I have been fighting against depression my whole life. Unconsciously all the way past my adolescent years. And more prepared in the past ten years.
Overtime, it does get easier. You have to make dealing with an episode a fixed routine with steps. Like when you first learnt about first aids or how to set up a computer. When an episode happens you don’t have to think. You follow the steps. Things pass. Life resumes as usual til the next one comes.
I have, however, another way to temporarily deal with the problem. It is tremendously helpful to either preventing an episode or mitigating the impacts had it happened. You get back to a calmer state faster, enough to move forward with some other contingency plans.
To do so, you need to trick your senses of space and time. The world is spinning around so all you have to do is to stop the world. You don’t need a 100% still world. You need to become detached enough from the world, that whatever happening matters way less. You become an outsider, sitting by the side watching the show.
When I was little, I somehow did it unconsciously. There were two ways to achieve that. One was to hide in the closet. It was dark and quiet inside. With a torchlight and a book, it would be a matter of minutes to forget that a world existed outside. Two minutes and it was only me in a whole other dimension.
The other was to sit by the highway right in front of my house. Thousands of vehicles passed by. Soon, everything would become a blur and I would feel one with the world. We would move together as one big mess of an entity. Moving together completely in sync also meant that to me the world had stopped moving.
Growing up, the closet became too small, and by then my parents had caught me sitting dangerously by the highway too many times. My grandmother’s grave became my new home. Whenever I failed to cope with the world, I ran to the cemetery and sat there for hours. No one would be around. Just rows of graves. The sun would shine brightly. And I would forget that there were living human beings. I was as alive as those 6 feet under. Dead people didn’t care much, usually.
I moved to another city for high school. The first week there, I passed by a traffic accident. One human and two rats laid side by side. I saw a mangled human corpse for the first time in my life. But I only remembered the rats’. Why were they even there? It could be the ultimate question that unlocked the secret of the universe. But also one that none would find the answer. For it was but a tiny ripple in time. It might have been THE tiny ripple resulting in the end of the entire universe or it might have caused the Big Bang billions of years ago. But no time agent would ever notice.
The first time I could not cope after moving, I freaked out. I didn’t know any way to pause the world. I took my bicycle and rode around the city at full speed. Hours afterwards I realized a miracle. I didn’t need to achieve the speed of light, just barely fast enough for the world to become a live version of Frogger. I was but a player racing against time with one last life. The world didn’t pause. Yet all I cared was crossing the endless mazes of streets and vehicles. That’s good enough for me.
In university, it was way easier. I didn’t have to travel much. There were thousands of empty corners in NUS. I ventured out every night. It was kind of cool. Like a vampire with many surveyor trips of the human world. I knew more about the school than most of my friends, almost all the nooks and crannies not behind a lock. Sometimes even nooks and crannies behind locked doors.
But my favorite was NUH emergency room. The hospital was next to my campus. When I freaked out, I tried my best to remind me that night time would come. I would go to the emergency area. People would come and go. They came with all types of freaking accidents. Or normal ones. Their families or friends would wait outside. They would cry or yell or be quiet in a corner, tired and weary. I would sit in a corner. The world became a reality show. I was but an avid fan.
When I learnt how to skate, ECP became my favorite place. 46km along the beach at night and you would forget the world exist. Once, I forgot I existed. Or I did stop existing. A transcendent moment when I was out of this world.
These days, I buy two bottles of teas at a random convenient store. One sweetened. One unsweetened. I would drink half a bottle of the sweetened one, then mix the unsweetened in. Sometimes I would sit behind the glass and watch people and vehicle rushing by. Sometimes I would walk around, not giving a damn about this wagging world. Just be there, fully accepted that the world as I know would end with me.
I realize it isn’t about where I am. Or who I am. It doesn’t matter if I was a child hiding in the closet. Or a reckless Frogger player playing around with one last life. Or the creepy guy in a corner of the emergency area of a hospital. The key is to create a temporary sense of control. Or a temporary lack of needs for controlling things around you. This method is not about the cure. It’s simply pain relief. But sometimes a little relief goes a long way.