The many faces of Depression

Depression can wear many fits, including happiness, playfulness, and free-spiritedness. Unlike what many think that it is sadness, gloomy and tears, it usually isn’t predictable. I learnt this in an almost hard way on the day I had a face-to-face conversation with depression.

When I say a face-to-face conversation, I don’t mean sitting depression down and having a discussion with it. Rather, it was that I saw a very close friend depressed, yet she wasn’t aware that’s the name for it. She just knew that something was eating her up deeply.

It all started when one year, she invested a huge amount of money that she had saved up for years in a too-good-to-be-real investment which later turned out to be a scam. But as the strong and hardworking woman that she is, she felt she could bounce back in not so long a time, so she kept working to rise once again.

My friend, let’s call her B, is a very lively and fun to be with individual. There is no way you would be with her and you’ll not laugh your heart out. She cracks jokes easily, takes life so small, lives her daily life like the free-spirited individual that she is, eats, drinks, and rapports well with friends and family, talks to her mum every day filling her ears with the gist of school happenings, attending parties, and doing everything fun. Everyone loved to be around her because her energy level was on a different level.

What everyone didn’t know was that B was dying inside. Her life was gradually turning into a nightmare, but no one saw it because she wore the happiness that always radiates from her with so much grace. She gave out freely as much as she could afford, so everyone thought she was good.

One day, she called me and invited me over. I knew something was up the moment I heard her voice. Without doing much thinking, I rushed off to her place. I got in and all I saw scared me. “Did someone rob your home?”, I asked. No, she responded with a shaky voice. Her eyes swollen like she had cried for days and the room scattered like a robbery happened in the house. B was a very meticulous woman and hates disorganized spaces. So, I knew it was something serious.

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I moved closer to B, held her hands and gently, I pulled her close into my warm hug and right there, the tap in her eyes was let loose. I allowed her relax in the embrace and let out all the emotions she was feeling. She wailed like she lost a very important part of herself, but I kept her there in my hug, and at interval patted her on the back while she cried.

While we were there, I looked around the room and saw a knife, and a picture album of their family on the page where the mum and dad where smiling beautifully with their eyes fixated on us. It felt like they were looking at us and smiling at me for saving their daughter from harming herself.

Apparently, my friend wanted to slit her wrist with the knife I saw earlier, but she decided to see her parents once more, so she brought out the picture album, and on the first page that had her dad’s picture jerked her a bit back to life. On the second page of the album, both her parents pictures stood there smiling at her, and somehow, it tweaked a thing inside her and that was when she called me.

It was a scary situation because it was my first time seeing depression face to face. It was with B that I learnt that depression is not always lonely, or sad. Rather, depression can wear many caps including that of an always smiling face, and that is why it is important to always check on your people, not only the ones that don’t talk much, but even those that seem to talk more, play more, and appear like their life is perfect. They probably need help than you can ever imagine.

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