Living Without Crutches by Samuel Ufot Ekekere - HTML preview

CHAPTER SIX

THE DEPRESSION CRUTCHES

I’ve suffered from depression for most parts of my mature life so I know it could be very well a bad crutch. What is depression? It is a lengthened state of feeling of sadness. Every one tends to have stints of depression but there are those who suffer from it as a sickness. These persons always feel sad however the atmosphere around them. These people are the ones who dwell on the depression crutches.

I started suffering from depression since I was little. It had stemmed from my poor interpersonal relationships that I had developed with my parents and between my parents. Our home had almost always being a war zone and everyone was always afraid to speak out so that you don’t get on the bad side of daddy. This affected how I related with people outside my family sphere. I increasingly became timid and fearful and it soon became a habit. I was unable to express myself amongst even amongst my peers. I took more to myself. I felt just being neutral to life was best but I observed that there is actualy no place for neutrality. I have to choose either to be on one side of the wall or the other. This neutral stance found me pitched with myself. Everyone chose either way and I was unable to choose. I was really sad.

Depression is a heightened state of sadness and it could be suicidal. A good number of those who suffer from this sickness end up increasing the suicide statistics. What’s sad about this sickness is that there has not being a tried and tested medicine to solve the problem so the sufferers suffer and end up in their death.

Well, if you hang on the depression crutches, you would be doing yourself so much harm. The first step to having a cure from this disease is finding you. I have observed that those who suffer from depression are those who were living on the strings of others and were either bottled or disappointed by their actions that they decided to be alone.

This personal discovery will involve you choosing to

• Climb up from the ground level. Every one you are trying to please or you are expected to please are on the ground. Move up higher.
• Reason with yourself. Find pleasure at discovering your own kind of thinking. Others will not matter when you have a strong conviction about  matter
• Uplift others. Those who suffer from depression are those who expect others to lift them. True happiness arrives when you lift others up
• Teach. Teaching is one way not to get too engrossed with things that don’t matter. It makes you live your life with the mindset that you have to be exemplary to enable you teach others who are looking up to you.
• Choose. You have a choice to let others rule your life or you rule that of others. You have to make that choice yourself. Others won’t help you do it.
• Heal wounds. Your importance increases as you find value helping people heal or helping relationships heal or helping people who have lost value in themselves find that value
• Exercise. Gainful exercise every day is very helpful at keeping the brain working and taking your mind off all the worries and anxieties that curses depression.
• Share your troubles. A trouble shared is half resolved. Advices and perhaps experiences of others could come handy and helpful at solving your problem.

Depression sulks capacity. When I finished from the university and lost my dad, I had to go through a harrowing depressed experience. The more depressed I was, the less I was able to think. Yes, there was quite a lot I could do but I wouldn’t because I just couldn’t think. I though managed to break it after I was advised by some persons that it wouldn’t help for me to accept defeat because of the situation I had found myself. Finding a job was quite an harrowing experience. I had thought I would get one immediately I finished school but it didn’t come.

I discovered one solution. I prayed. I sought for spiritual direction. I found delight in spiritual exercises developing my mind through engaging in gainful acts like reading and writing, an experience that has produced this book you are reading as well as others. I found my story. Today I have something to say when I see people who are going through some horrible moments in their lives

I can comfort them with calm words and reassure them that if I had managed to break away from those crutches, they too can.

This is the reality of depression. Depression

• Chains you to none existent bars. I felt something like chains. I could not just make the steps that I so wanted to make
• Ruins your ideas. However wonderful your ideas may seem, when depression hits you, those ideas become devalued.
• Creates upheavals. Depression makes life go up and down. You don’t experience the smooth smiling lifestyle that should characterize the triumphant life.
• Tricks you. You can never and will never find the real you when depression sets in. it gives you a faulty impression of who you should not be
• Criticizes you. Depression makes you critical of yourself. You compare yourself with the jonesses every time even when you are better than the jonesses
• Hurts you. You hurt yourself when you fall into depression. It’s like picking nails and punching yourself with them. It will really hurt.
• Entangles you. Depression creates a web. You might have being entangled one way or the other with spider webs. Was it a great feeling? Not at all. Depression has the same effect. It blurs your vision and slows you down.
• Stills you. When you become still, you are dead. Many have died and are dying because of this disease. It hurts that those who should have gone ahead to achieve great things have being lost to depression

When you are thinking that you are not worth it and considered valuable. It’s always because you are looking at the ratings of some other person. The fact is, no one will rate you higher than himself.

Depression actually stems from a lack of self-worth. You don’t need others to celebrate you. You don’t need any body’s ok. You don’t need people saying you are looking beautiful to know you are truly beautiful. Give yourself value by believing in who you really are.

When next you are feeling sad and pressed, standup and get going. Be happy, break away from the depression crutches.