(to be honest, the real reason why I decided to write this is because of a certain suicide case that I recently heard)
(it affected me a bit)
Hi, I’m a 21 going on 22 year old girl with a mentality of a 16 year old kid. I think.
I stumbled across this picture yesterday, and I suddenly had a recollection of my life in general. I was 14 in that picture, and I was – in what I prefer to call – in the ‘daze era’.
Then there’s the 16 year old era – affectionately nicknamed the limit era – where I believe I simply stop growing and no longer dipping my toes into the filth of the world.
Till this moment, I am still quite green in the head. And I still think that my ex-schoolmates still retain their original features like they did six years ago. I was wrong, obviously. In fact, if it weren’t for their Facebook and the zillion photos in their accounts, I wouldn’t expect them to not be as short, childish, immature and just plain innocent.
Admittedly, that’s quite the opposite of me. Perhaps because our lifestyles are different. EXTREMELY different.
But I must say, the limit era is certainly the time where I finally feel like I could handle the world. I’ll tell you why.
I wasn’t the brightest bulb during my early years. I can’t write and read as early as the other kids. In school rankings, you’ll probably find me among the average of the average back then.
I was certainly not the cleverest out of the bunch. And I didn’t expect to be such a genius either, but I’d like it if I’m just a bit brainy. And I seemed to get my wish; suddenly I did a somersault and somehow landed on the first place, making me the number one smartest kid in my grade.
I was ten. My rank used to be 10. Then somehow I got number 1.
I thought the teacher forgot to call my name during the announcement. The numbers had gotten smaller and smaller and my name had yet to be heard (the announcement was backward), but as it turned out, I was destined to be called out at the very end.
It was weird, that. I didn’t remember doing particularly awesome in the tests or anything. Or maybe it’s just that those other kids didn’t do as awesome as me haha hah.
From that day on, I realized that I was in fact, not that average as I thought I was. My brain is quite sharp, I can understand things fairly quickly, I wasn’t that bad in memorizing, and at that particular time, I believed that my life is going to turn out just fine.
I’ve had it all mapped out in my head. I’m going to enroll in a boarding school, study overseas, work in a crime investigation department. I'll be a spy. I have such a weird dream.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
I was eleven. That was the year where everything went downhill, the year when I caught my disease. I can’t really explain what the disease really was, but it was strange, and it was certainly a mystery to all doctors alike. I was constantly rushed into an emergency room back then, and if not that, in the wee morning, I’d find myself in the clinic having my shots.
Is it possible to have all kinds of sicknesses in the world and have it all happening at once? Perhaps not, but that was exactly what I felt.
The doctors will ask,“What’s your sickness?”
And I will always answer, “Oh nothing. Just that I feel pain in my head and stomach and arms and legs and eyes and nose and mouth and throat and EVERY SINGLE BONES AND ORGANS OKAY.”
I was forced to eat various kinds of medications. I was thrashed by the doctors because of my late recovery. I was miserable.
I very much wish I could curse at those bloody doctors. I also wish I could destroy the nebulizer. And tug the wire out of my hand and throw that transparent liquid bag out of the window.
I hated doctors. I disliked nurses. I didn’t like people. I wish they would shut up and let me rot in hell. Because that was where I was going to end up at anyways.
It's a no brainer that a patient can’t possibly perform any of those good deeds properly, can they?
My classmates can read the Quran without much difficulty, but I just cried staring at those foreign words.
They never missed their prayer, but I can do nothing but slept through everything and lied to everyone that I was just as good as they were.
I just never saw the point. What are you doing, praying and reading the Quran in a language you can’t understand? What are you saying in your prayer? What is that you’re reading in the Quran anyway? Why do you need to do all of that? Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I survive even one prayer without feeling like I’ve climbed a mountain? I can’t do that, but no one will believe me anyway.
I was twelve, and all I wanted to do was to kill myself. It’ll be nice, feeling the cold blade on my veins. Disappearing forever from this world. No one’s going to miss me anyway. My family might, but life will go on for them.
But I can’t die. I’ll end up in hell. I’m scared of hell.
