I am proud of myself.

That might sound vain or conceited, but I don’t see it that way. I am developing what I believe to be a healthy self-love, something that my psychologist showed me I was sorely lacking in. I used to “punish” myself, I had an incredible amount of self-loathing, I had an unattainable and unachievable set of “standards” (I use “” because they were more self-imposed impossibilities to keep me in my rut), and I actually, truly, hated myself.

I am, I feel, an extremely love-filled human being; I have a lot of it and it often overflows. So it was a very strange space to be in, having all of this love, all turned outwards, towards the world and others, contrasted with this seething hatred boiling on the inside. Something I found remarkable during my transformative year was seeing how self-fulfilling and self-propelling negativity is. Another surprise was seeing how it was the same, if not more so, for positivity. Much like a quadratic, close to zero it is much of a muchness whether you are + or -. But it starts increasing more rapidly as you head in either direction.

For the most part of my childhood I feel like I was comfortably in the + zone, when during my teens I befell a knee condition which all but incapacitated me. I am a sporty individual; I was playing provincial level squash for the age group ahead of me, I was first team everything in junior school, and loving every minute of it. So it can come as quite a shock for a thirteen year old on this path to be told that he will probably need a wheelchair by the age of thirty. Surprisingly, it didn’t really sink in for a while. I just kind of took it in my stride. People used to comment about how well I was taking the news, where I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about.

But it changed something in me. I started slipping from a comfortable + towards a neutral, and slowly, very slowly, towards the -. I think it’s fine and normal to bob and change between the +’s and -’s, but when the majority of your time is being spent in the -, things can start becoming quite tough. Obviously there are things like death of family members, loss of loved ones, life events and so on that can seriously upset the balance, but I find that those are generally temporary. When life happens, it appears external, and can therefore be rationalized away, “That’s just the nature of things”, “These things happen in life”, “Life is unfair sometimes”, and eventually stability is reached again (although, this can take years, if even at all).

Enter the inner demon, that “self” that can be so endearing and at the same time so tormenting. There is no externality to project onto, to shift the blame onto, to take the pressure off. It even manages to fuel itself. It starts with thinking that this negativity is your own doing, therefore you should be able to snap yourself out of it. And sometimes you can. Sometimes your willing it to stop or go away is enough. But it comes back.

Willing something away is like sweeping dust under the rug.

I think we need the rug-technique sometimes in our lives, just to put off dealing with something until a later stage, until we are more ready, or more able to deal with it. An important lesson I have learnt is to always, without fail, come back and clean out the rug. No exceptions. Otherwise the dust sits there quietly, happily forgotten, slowly gathering more dust. Just like how the owner of the house thinks the house is clean, when you forget about cleaning out under the rugs you can be led to believe you have a clean “house” as well. But the dust is still there.

You end up sweeping more under the rug under the false pretense of there being none there. This process repeats itself, over and over, compounding the amount of dust hidden. It even acts similarly to compound interest: at the beginning the interest is almost imperceptible, as there is not enough substance to compound upon. As you add to the rug, you increase the amount that is compounding. It can take ages, years even, before you start noticing the lumps in the rug. This is why I think depression can go undetected for so long, and why it is so scary. Something that makes it so hard to overcome is how long it takes for it to actually form. As per earlier: you must always come back and clean under the rug. With a build up of potentially years, you forget what went under the rug. You forget which rug you put things under. You start to lose the ability to clean it all. But the dust is there, growing.

I saw my psychologist for nearly a year of weekly meetings. She patiently and methodically helped me air out some of my rugs, we hung them outside and slapped them silly. I don’t for a second think we got through all the rugs, but we got enough so as to allow me to manage my own rug cleaning process. Something I have learnt along the way is that if you write it down, you can always find it again. I have taken up writing a morning journal where I spend 15–30 mins each morning writing about anything and everything that flows through my mind at the time. Sometimes it’s just arbitrary thoughts, other times it’s about future plans, or desires, and on a few occasions I have had the urge to write about my rugs. It is incredible how much content you can generate when cleaning out a dirty rug. It can be like a release valve at times, a whole Saturday morning can whizz by, leaving you feeling clean and refreshed on the other side. I think writing this article is another wonderful product of this endeavour.

Something I feel that makes depression so prevalent is that the rug method is so easy and convenient. I think it has evolved to help us manage life crises but has become abused in our fast-paced, no-time-to-clean age. The general idea these days is to use something, and when broken, dirty or old, replace it. Never fix, clean or renew. Just straight replace. We can see the damage this mentality is doing to the world. We can also see how hard it is to fix. The easy method wins… for now. But easy is easy for a reason: something or someone else is paying the price. There is always a price. It is up to us to decide how we pay for it.

I choose to pay for it myself, to put the effort in, to scratch around through all my rugs, to spend the time sifting and sorting the clutter, the mess, the dust, with the intention of brightening my life, my future.

This is why I am proud of myself.