A Battle with Depression

My Trigger

Losing a friend changes your life, mostly for the worse. Especially, when it’s your fault that they left, something like this happened a few years ago and everything changed in my life for the worse. The sad thing I realize now is that it wasn’t even my fault and I wasted all those years thinking about how I could’ve changed something to avoid this.

I had a best friend from childhood, and everything was going well. We used to have fun, and life was easy, or so I thought it was. I had little knowledge of personal boundaries then and usually did stuff that I didn’t want to.

For instance, I was going to meet him twice a week, spending a lot of money, removing other friends he didn’t like, and spending an exceedingly long time on calls with him. Things had gotten so bad, that I used to sit on my roof alone at 3 am to talk to him because I had weak signals in my home and had to go up there to talk on sim, as he was paranoid about talking on any social media platform.

Eventually, I was getting fed up with listening to him rant about everything from his own life story to even my family and brothers. For example, while he abused my siblings, all I could do was listen and agree.

However, once I matured, I realized I had boundaries and decided to cut him off. While the plan was to let it go smoothly, the process took a drastic toll and we ended things on a bad note. After cutting him off, I started developing depressive symptoms, and a huge factor was the irrational guilt that I had gathered as a result.

If I introspect right now, I know nothing was my fault and I couldn’t essentially change the situation, but that wasn’t possible for me in the past. I grew more depressive symptoms and had persistent depression for about four years.

During that time, I always felt bad, had no motivation to do anything, and essentially had given up on living. A lot of my friends described me as a walking corpse because I had no energy and put no effort into trying to liven up.

While the whole experience is indescribable, today I’m honestly glad it happened because now I have a better outlook on life and empathy comes from this experience. I understand what people may go through, and while my experiences differ from others, we call to connect on the plane of humanity, and this is where the quote I live by comes from, ‘A broken soul looking out for others’.

This is also a major reason why I’m currently researching Depression, with my research on whether ‘Depression is Contagious’, because whether people believe it or not, mental health issues can be transferred from one person to another.