So I hurt myself. It was nice. Nicer than my disease – whatever that is. For some reason, the inflicted pain counteracted the actual sickness, so I wasn’t that troubled to say the least. I must have hurt myself too much because after that, I fail to feel pain. Bruises just don’t feel as painful to me anymore.
People will punch me and I wouldn't waver. They'd massaged my feet and I wouldn't have any expression on my face.
Pain became such a trivial thing.
Then I graduated from primary school, and off I went to another chapter of my life, the secondary school.
I was thirteen. Everything was new. New school, new classmates, new teachers, new environment, new subjects.
But my sickness is nothing new.
I tried to fight my disease. I tried to become significant. I applied to be a librarian.
But I. just. can’t. do. it. Sometimes I can’t get out of bed at all.
I saw a whole lot of different people in my life. All sorts of healers, all sorts of races, all sorts of methods. None worked.
I also saw all kinds of patients. Patients who were just like me, patients who were worse than me, shrieking at the top of their lungs, their hands bruised, wanting to be free. It was a disturbing sight to behold. I always hate going to such places.
And I can’t stand seeing those healers/doctors smug faces. All I wanted to do at that moment was to wipe those smug grin off their faces and prove them wrong. Humiliate them.
I must say I succeeded on doing that.
Then I was fourteen, and I didn’t care about the world.
I just stopped thinking about everything in general.
I didn't even bother with ambition. What was the point?
I shouldn’t bother that they got better marks than me, as long as I understood the subjects clearly and didn’t fail them, it was fine by me.
I didn’t care about your friends either. I didn’t think anyone will understand what I went through, and I didn’t think they can. I was as strange and suspicious as it was, I don’t need to add more fuel to the fire, do I?
I had food in my home. I eat to live. As long as I wasn’t hungry I couldn’t careless about the taste of food.
Well, to make it short, you got them all, I got them too, so what?
My teacher used to say, “I’m worried that you’re missing out the joy of the teenage years. You might not regret it now, but you may later on.”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted those ‘teenage years’.
I didn’t want my schoolmates’ lives. I was as comfortable as it was. They were the ones who were missing out to be honest, because their lives were not as awesome as mine! Yup.
I slept through the years.
I couldn’t remember the 15 year old me that well because I was sleeping.
I only remember answering questions for the big test – PMR – scribbling, maybe I should answer A…no B is prettier…yeah D. Okay I’ll make a pattern here. Triangle zigzag HAHAHAHA.
Because of that, I aced half of the subjects and got B for the rest of the subjects. That was weird. Not that I expected to ace everything but WOWZERS I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO FAIL EVERYTHING HAHA YEAH.
No matter, I continued sleeping again, and finally woke up to a sixteen year old me.
I was sixteen, and I am a dropout. Let's quit school altogether since I can't study anymore. What's the point, really?
I was in my worst condition ever.
I somehow found myself in a specialist hospital, specifically at the brain and psychology department.
I thought this was it. I was finally going to be diagnosed with something. Something scientific. I rejoiced at the thought of being a mental patient. FINALLY, there’s a reason why I was like this. FINALLY, the doctor’s going to tell me that there’s a defect in my brain and I’m going to die.
That didn’t happen obviously. I’m very much still kicking and alive.
The doctor’s just talked to me, called me bright, gave some advice, gave some drugs, I took the drugs, and I was in cloud nine. Because of the drugs.
I laughed like a maniac on the first day I ate them. It was funny. Funny how I suddenly can’t stop laughing for hours. It was funny.
I can’t remember the drugs’ name. I’ve eaten a lot of drugs that I ceased to care about everything. And now I’m paying the price for eating so much drugs. Good thing I’m not a drug addict.
But the drugs helped me, in some way or another. It cleared out the fogs out of my head and it made me think that lying down on bed doing nothing was quite boring.
So I opened some clips that my brother gave me in his hard-disk.
He said, “They’re cute.”
I replied, “Yeah they’re cute.” I saw them when I was eleven. “But they can’t sing.”
But he just said, “But they’re cute.”
“Fine,” I’d said, and that day, I decided to play their videos. And this is one of them.
