Short Story #009: On Cloud Nine

 

On Cloud Nine

I’d like to think that I’ve beaten depression once and for all. Let’s hope for the best, as my therapist likes to say.

The victory isn’t at all my doing. I think God helped.  

He was the one who helped me to figure out all my burning questions, like, why are we put on this earth? (Answer: to worship Him), what am I supposed to do with my life (Answer: Do everything for the glory of God), and what happens after I die (Answer: There will be eternal life for those who believe in Christ Jesus).

I think about all the twists and turns this journey of life has taken me on and I’m humbled that I made it through so much and lived to tell the tale. It is only the grace of God which has sustained me so far. Glory be to God Our Father in Christ Jesus!

I first began my battle with depression as an eight year old child. It started with me hearing voices.

I can clearly remember the day it all began. My mother and sister were teasing me about something and being a hyper-sensitive little tyke I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. That’s when I heard a soft, sweet voice say to me—“I’ll be your friend” and I assumed it was the voice of Jesus. Soon I began to have merry conversations with this voice.

Turns out, the voice didn’t belong to Jesus, but it took me eighteen long years to figure that one out.

This is my first time writing about this particular incident. It may sound super funny in the present but just think about the seriousness of it. I shared my life with a disembodied voice for eighteen long years under the impression that I was talking to God. That’s how lonely, isolated, and deluded I was.

The depression began soon after this incident.

Even as a child I was very private kid, and till this day I am still wonderfully withdrawn as a person. With a sullen gloomy expression, I look as if I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders (I’m a bit sociable now because I’m done answering most of my burning questions). I seldom shared things with even my closest friends. I have no one to blame except myself and my need to be super secretive about all things.

My motto was—the less people know about you the less they can ruin. It ultimately led to my degradation because the less people knew about me, meant they knew next to nothing about me, and it became a problem because they filled in the blanks however they liked.

*

I’ll tell you what depression is really like.

It’s nothing.

And by that I mean you feel absolutely nothing—no joy, no sorrow, no grief, no ecstasy, no throes, no highs, no lows, nothing. It’s a flat line at zero. And that’s the scary part. It’s like staring into the pitch black unable to feel your way out of the abyss you’ve fallen into.

It gets worse on some days, and on some days it gets better. But don’t let that fool you. When it goes, it comes back with a vengeance and that’s the stupidity of believing one sunny day means the cloudy days are over. So do the cloudy days go? Yes, they go. Once you’ve felt your way through all the questions that are bothering you, and there will be some questions that are bothering you, the cloud just lifts and shifts. That’s the root of depression: unanswered questions and secret sorrows.

There is usually a whole host of reasons: long standing social wounds, childhood grievances, loneliness, worries about the future, plain old angst, just to name a few.

But I call depression a blessing in disguise. I and my fellow sufferers are mentally much stronger than those who don’t go through depression. We question life from the bottom up. We rip everything we know down to its most basic entity and then try to make sense of it before we put them back together. Personally, it led to me discovering a lot of answers about God and the world in general, and about what I’m meant to do with my life.

In a world which is fast losing its raison d’etre, it’s important to take time out to understand where you are heading as a person. 

*

You’d be surprised by how thin the line between giving in to depression and fighting it off is.

I was struck by how powerful I really was. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was all it took to either spend the day doing something productive or simply lying in bed. I was that much in control of my life and I really felt the burden of my free will. I was free to mope or not, lie in bed or not, cry or not, and I didn’t like being in so much control.

That’s what left me stumped, and I’m still a bit stumped till today. You’re so free you just don’t realise how much of a weight that freedom is on your shoulders. For some it may sound like I’m crazy to be complaining about being completely free to do whatever I like, but that’s what I felt. What was I supposed to do?

Was I supposed to A) write a book, B) get a Master’s degree C) get a job?

There were so many options to choose from and I was confused. At times like this you really wish your future self would come to the present and give you advice. There’s no way of knowing which road leads to success.  

The scary thing about life is that you make mistakes as you go and they cost you heavily in terms of years and money. No wonder people go to fortune tellers.

Having a perfectly functioning free will without the necessary manual on how to use it, is a recipe for disaster. So Jesus says—“the yoke I put on you is light.”—all we need is that yoke on our free will, if we’re meant to do something productive with our lives. And it’s important we go to God to find out what his will for us is.  

