After reflecting on every moment of your life, you see there is waiting for you some moments, especially for you to say thank you—to appreciate your courage, courtesy, and patience to wait until that moment.
I can say now, freely: life is a one-time miracle. Be careful not to miss any second of it.
There was a heavy, sudden rain on the way back from uni to the bus stop. I didn’t wait long enough to completely let this experience sink into my soul. I am all in a rush. It has become a habit—missing things out like this.
I am doing it unconsciously, and when I think about it later, I regret it with my whole being. Bad habits are what can ruin you the most.
Every time I feel this sudden energy injected into my vein, I gamble all of it on tasks without asking where it came from—without questioning how that happened or asking how people around me feel about my behaviors. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s mood, but I feel it—I sometimes do.
You see, my subconscious and unconscious are on my nerves. I want to stop those reactions, but God damn it, they have become automatic responses. They just happen without letting me sink into my experiences. I think you understand me—“how does it feel when you want something the most, but you don’t get to take it?”
Even though I do get to myself, I do deep breaths, and I do believe meditating on things will help me to change, I still feel impatient to see the change.
I believe in “The body works simply with rhythms. If you get someone’s heartbeat right and their breathing rhythm, and try to tune in with them, you could say your bodies start to behave beautifully in a synchronized way.”
But there is a long road for me to catch up skills like this one.
When I try to let my anger show itself to me, I feel this tendency to punch my fist into my body until every bone gets broken. Sometimes, it is needed—to feel the pain. And I guess that is the reason behind the existence of different illnesses—but not psychological disorders.
They are like indistinguishable parasites. They eat you up until nothing remains. I am talking about depression—especially the melancholic one or the one with typical traits.
When it starts to work, it kills every joy in your life by prohibiting the simple but most important pleasures of life: sleep, and pleasure itself.
At first, you don’t sleep well anymore. And then, after a while, you feel angry all the time for the lack of sleep. And then you burn out, and you don’t feel anything.
It’s called anhedonia. Not that your sensory system has any problem—it is because everything seems inevitably meaningless and joyless. You don’t see a point in anything anymore.
Then panic attacks show themselves because you’re alone, without any social connection.
Why is that? Because nobody wants to be friends with someone bitter, narcissistic, selfish, and blue most of the time. You feel stressed all the time—even when you try to relax. Your thoughts don’t stop. You can’t focus.
Your memory drops, in a way that it’s difficult for you to save a sentence in your memory with one-time reading. You have to repeat it a few times, on different days, to remember parts of it—not actually the whole of it.
Then it goes to the school part. You’re sleepy and exhausted all the time. Your body doesn’t keep up with you. Even in quizzes, suddenly your brain lights out and nothing comes out. You feel something is wrong, but you don’t do anything about it.
It keeps going until this part. The whole summer, you haven’t got out of your room even once. You don’t see any point in going out. You try to make excuses to go out, but your mind resists. Maybe after a few years living in this line, you tell yourself, “To hell with it, who gives a fuck? That’s life.” But still, deep down, you know something is wrong.
Let me guess—you have tried different physicians, and they have told you the same thing: “Nothing is wrong.” But you feel your body is heavy, especially after eating something—you become sleepy.
You don’t go to ceremonies or trips. You don’t have the mood to interact with your family members. You are sensitive to light and noise. You get headaches from listening to different kinds of noises, and you hate the light. That’s what depression does. It forbids you from the mornings. It makes you see everything as dark and messy.
After a while, you tell yourself, “There is no point in life. Why do people have children? Why do people do what they do?” You try to distract yourself with different activities, but nothing makes you feel fulfilled. I repeat again: “After a few years living in this line, you become used to it. You live life just to pass it.” You don’t care about anything anymore—because, simply, “That’s life, and it’s initially meaningless.”
You even come up with this philosophy that: you don’t need anyone. You don’t need friends. You don’t need to relate to anyone else. And even though you feel alone all the time, even in forced ceremonies, you decide not to think about loneliness anymore.
