed. That was my label. It was tied inextricably with my traumatic birth which, as the authorities wrongly predicted, would be the culprit for why I’d never graduate college, never succeed in a career, never make friends as easily as others, and a bunch of other crappy “never” opinions that did nothing but crush my self-esteem while growing up.
I secretly pitied myself like some poor schmuck in a Dostoevsky novel, believing that my label would overpower any choice I had to actually disprove it. But, without boring you with all the self-wallowing, self-medicating interims, I will tell you what a good friend of mine, Kevin Bergen, told me about my label.
“I’d like to suggest to you that you’ve never been depressed before—yours is a gift,” he said.
I’d usually chalk up this sort of thing as trite, but I respected Kevin too much to discredit it and listened intently as he unfolded, almost in a messianic sort of way, a glimpse of who I really am.
You have been endowed with an intense sense of awareness, you see things that others take for granted. What is invisible to others is visible to you. What you perceive as depression is really a form of illumination, for were it not for your sadness you would not care to reflect, and if you did not reflect there could be no insight. It is a gift, he said, and great gifts are hard to bear up. Never fool yourself into believing that you are depressed. You are enlightened through depression. And enlightenment always, always comes with a heavy cost.
These were not his words exactly but were the feelings that arose in me as I listened to what seemed like God himself was delivering to me in this timely hour. I laugh it really, how people can take on the divine role, speak the healing words, intonate expressions with sincerity, and send chemical signals that shift the way you’ve seen yourself, often darkly, often wrong. I don’t think that it’s fair to say that we’re just humans.
And so to you, my fellow down-trodden tumblr-ites—you who feel the lemons which give sharpness to your pain—I would like to inform you that your label is bullshit. It is not who you are, it is not even who you were. If anything, it is a temporary gag that ends in laughter because you realize what its purpose has been. Think of it this way: You are a dazzling, jubilant superhero who’s been asked to wear a human costume (including all its raging contradictions and imperfections) because of what it will mean, viscerally, to who you really are.
You are not really the addict. You are not really the whore. You are not really the awkward guy who feels socially retarded. These are all transient seasons, tutorials in what it feels like to lose your supernal powers, if only because you come back to appreciate, with new eyes, after wading through the bullshit, what “dazzling” and “jubilant”—heck, even “divine”—really means. So don’t give up. Don’t you dare give up. Because the nightmares of life were meant to inspire the most magical things in you.
