of late i’m having frequent bouts of extreme depression. sometimes i get afraid that i might do something drastic to myself during such times. and to think i have so much to offer this world 🙂
the thing starts with seemingly arbit reasons and then i’m reminded of a hundred incidents in my life when i’ve made mistakes, including some a couple of hours or minutes back. and crashing down i go.
sometimes just telling this to someone can make me feel a lot better. however, there’s the feeling of embarrasment. it’s not the done thing to crib about. people don’t want to see you cry. they want to see you all happy and healthy and share your happiness. i think of half a dozen people i want to talk to. then feel embarassed (for a different reason) regarding each one of them. and somehow keep it to myself.
i guess similar is the case with the readers of this blog also. a lot of people read this blog probably because they like the way I write and then to feel happy about the stuff i’ve written. hence, a depressed post has NOTHING to do in here.
a couple of times before, I’ve written this kind of depressed stuff here. then somehow try to sleep and in the morning wake up to sanity and make the entry private! however, this time i’m determined to let this stay a public post. let readers form whatever opinions they want about me.
and, for the record, i’ve been on a psychiatrist’s couch once. midway through my BTech. a combination of depression and what my parents called “underperformance in acads”. i’ve been through the 100 question questionnaires that they administered. i’ve interpreted the whatever cards and tried to identify patterns on them. don’t remember much of it except that in one particular card i identified ghosts dancing round a fire! at the end of it all, there was nothing conclusive. was put on some arbit medication for two months. had no effect whatsoever.
PS: they say shopping cures depression. thatz exactly what i did yesterday and bought myself a Kodak C330 Digicam. 4 megapixel. Cost Rs. 11000 inclusive of accessories. pity no shops are open at 2 in the night!
Think of it in terms of a hierarchy of needs: You have achieved most of the things a majority of people keep working for well into their middle ages, things like financial well being and security, physical comforts, safety, decent health etc.
Now, the rest of the things you need to take care of are things that will take a long and uncertain amount of time to come by you – a discontinuous growth in professional recognition, filthy riches, kids, a wife that meets your needs, etc.
So, you are stuck in this weird middle ground where you don’t have the satisfaction of achieving certain goals or knocking down certain problems (the first kind) and you have no immediate line of sight to taking care of the second category, beyond chipping away at it day by day, with an uncertain outcome at the end of it.
Do you think this might be causing it?