You see nightmares—different animals attacking you. It starts with snakes, and it finishes with them too. Sometimes wolves, or even sharks. Any animal you’re scared of. You’re scared of sleeping because they appear, torturing you. These are the signs of severe stress.
You see them every time you tell yourself, “They aren’t real.” But your mind is so scared that it doesn’t believe anything you whisper. There are moments when you feel alienated even from your own mind. It seems uncontrollable. It produces a vast amount of dark animals to eat you up.
You feel wounded. I shall say: “Who doesn’t, with these experiences?”
No, wait—it hasn’t finished. Let me empty what’s been in my mind for a long time, and I couldn’t write it directly to my face. Where was I?
Aha, then comes the paranoid part. You can’t trust anyone. Because all seem similar and vicious. You don’t trust because you believe life is essentially like a jungle, and people are different kinds of animals—not eating each other only because of civilization. You don’t trust anyone because you don’t see any goodness in anyone. All you see is polarized darkness. Your family members tell you to your face, “You’re unbearable. We don’t love you anymore.” It all hurts. But it still keeps going.
With all of this stuff going on, you still don’t give up, because you feel there is a little life left in you.
You start self-sabotaging behaviors. You have to do everything the right way. And you have to do it severely. Why? Because you think you are gifted, and you’re special. But the reason is you’re empty.
The more you read, the more you feel empty. It’s starving and exhausting not feeling anything in life.
You decide to change your life with exercising and eating less. You tell yourself, “I have some fine habits in my life.”
You see, how depression bugs you. It makes you run after the things that don’t solve the initial problem.
The next thing is:
“You feel a shadow is chasing you. I am not joking—you feel something is sitting on you when you want to lie down to sleep, and it’s like a cloud around your head all the time.
For sure, it does go away for a little while, but it always keeps coming back.”
You’re headed to a point where you’re scared of darkness.
Some people tell you they see some kind of invisible fairy beings, but it’s none of them.
And I can tell you—if you have experienced some of the things in the previous lines, I am sure as hell it’s the depression.
And then, there is this guilt about life—and especially about your failures.
With all the things you’ve been through, you blame yourself.
Why weren’t you there to show the best version of yourself, like all the others?
And there is nobody to back you up.
Because you feel like God’s only lonely man on the planet.
You just see the surface of other people’s lives and compare it to your own.
Your body aches. Your heart aches. Your brain is on fire.
You just want this life to be finished, but you’ve got no choice—because that’s how it is.
You’re done with everything in your life.
You’re ready to finish yourself up, but you’re scared of the afterlife.
Because from childhood, everyone around you whispered: “Suicide is the biggest guilt.”
You maybe come up with this idea:
“You’d better be up here, instead of down there in hell.”
You’ve seen enough demonic faces in your sleep that even your mind puts animal faces on people’s faces for you.
You feel guilty because you push people away. That’s all you do.
You don’t like chatting.
You don’t like calling somebody.
You don’t even like your mobile phone.
And you’ve come up with this excuse too:
“I get away from my mobile phone to focus better.”
Sure, you do focus better, if this D. lets you—but you don’t mind reminding yourself:
“Hey, make friends, go out, you’re in the best years of your life. Your youth doesn’t repeat.”
You don’t even care anymore, do you?
It’s just how it is, and you think:
“I can’t do anything to fix it. I do my best with my healthy habits. There is no point in life—why should I go on the path of my ancestors?”
Then the resentment pours in. Even though you were born in a country cursed with oil, you feel little love for it. You don’t blame the government for its flaws—you blame yourself for being born here.
These questions repeat a gazillion times in your uncontrollable mind:
“Why here, God? Why?”
You see your parents as partly guilty for it too, but because they provided for you, you see yourself as a parasite in their lives. As a barrier in their lives. Everything they plan to do—you ruin it.
Because you are so down, you don’t have the energy to interact with people. Going out takes too much energy from you. You’re better off alone.
Rejection continues until all your bonds break.
Life has made you stop believing in anything.
This enduring pain has cost you your beliefs.