I find that those girls, younger than me, older than me, same age as me, singing this song, inspired me in an unimaginable way.
I was sucked into a world of sparkle and everything shiny.
They had a TV show (they no longer had them) and I used to watch all of those all day long. They were funny, yeah. They were adorable, yeah. They were typical, yeah. But I was interested in them.
Something about them was so human, so fascinating, I was distracted, I’m thinking it was the effect of the drugs. Probably not. But they were a nice distraction. I’d dream about them all day long. I’d think about their behavior. About their personality. About everything really.
About how great it’ll be if so and so happened. If so and so met. If so and so had a better voice. And a better song. And a better music video. And a duet.
And I began to forget the world. The world that is not as sparkly and shiny. Then I noticed that the world the girls were living wasn’t as sparkly and shiny either, and they too lived in a world like mine.
Then I remembered.
“I’M IN A WORLD! OH YEAH.”
“Hey I’m in a world!”
“What is this world?”
“Who are these people?!”
“Who am I?!”
lol
To be continued. :P
I’m not saying that music will cure depression, nor am I encouraging you to switch your medications to music. Did music save me? No. Before that, I was listening to music all the same. I was such a huge kpop fan. H.O.T, ShinHwa, G.O.D, Brown Eyes, Big Mama, S.E.S, FIN.K.L (oh the names are so weird...) but did they change my life? No.
I just happened to find the one thing that truly made me smile.
My point is that you need to have a distraction in your life, you need to be deeply absorbed in doing things that you love, things that inspired you. Once you’ve forgotten about the world, about your worries, you’ll remember back about the things that make you happy.
Though seriously, worry? What worry? I don’t have any worries. I live a comfortable life. Not a typical life but a nice life nonetheless. But what I didn’t know is that I have a parasite in my brain that clouded it with dust and made it heavy to live and choking me to death. Once you’ve forgotten about that little parasite in your brain or heart, you’ll notice that the grass is green and the sky is blue. And you are here, not as an outcast, but to actually do something. You’ll realize that in order to do something, you need to get up. And you can, if the thing that you want to do, you want to achieve, the passion of your life, is greater than your mindset.
It’s hard though, to realize that the grass is indeed green and the sky is blue. I used to scoff at people who have such a positive outlook of the world, but I am surprised to learn that the plants are very much alive as you and me.
And who cares that you don’t left any marks in the world? As long as you’re doing things that you love, those are good enough for you. As long as you’re doing a little thing in your everyday life, helping an elderly crossing the street, giving your seat to a pregnant woman, it might change their lives. You just don’t know it.
You don’t have to make a huge mark in the world. To live life sincerely and enjoy it every second are what matters most.
I used to think that I’ll die young. Or as a spinster who still lives in her parents’ basement. Or the world will end. I waited every freaking day for the world to end. For any sign. It still hasn't. I no longer anticipate it, just so you know.
Now I thought, those girls on TV are real. They’re doing things that they love. I want to do things that I love to. I don’t want to miss a day not doing the things that I love. But in order to do that, I need to recover.
Recovering by the power of brain is not impossible. Even if it’ll only cure half of your disease, it’s good enough. At least you’re able to search for the remaining remedy by yourself. I’m constantly on the look out on how to improve my condition - the results of digesting too many medications. It’s taking a toll on my health, that’s for sure, but what’s done is done.
Some of the things that we depressed people need in our life are a purpose of living. A sprinkle of happiness. A bit of love. Once we got all that, standing up isn’t that hard anymore.
So get a hobby, find something you like, stay with it, be happy, laugh a little. It’ll help a lot.
Or if it's your friend who's in pain, you don't need to advice them, saying, "Oh, you need to go out more. Oh remember God will you? Oh you need to *everything imaginable under the sun*"
No, we don't need that, and we won't listen to you. Keep your advices to yourself. The only thing you should do is include them in your activities, introduce them to new things, and just let them enjoy them as much as you do. We hate attention, but even we don't possess the heart of stone to be unaffected by genuine attention.
And that concludes the depression post. The next post will be
I hope you’ll look forward to that. :D
(read the continuation of this post here)
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