Depression
It was wonderful in Grenoble, I came to Delft full of energy and new ideas: and has been hit by a wave of depression in very first day. Depressive feelings are not alien to me, they are well-known but still dangerous enemy. I guess many in my environment are having depression from time to time, but do not discuss this and try to deny it. When depressed, I don’t do things scheduled and/or those I have to do. Rather, I’m busy with things completely unnecessary and sometimes even damaging for me and others. The pain from not doing things I have to do or not doing them in a proper way is sharp, overwhelming and pleasant in masochistic way, and it drives me to further depression. The feeling of miserability, despair and apathy persists. I become increasingly asocial and even rude while demanding and needing more attention from people around.
The danger of depression is easy to understand in physical terms. It arises spontaneously, like an instability, and sustains itself by a sort of negative feedback: apathy and relation damage caused by depression brings more despair and therefore more apathy and damage. If I try to compile a list of all things that would drive me to a depression, it’ll cover 80% of my working and family duties. It is especially bad to have a depression in the fasting period: yelding to despair is a sin, and the despair is a fertile soil for almost all other sins, and failure to fast does produce more and more depression. This is why the depression tries to hit us in this particular time.
Being human, I can do very little against instabilities and negative feedback loops of my tainted soul. I have to bring the topic to Him, though initially this seems both unnecessary or blasphermic. There’s an old prayer:
- O Lord and Master of my life,
the spirit of emptiness, despair (that is, depression), domination or idle talk
do not let me have it. - But give rather a spirit of purity, humility, patience and love, give me to Thy servant.
- Yea, O Lord and King,
grant me to see mine own faults and not to judge my brother,
for blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. Amen.