You ask yourself repeatedly:
“What kind of God is this, to bring on this hell?”
And even that thought makes you feel guilty.
There is no blame on you.
Because your life is a real hell.
What comes next is loneliness.
There are days you are so heavy, you can’t get out of bed.
Even with the smallest wrongdoing, you feel guilt on your shoulders.
So by now, hell has become your life—and you’re the demon on the earth.
What else?
There are hours and hours where you keep repeating the same actions to be productive and get something done,
but the problem is—you don’t feel anything.
All the simple pleasures of life have been forbidden.
They don’t make you feel happy—not even for a second.
The more it goes, the more you laugh it off.
You pretend you’re OK. You become a good actor.
Every time you go out of the house, on the path to uni, this thought comes up:
“So what? What do you want this degree for? There is no point.”
It keeps coming, but you repress it—
until some days, you can’t control it anymore.
It brings you down to the ground.
Your head goes down after a while of sitting in class.
Your body doesn’t keep up with you.
You hate feeling sleepy in class, in front of everybody.
You pinch your limbs a few times, you chew gum to avoid that.
A few semesters go by, you pass some credits.
Then there’s this moment when you tell yourself:
“So what? Nobody cares what you do.
Who are you wearing this mask for?
You don’t need to care anymore.
Just loosen up.
You have the right to sleep in class.
You have the right to go to class late.
You have the right to do anything—
as long as you don’t hurt anybody else.
Why? Because of the amount of anger life has cost you.”
You hate yourself.
You hate your being.
Nobody knows, but you hate your birthday.
It makes you think about death.
You’ve even pictured your death thousands of times.
You think:
“Maybe I’m dying slowly.
My parents—they are much older than me, but they don’t have any of the symptoms I have. Why?
Why me? Do I have cancer?
If you want to give me a death, please give me a quick one.
Why me? I was the obedient one.
I did everything you said in your holy books.
I was supposed to be the good one.
The one who’s proud of repeating your name a few times a day.
But now look at me.
Where am I ending up?”
Even when you want to pray, there is this dark cloud telling you:
“There is no point in it. What do you want God for? You’re dead already. The earth is your eternal hell. You’re damned in hell in both lives.”
You stop praying. You stop feeling guilty about anything you did before.
Why? Because you don’t feel anything anymore.
Your mind is broken, but still, you put on a smile and go out there.
You’re obsessed with being perfect—even when it hurts.
There is no point in not pretending to be the smart one who has a perfect life, when you’re already dead—already fucked.
You feel and read from people’s eyes: “They think you’re one hell of a bastard.”
But it doesn’t matter what they think, because the pain you’re feeling inside has made you stop feeling anything anymore, even for yourself.
You decide to be more silent.
You come to this point:
“Why ruin the good moments of others by talking about my fucked-up life?
Let’s just tell them everything is perfect—like every other individual.”
When they ask you, “What’s up?”
You repeat the same answer:
“Nothing. Life. It’s passing.”
Or maybe that other answer you hated—the one whose inventor you despise:
“Good, thank you for asking.”
So let’s recap.
What is happening?
Do you continue this way?
Yes, because you don’t have any other choice.
You hate the money you take from your father monthly.
You want to have a good life.
You want to be stable and kind.
You want to be the son your father is proud of.
But you can’t. Not because you don’t want to—you want it badly.
But you feel sad all the time.
You want to change, but this sleep problem is killing you.
It has become your torturer.
Life and its whole being has cursed you like Prometheus,
but the question that remains is:
“You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”
It doesn’t end anywhere close to your imagination.
Don’t try to guess.
Life has led you to major in psychology, to keep reading about grief, sadness, insomnia, and depression.
This is life’s turn.
It opens up a few doors in ways you have no idea why or how.
You still don’t get it.
Maybe you won’t get it even in the future.
But life does tricky things sometimes.
Since last semester, you’ve been reading about different kinds of depression.
You’ve tried different ways to solve your problems.
Since two years ago, you’ve started journaling seriously.
It has helped you sleep a bit better—
but it doesn’t feel like much.
