Disclaimer :
   I am not a trained professional in Psychology or Mental health. My intention to share my story is merely to raise awareness among people and the stigma attached to it. Please consult a professional if you go through depression, anxiety, or any mental illness.

           
                        Preface
    My depression story is nothing extraordinary. It might be similar on various levels to many, of course, unique on my personal level. Well here I am just going to make an effort to express all that is unexplainable, as it’s the biggest barrier in human communication because we really don’t know how to put it out to make others understand, how unusual and more than the normal ‘sadness’ these feelings are, accompanied with guilt,  bottled up emotions, and negative feelings.
    I am going to try to the best of my capacity, recollecting all faded emotions & dreadful feelings, that every person who goes through this is able to relate themselves to it. And not be ashamed of who they have become, thus building an awareness of this gut-wrenching feeling that comes with this illness & provokes you to haunt to death.

               Uninvited Monster

       One dark morning 8 years back which was also a week of my resignation to my flying job forever as a Cabin crew in Mumbai, I woke up with unusual emptiness & hollowness in my mind. As if the feelings of normalness & happiness have just gone lost in some deep dark hole inside my mind, and replaced with a feeling of hopelessness and overwhelming negative thoughts.
   For a person who never experienced such feelings before, came as a shock to me. As if something was really wrong inside my mind. And that instant gripping fear, that I will never be the same again, scared me to death.
     Though at that time I was not able to term it as ‘Depression ‘ in spite of hearing this word many times in articles or newspapers occasionally. Because seeing and experiencing itself carries a huge difference in symptoms and its intensity. I don’t think so anyone can even understand it’s intensity until experiencing it themselves.
      That day I woke up with bouts of crying for no reason. May be all my bottled up emotions & the ongoing stress, which I have been taking all this while came as an outburst of mixed feelings.
        I never imagined I would be exposed to such a level of mental disturbance, simply because of the stress I was going through which felt to me pretty normal, which everyone goes through at some point in their lives when all things go wrong at the same time. Maybe in my case, I was more vulnerable to this disease because of my genetic history of OCD or maybe depression running in my family for years which was also undetected all this while until I dug deeper in my family history & their patterns while I was experiencing this hell throughout my journey. Well, the history of OCD in my family is another story altogether, though it’s interrelated to my depression, Will talk about it later in other chapters.
       Here,stress just acted as a trigger point in my life, hitting my genetic pores in my brain and giving an invitation to this unknown monster.
       With these bouts of emotions, I also woke up with nil interest in my daily life in general. I had to force myself to carry my daily routine task, be it even as simple as taking a bath or brushing my teeth, forget about other errands.
      I remember my close friends calling me to meet that time, and I was shit scared to expose my new self, who was oversensitive to any emotions at this point of time. But I knew I suddenly could not avoid meeting them for no valid reason.
         So I build up the courage to face them, pretending to be normal. Somehow I killed the time pretending to be fine effortlessly. When I came back I started feeling the same again, with some percent of acceptance of what was happening to me.  I further mustered courage, in spite of being alone in my rented flat, completing my resignation formalities & co-ordinating with movers & packers. Meanwhile preparing to pack all the stuff as I desperately wanted to go back to my home town.
     I still call that week as the blackest week in my living history.
                         To be continued……