It leaves a scar

A friend of mine recently said something weird, or at least something I find weird. We were driving to her grandparents' house when she started talking about someone with depression. I forgot most of the conversation, because to be honest, I wasn't listening until she said something that made me realize, that even though she is the smartest girl I know, boy is she dumb.

At one point of the conversation, she stated: "I don't understand why people get depressed. Like it is not that hard, just be happy like the rest of us!" This was one of the very rare occasions where screaming at the top of my lungs wouldn't be enough to set things straight. But I know I could never explain it to her in a way, she would understand. So, I stayed silent.

She would never understand, because her mind does not have the ability to see things through another pair of eyes. Or if she experienced it herself, though I hope that will never happen.

I just wish I could make her see, that you can be steady as a rock, the strongest of the strong-minded. There will always be something, that can hurt you so bad mentally, it leaves a wound. It stings and causes you pain, and just like a physical wound, it takes time to heal.

Some wounds are so serious, you need a specialist to make it disappear, and you never know how long it will take for the wound to fully heal. If you treat it right away, you can be free of it in no time. But if you keep picking and scratching it, it won't just take longer to heal. It will also leave a scar that might stay with you throughout your life.

A lot of things can cause you this kind of harm. It really depends on who you are as a person, and what matters to you the most.
It could be losing someone you love. Someone, you feel a deep connection to, someone you just can't live without. It could make you feel like you didn't just lose a loved one, but also a part of yourself that you can't ever get back.

Or if you already have low self-esteem, or just don't think very highly of yourself, it can completely break you to have someone tell you, that you are right. That all those things, you don't love about yourself really are horrible. If you are told regularly, that you are not good enough, that you are not doing anything right, at some point you will start believing it yourself, causing your self-esteem to drop more and more until it's leveled with the bottom of the world's deepest pit.

Or if your job goes to crab, you are falling behind on work, you get an impossible assignment, or maybe you just keep messing up. Your job becomes a burden, that gets heavier every day and it starts affecting your emotions and your mood on a deeper level.

Or one of the real killers, if you love someone who doesn't love you back. Feeling attracted to someone in such a strong way, that you would do anything to see them happy, unrequited love. I mean, to want nothing more than to be close to this one person, to spend time with them and share meaningful memories with them, knowing you can never have any of it for real. That can really make a mess of you.

There are probably millions of reasons for why people get a depression. What every case has in common is that facing it alone will only make it worse. You need a guardian angel, someone to share the difficult times with, every moment of insecurity and self-doubt. You need someone to provide the kind of safety, that has been taken away from you, someone to tell you from the bottom of their heart that you are strong enough to conquer whatever it is that you are fighting with your mind.

I get why it can be hard to understand the power of the mind, the endless amount of thoughts that appear, sometimes as calming waves, other times as destructible as a hurricane. How the smallest idea in your head can spiral out of control until it fills up your mind, your life, your self-image. But there is a rather famous quote, that I wish every individual in our world would know and at least try to understand. Because its meaning is so accurate, so straightforward, and yet we have a habit of missing the real meaning of what we read.

"Everyone is fighting a battle, you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."
Depression is an almost impossible battle to win. We need to understand these sentences to see, that we don't always know what is going on in someone else's lives, nor in their minds. We have no way of knowing what kind of issues they must deal with every day, or whether they are dealing with it alone.

We got to stop assuming, that the simple shell we see of another human being is all there is to their existence. That our choice of clothes and makeup, the way we walk in low or high speed, the way we talk with confident or insecurity, somehow makes us transparent to the stranger next to us on the train. Because there is so much more behind the curtains, that we can't see through with the naked eye.

We don't have to fully understand the whole feeling of depression. We only have to accept, that we all have a life, public as well as private. A life that is our own, that we can choose to share as much as we like with just as many people as we desire. No one's life is an open book, there will always be at least one page, you are not allowed to read. You can always guess, but you can never know the words on that page for sure, until the owner reads it for you.

Until that happens, the battle is not yours to fight. Stay openminded and openhearted but keep a small distance until you see the green light to interfere. If someone wants you to fight by their side, they will give you a sign...