Just a few drops lesser from the ocean. It’s all the same.
You keep working on your breath, and try to be mindful of your feelings.
But God damn it—why does nothing work for you?
Going to uni has helped you.
A major like psychology is the closest way to confront your fears.
You are afraid.
You’re afraid of your thoughts.
You’re scared that maybe these dark clouds will end up taking you somewhere so dark that you’ll do something to yourself—something so harmful, it’s irreparable.
You feel suicidal sometimes, but you’ve gotten used to it,
because you’re so down, you can’t even react to those thoughts anymore.
It goes forward.
It’s life—like it has always been.
The good point about uni is that you have to get out of your room.
You’ve tried skipping some classes, or maybe taking some credits online, but it doesn’t work that way.
You even reached a point where you have quit university once.
You still feel guilty about it.
But there was no point in a computer major.
You didn’t like facing computers,
but you love talking to people.
You love when people open up to you.
You love biology and human chemistry.
You love thinking about the fundamental questions of life.
You love easing the pain that people carry in their chests.
You see people like books—readable, no matter their ethnicity, color, gender, or any other category of difference.
You love talking to people.
In the last few semesters, in psychology, you’ve realized: this is your future.
There’s still this thought that keeps repeating in your mind—
when dark clouds start to thunder and soak you in sadness—
but you don’t have any other choice.
You’re scared of being a soldier.
You don’t feel any love for your country.
You just care about its people.
You have no hope in life, no clear prospects.
But there’s this thought that scares you like a razor blade:
“If you end up being a soldier, life will become so unbearable that you’ll literally kill yourself.”
So you’ve made a final choice:
No giving up on uni.
Okay. No giving up on uni.
You have to come up with some plans.
You tell yourself:
“Life is dark. Okay, I got it.
But you’re tough enough to survive it.
You’re YOU.
Don’t let these thoughts eat you up—pull yourself together.
There is more to you than you know, more than you’re even aware of.”
This is the power of belief.
Your personality doesn’t let you down on this one.
You think you’re a fighter.
You still keep reading.
After torturous thoughts of reading just to conquer,
you’re back to reading for the sake of growth.
You still feel sleepy and foggy sometimes,
but you tell yourself:
“You need to recover, man.
This education system has ruined you.”
You don’t like blaming the government.
You believe in change.
And maybe, to start that change, it’s not a bad idea to light up a little bit.
Every athlete knows: when you begin, you have to start with light weights.
Starting is better than waiting.
So—you start.
This is the moment you find out:
“Life is a play.
When you’re born, you’ve already lost.
So blaming or feeling guilty is just a waste of time.
You need to play your part—sweat and fair.
Why don’t you?”
So you do play.
You keep coming back at life, every time it throws barriers at you.
You believe:
“If I am damned here,
and the eternal hell is on Earth,
and there is this demonic darkness weighing down on my being—
I don’t have anything to lose.
Let’s fight.”
Sometimes, it goes well.
Mostly, it’s full of pain and difficulty.
But it’s better than doing nothing.
You’ve realized you need people to rely on.
You need relatedness.
This idea came to your mind through Rogers and Maslow.
So you think:
Maybe nothing is wrong with me.
Maybe I’m just full of cognitive distortions. You came up with this brilliant idea in your fourth semester.
You’ve kept up with your classes.
Life is bitter and salty—
and that’s okay.
It keeps going—down, but okay.
Until you come across readings on depression.
These last two semesters, you’ve read a lot about psychopathology.
You like playing with prognoses and diagnoses.
It’s fun to guess differential diagnoses.
Then there’s this thought:
Maybe it’s depression.
You’ve found your symptoms match both “MDD with melancholic traits” and “MDD with typical traits.”
You think:
“No way. It’s not possible I have depression.”
You don’t take depression seriously.
But you don’t know that depression has actually taken you seriously.
You keep reading about it.
Your last term proposal and presentation were about PTSD and its connection with anxiety and depression.
You had to read a lot about how they’re connected.
