I was in a café the other day, and four ladies were having coffee at the table next to me. They were chatting merrily about social things, when a couple of them noticed a man they knew walking into the café. The man took several steps in their direction, and suddenly pivoted around and walked out the door again.
The ladies were aghast. One by one, wide-eyed, they chimed in:
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Years ago, I was bedridden with a bad case of depression. I could hardly move, as though moving would quicken the death I was certain would come. Yet death would have been welcomed considering the dark space I was in, if not for my fears that everything I was feeling at that moment would be intensified before death would embrace me into nothingness. The paradox I faced was that I was in so much pain that I was hoping to die, but in order for death to come I’d have to be in still greater pain.
All very morose, to be sure. But every day, millions of people go through the very same thoughts I went through that day. Stuck between the fear of existing and the fear of dying, many people are confined to a dull existence consisting of only passing the time. Even without physical death, they are dying on a spiritual level – struggling to control, fix and manage the scarcity they perceive in life, in a race against time, believing that if they didn’t succeed they’d be diminished to a tiny speck of insignificant, inconsequential thing.
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Some of my first memories of my mother include her being sad, in some capacity. That is a very sad thing to say, I realize this now. Likely, on some level, I realized it then too. Growing up, I couldn’t understand her sadness, couldn’t access the dark places she must have dwelled. As far as I knew, I came from a family of sound minded people who scoffed at the idea of therapy in any form.
And then, at the home of my grandfather, my mother (by this point, an alcoholic) revealed to me that my great grandmother, a woman I’d never met, had committed suicide when she was a fairly young woman, around thirty. She left behind a few children, and a legacy of secrecy. My mother’s depression had happened around the time that she was thirty and as I grew closer to that age myself, I realized that my feelings of sadness were more than that. They told of a history of women and mental illness and social stigma. They told a story about the ways mental illness can destroy most of the women in a family before they even realize it.
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There was a time in college when I was going through a very bad patch – my personal life was going down the drain, I was unable to focus on my academic performance, and I had no clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. It seemed as if my past, present and future were conspiring against me to keep me in a depressing limbo from which there was no respite. And then I came across a paragraph that turned things around radically; leafing idly through an old textbook which I had bought secondhand, I found a piece of paper titled Footprints in the Sand.
Many of you may know the story, but for those who don’t, it details a conversation between man and God – there are two sets of footprints in the sand that represents the man’s life, and God tells him that he is there too, walking beside him and taking him through life. And so the man traverses his life, identifying the highs and lows that he has been through. He finds a curious pattern – during all his times of turbulence and trouble, there is only one set of footprints. So he turns to God and accuses him of ditching him during his difficult periods. And God in his infinite wisdom replies – No my Son, I did not leave you to face your troubles alone. Rather, I carried you through them to help lighten your burden. The sole set of footprints you see are mine, not yours. Needless to say, the man is chastened and ashamed.
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