Reclaim Your Life

It is easy to slip into depression if you find it difficult to be yourself. Survivors tell us their stories.

- Geetmala Sarkar

The din of everyday life leaves us hardly any space to be ourselves. We feel constricted. Despite doing the “assigned work” to the best of our capacities, we, at times, feel incapacitated. This, if continued long enough, makes us unhappy and we start believing in a sense of powerlessness. To add insult to injury, we also feel shy talking about it for fear of being judged (Oh! isn’t it everywhere?! Shhh!). We begin thinking that accepting our depression is unhealthy (or would it sound so from the point of view of the listener?). Still, should we push things under the carpet to make them vanish?

Painting this picture of sadness is depressing in itself. So, what does a person in depression care about? Well, they care about nothing. They find it burdensome to walk, talk and dispense with their daily chores. However, like most of us, they too, need something… a friendly ear, a concerned relative, a book, a hobby, a session at a fitness club.

What is essential to know is that only they themselves can take the stress off themselves. A nudge is needed to break the chain of monotony, but once that is done, they are all set to go. They are free and adaptive, energetic and enterprising. They start to see the positives in spending time with themselves.

For such a turnabout, they must know and feel that they are not alone and that there are others with similar experiences. It is only a matter of deconstructing the tunnel vision.

We, thus, spoke to three people and listened to their success stories of surviving depression, and learnt how to become our own best friend.

GARDENING IS MY SAVIOUR

My name is Jasmine. Being a modern day working mother who has a 5-year old daughter and a loving husband, my nuclear family can be best described as perfect. I could never imagine my happy life falling apart.