Let me be clear at this part—
you need to know anxiety and depression are like siblings.
And they are both, in a way, grandparents to almost all other psychiatric disorders.
Then there is this one sentence from your uni teacher:
“Guys, you need to put a face on disorders.”
She didn’t say these exact words,
but you interpret her sentence this way.
The initial idea is hers.
She spoke about her childhood in class.
You like her serious voice.
You like how she takes things seriously.
You try to talk to her, but she’s not available.
Still, when you look closer, you feel close to her.
You feel she feels blue too.
You know the smell.
You know the mask.
You’ve worn it a thousand times.
She is in pain—
and you can see it with your eyes.
It’s now your face time.
After everything you’ve been through,
you understand people much more easily.
You can even read their eyes, lips, the micro-expressions in their faces,
the gestures of their hands and their bodies.
You’ve become one hell of a behaviorist.
You think to yourself:
“Students don’t get the weight of what Skinner and Watson, and other behaviorists have done for psychology.
You need to be a behaviorist to get into people’s minds.
You need to look into their souls based on how they behave.”
So you think:
“Okay. Let’s look closely. Let’s shut up and listen.”
Then you remember what Alan Watts said:
“Life isn’t made of five colors. There’s more to see. We’re just blind to it.”
These weren’t his exact words—
but that’s what you remember.
The more you try to be silent, the more it scares you.
You find out there’s so much you’ve been missing.
There’s been more to life.
There is this class on the “Basics of Counselling.”
You liked the teacher.
Her voice was calm—like a real counsellor.
You even try to talk to her,
but you end up in rejection.
You think:
“Maybe they’re right.
Greatness isn’t achievable through just reading a lot.
You need experience.
You need to get out of your room.”
You fear thinking about your irrational thoughts.
After reading about REBT and Albert Ellis, you end up with this thought:
“Make a list of your irrational thoughts.”
And it hurts, boy,
when you see how much your vision has been distorted.
This is your sixth semester as a psychology major,
and after much reading, you know:
“You know too little about the human psyche.”
But it seems it isn’t too late.
There is this one sentence from Jeffrey Young:
“Reinvent your life.”
(It’s actually the name of the book.)
It’s been a while that you can’t bear going to uni.
You just go to be in class—among people—to discover them.
Even though they’re not your friends,
you feel better when you’re in society.
Your darkness emerges when you’re alone.
Being alone is your demon.
You know you have a good family.
You know you have good friends who care about you.
You know your hardships will be answered.
You know you’ll be a good therapist
if you try to be less perfectionist.
But still, your distorted cognition makes you end up blue.
This is what depression does—
it makes you see the half-empty in everything.
You try talking to the teachers,
hoping maybe you can skip some classes.
But Mr. Yekta says the words that have haunted you since then:
“You can’t be a psychotherapist if you can’t bear being in class and among your classmates.
You need to understand: no one is special when there is a group.
Try to be flexible.”
At first, you try to repeat his word—“Flexible”—in a funny way.
Humor is one of your strongest defense mechanisms.
Reading about the human psyche has made you much more mindful of your behaviors.
So you don’t judge anyone anymore—at least, you try not to.
You’ve felt the pain of being judged.
Once, an old man told you on the bus:
“Sleep sooner at night, instead of fingering your mobile phone.”
Pain is like a sharp knife through the meat of your body.
You were like:
“What? How did you judge me without asking me a single question?”
And I wasn’t the same person after those words.
It felt like a transformation.
It occurred to me:
“We’re all looking for someone who can understand us—
someone who can love us without any condition.”
On New Year’s Eve, everything got worse.
You’re so down that you don’t even feel like eating.
Your family has been traveling recently to other cities,
but you didn’t accompany them.
You think:
“There’s no point in traveling when I have my room, my books, and my laptop.”
The last time you traveled was three years ago,
to the northern side of Iran, beside the Caspian Sea.
You like the sea.
You feel free.
You feel calm.
Nothing is like the sun when it dawns and you’re sitting beside the sea.