*

Middle of this year, I started fighting back. I told myself enough was enough. I would regain lost territory. I started plaguing my family with questions about life and God and what would happen once we died. They weren’t always able to help me but the answers did come.

They came through my own working out of the problems. Through trial and error I managed to make sense of the world.

The world is created for the good pleasure and sole benefit of God. Everything with Him at the centre makes sense and has meaning otherwise human life is no different from dumb animal life.

During this time I understood the importance of worship. For those who worship, the spirit of heaviness flees before them. Joy fills their soul, the joy of the Lord which ultimately becomes their strength.

Getting out of depression was hard.

You’ll need someone to throw you a rope to pull you out of the mire. There’s got to be something to live for. Something worth striving for. Something you can look at on the dark days and think—“I’ve got You, You’re all that matters.” You need to find this golden Snitch then the game of Life is over and won.

What’s your raison d’etre? Ever thought about that?

If you suddenly find yourself struggling to find meaning in anything, that’s a problem. I went through a phase where nothing—and I can’t stress this enough—absolutely nothing, held any meaning for me. What was the point of living? It appeared to me to be sheer banality.

Why do we draw, paint, write, cook, eat, educate? There’s no need to. Sure we do it because we like to, but it doesn’t serve any purpose in and of itself. Everything is so transitory it isn’t worth the effort, or so I thought. I got educated to work at a career. I worked at a career to make money. I needed the money so I could survive. When I refused to survive that’s when my house of cards came crashing down.

What do you do with a person who refuses to survive?

I don’t know. You let them wither away and die, I guess.

But I do know why I behaved so defiantly. I thought I was getting back at God for putting me through some tough times. It was my way of “showing” Him who was boss. ‘You can’t make me live,’ I screamed on the inside. You can’t put me through a whole host of things and expect I’ll be willing to go on. It’s just not fair!

My argument is an argument that defeats the grace of God. I don’t know what God felt about what I did. I don’t think He was too pleased.

*

The mistake I made was in giving in. I gave in to the capital D when I ought to have fought it off.

Now, it’s time I made a little confession.

There were times when I enjoyed giving in. I gave in for the sheer heck of it. I wanted to cry, I wanted to mope, I wanted to lie in bed all day and not do a thing. There were a lot of things I hadn’t cried about when it was the time to weep, so now I cried with a vengeance. It was a very angst-ridden phase of my life. My frame of mind was such that I wanted to show God I didn’t care two hoots about life and I was just going to waste my time on Earth. I was angry at him because I believed He didn’t take care of me at the time when He should’ve.

One day I went out to lunch with a school friend of mine.

I believe God sent her in to my life at the right time to tell me something very important about the wrong attitude I held.

We met at a restaurant.  Over lunch I told her about my theory of “boycotting” life because I’d been wronged. That’s what I had decided to do. I’d decided (and it really sounds crazy in hindsight) I was going to stay locked up in a room and never live again. 

My friend heard me out and made a comment which left me gobsmacked.

“You’re daring God to send you to Hell!” she said, “Bad things happen to everyone. And there’s nothing that’s happened to you that you can’t overcome.”

I stared at her and regretfully realised that she was right.

I went through some rough years but nothing had happened to me which I couldn’t overcome. I was just stubbornly refusing to get over those incidents.

“That’s not true,” I replied in a little whine, miffed as I was.

There wasn’t much weight behind my response. It was like God had trapped me at my own game.

*

Post recovery I can’t say I’m on cloud nine all the time, but on most days I am jovial and eager to meet the day. I got a job as a content writer. It’s something I enjoy doing. I know I have good friends. I have a great, supportive family. It’s all you need really. You need to surround yourself with loving people if you want a fighting chance out of this mess.

I believe I’ve triumphed. I no longer feel that gaping emptiness I used to feel. I communicate better. I don’t lie about what I feel. I don’t prevaricate or obfuscate. I live according to sound principles I’ve found in the Bible. I know why I’m here and what I’m doing with my time. I’m not selfishly living for myself. I have never wanted to.

I wrote this piece in the hope that anybody reading it and going through the same ordeal knows and finds the right way out. Let me be very clear here, there is a right way out, let me leave you with no doubt about that. Jesus is that way.

Even though I went through depression after I was born again, I believe it was for a purpose. It led me to a closer relationship with my family from whom I was very estranged. It also helped me to speak up about all the hurts I went through in the past.

I can genuinely only thank Christ Jesus for my recovery.

Amen.