(Step 1, Day 1 in Getting Over Depression week)
Note: If you decide to follow these articles, please stay for all five steps, this is NOT a complete story.
“Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
Everything in you do in life is about motivation. If you want to be a good student, you’ll have to motivate yourself to do it. If you realise the days of sitting on your butt playing video games was over in college, you’re gonna have to motivate yourself to get a job interview. Then you have the whole issue with self-confidence. Even when going to the dentist. Whether it’s by force or by choice, doesn’t matter, you’re still being motivated to take action by the force. *insert Star Wars theme* Here’s the dictionary definition in case you need more proof.
Motivate (noun): Give an incentive for action.
The How and the Why
The question is, how. How do I motivate myself to do anything while I’m depressed? I can’t even motivate myself to eat properly. That’s why this is the first step, ladies and gentlemen. The first step is realizing that you need to move on. Depression is such a condition that simply taking antidepressant and expecting miracles won’t fix anything. You need to give yourself a tart mental slap and wake up to the fact that as much pain as you are feeling, you’re tougher than this. You won’t let this condition, you won’t let the bullies, abusers and other rotten humans of the world take you any further down a road to losing yourself. They are just that. Things that want to destroy you. You just don’t let them and they’ll back right off.
The What I Realised
I’m not going to sugarcoat anything in this article. It’s not easy getting out of depression and it’s not pleasant. It feels like it’s not worth it 80% of the time. Like getting braces at 10 years old. Then you go to college and you’ve got the best smile. Voila!
One of the reasons I didn’t actually kill myself is because it’s considered a great sin to indulge in self harm, and I’m grateful for that motivation, because it kept me floating and I never realised then how utterly pointless that idea would have been. I have so much to live for, I told myself a couple of months ago. When I actually was depressed that I didn’t appreciate the fact that I couldn’t kill myself. I was angry, because it felt so GOOD to be able to focus on some other pain. And secretly, though I denied it, I kept hoping that if I did it, someone would notice how much pain I was in.
Now I realise that it was just a way for me to get sympathy from others. I was in need of attention. I felt… neglected. I wanted to show the world what they had led me to.
But the thing is, they didn’t.
I did it to myself. I let them make me feel bad, I let them hurt me. Let’s be honest, do those people ever give us the time of day? Did they sit and think, losing sleep over that comment they made about my art, when I admired them so much… which led me to crying myself into the mother of migraines? No, they certainly did not. So why am I giving them my time of day?
Realise what is going on, don’t just go with it and blame the world.
The world sucks and everyone learns this at some point in their lives. Those who don’t either die at 27 on a cruise ship doing his twenty-second bottle of Jack or they live on to be 60-something year olds crying about how she never got to be prom queen and thus never got married and thus has no life. You know what I mean.
The world will never treat you right. Either you can kill yourself over why that is, or you can say “screw you” to the world and be who you are, provided you’re not a serial killer. Which brings me to the next part.
The How I Did It
I did it by stopping blaming the world for my own shortcomings. I did it by telling myself the old, “How can I make this work for myself?” question. At first I was desperate and wanted to go to a psychologist behind my parents’ backs. That wasn’t the best idea, by the way. They would have stopped trusting me. Anyways. I went online. I found articles on how to get over depression, I went on WebMD to see the medical conditions of depression and see if I truly did have it. I assured myself that, yes, when you cry twenty times a day, bang your head against the wall hard enough to make a loud sound, and when you need to change your pillows twice a night because you soaked the first one with tears- you definitely are depressed. Also, I used to cry for no reason sometimes. I finally got myself migraine meds when my doctor told me that my eyes were photosensitive. In a stroke of luck, and true divine grace, the migraine meds had an ingredient that also acted as an antidepressant. I didn’t know it at the time. The doctor told me to take it only when I got headaches that didn’t go away. So it’s not like I had a dosage or anything.
I tried these self-administered methods for months. Some of you may not get the meds if you’ve also got parents who don’t believe in “luxury, it’s-all-in-your-head illnesses” like depression. I still know that my parents won’t believe me if I told them I suffered like this. So I don’t tell them, because I don’t like feeling sad.
The articles, books and movies are the ones that truly helped. Especially one mini book I bought from Barnes and Noble when I went to the States called “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom”. It’s amazing how the tiniest little book can change everything. I usually avoid the cheesy books, but this one was too damn adorable to ignore. The words, on the other hand, were revolutionary.
Besides this, I had a secret ingredient called faith and religion. I had faith that Allah would help me, and He did. My getting out of depression would not have be possible without divine mercy and true inspiration to fix myself.
The What You Can Do
First off, I recommend getting that book. For reals. It’s incredible. Even if you hate reading, it’s so tiny, it’s an unbelievably short read. What I loved about it was that, it’s completely general truth. I’m a Muslim, and whether you’re of any other religion, or an atheist, he could have easily put off the book for one of us, by either talking from a personal perspective or glorifying one particular religion. But he didn’t. It’s literally the perfect motivational book. I don’t mean to emphasise, when I say “literally” I mean “literally”.
Second, reassert yourself. What have you got to lose? Think about what is right, think about how you can better yourself. Tell yourself that you’re better than who you’ve let them turn you into. Be a good person. Only you can change who you are, NO ONE ELSE CAN. You may think that someone or some experience changed you, but, they didn’t. You let them. And you can also choose not to. You can choose to find out who you are, by being better, maturing, letting go of hate and negativity. You need to motivate yourself to change. Take charge of your choices. Don’t be afraid to be stronger.
Third, those of you who are religious, have faith in God. He’s always there, no matter how much it may feel that He’s not. To quote Dan Brown, “God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is ‘no’.” This means you have to try a new way, not give up faith and say that He doesn’t exist. That is, again, the easy way out, and things that come easy in life are usually fleeting joys.
Fourth, before taking a step further down into depression, think about it. Think about what you would gain from it, which is nothing. What’s the point in hurting yourself? Why should you give up and give THEM the satisfaction that you fell? And what would you gain from making them feel guilty? You’d be dead, or even more miserable than before. More animosity and negativity is not the answer.
We’ll continue tomorrow, and don’t worry, next step will be shorter, I PROMISE!!! This was the introduction and includes a summary of what we’re going to be doing.
A few quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt to back up this stuff
“You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude”
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
Ms. Roosevelt will be making further quotes cameos in these articles.
It. Starts. Now. 