You don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Still, sometimes, this thought keeps repeating:
“That’s enough. You are thinking too much. Let me finish you off easily.”
But you feel there’s no point in that either.
I was saying about new year’s eve—
you had to be alone because your family wanted to go to Tehran.
You made an excuse about your stomach problem.
Oh, I didn’t mention the stomach problem yet.
Since last summer, You’ve had this issue.
Every now and then, you end up in the hospital.
The pain doesn’t let you do anything—not even sleep.
The doctor says it’s a virus,
but you suspect it’s part of the psychosomatic symptoms of depression.
Why?
Because you don’t think anyone catches the same virus five times in less than six months.
Even after vomiting—because of this unknown possible virus—
and a heart-breaking pain in your intestines,
you don’t feel anything.
There’s this one sentence:
“THAT’S LIFE.”
This has become your philosophy somehow.
Instead of solving the problem, you bury it—again and again.
One “genius” idea you came up with after listening to a Frank Sinatra song with the same title.
It’s an irrational thought, and now you know it.
So what happened on New Year’s Eve?
You describe it this way:
Ah… somehow, I can describe it as nothing.
I had never felt so down before.
I was down in a way that I couldn’t keep studying anymore,
or even sit beside my desk and do something on my laptop—
not even watch a movie.So I did what I always do when I feel miserable.
I grabbed one of the Harry Potter books and started reading.
There was no other choice.
My mind was against everything else.
It kills me when it gets like this.
I hate it.But then I thought:
Reading a novel is better than nothing.
And it healed me—somehow.
I’ve read the whole collection before,
but every time I return to it,
it helps me get back on track.
Because it shows me the worst possible picture of a life—
and how someone can still keep going.It goes like this:
“I’m an orphan. My parents are dead.
I have nobody—not even my relatives like me.
And I don’t even know who I really am until I’m twelve years old.
And then there’s this magic school…
and an enemy who wants to drink my blood
and watch me suffer—
with a made-up name: Voldemort.”God, this J.K. Rowling is a genius.
That’s the sentence I say every time I finish one of her novels.
I still sometimes listen to her Harvard commencement speech.
The story of me and Harry Potter is a long one.
It has helped me a lot through my life.This character shows anyone:
No matter how brutal and dramatic life becomes,
if you stand up for yourself and for your loved ones—
if you fight fair—
victory is yours.
Anyway, New Year’s passes.
You’re still in denial of the notion of depression.
The idea has been planted in your mind,
and you’ve searched about it a lot—
but you don’t know what to do with it.
You need a push.
A conversation—
and a video from Jordan Peterson—does the trick.
The conversation happens at university,
when one of your classmates—who has recently become a friend—
somehow opens up about her depression, ADHD,
and her journey through psychotherapy and psychiatry.
She strongly urges you to see a psychiatrist.
But you still can’t take it in—
you, on medication?
It feels like a stigma.
You excuse yourself with this futuristic thought:
“As soon as I find a job, I’ll try psychotherapy.”
But then there’s that video.
Jordan Peterson, talking about depression,
and how he dealt with it on his own,
and how antidepressants helped him.
After that, you search YouTube
and come across another video—
Kati Morton sharing her own story of depression.
You decide to make an appointment.
It says the soonest one is two months later.
Two months go by like the wind.
You’re still stumbling.
A few times, you consider canceling the appointment.
But then you think:
“You’ve already paid part of the fee.
There’s no point in not giving it a try.”
And you do try.
You do see the doctor.
And you find out—you were right about your diagnosis: MDD
And now—this is your fourth day.
The first two days, you didn’t notice much change in your sleep,
but you woke up fewer times than before.
But then came today.
Fascinating today.
You got up in the morning.
You did your routine exercise.
You ate your breakfast.
After a bit of rest,
you started reading—
and for the first time,
you had more energy than before.
The day wasn’t as sad as usual.
Getting out of bed wasn’t as difficult.
You felt:
Today was different.
A new start.
That’s why, in the afternoon,
you decided to write your version of the story on depression.
And this story—
has no end yet.
