Messed Up - Part 1

A recent realization I’ve had is that too many people I know are messed up. Too many friends of mine are depressed and feel inadequate. Even I’m messed up.

For some reason, today’s world of a progressive society that aims at accepting and incorporating all groups of people into it, has seemed to romanticize conditions where people are messed up. Depression, insecurities, inferiority complexes, not trusting anyone, suicidal tendencies, and more… It is as painful to watch a friend suffer from being messed up as it is to be messed up yourself.

And we’re all a little messed up in this world, in varying ways and degrees.

In this post, I seek to address the ways people are messed up. It is often a combination of a few of these together in a person.

INSECURITIES:

This is the most common thing found in almost every teenager. Sometimes even preteens feel insecure. This is often coupled with an inferiority complex. The evil in this is that we never feel we’re good enough. We’re not pretty enough, we hate our bodies, and we hate our personalities. No matter what anyone says to us, we feel like we’re below them. We want to be like other people.

I’ve always thought I was never pretty. I’ve always hated myself. I feel good when someone says I’m pretty but I never accept it and brush it off that they’re just being nice to me.  Today though, after having brilliant friends like I found in the past two years, I’ve started to feel good about some aspects of myself. But the insecurities are always there. I almost envy other people around me all the time, wishing I were more like them.

FRIENDSHIP ISSUES:

Another common problem is that many of us feel like we don’t have friends – real friends. The reasons for this are that we’ve always been lonely, everyone hates us, we’ve been backstabbed and lost those we thought were true friends, we’ve never fit in anywhere in any friend circle, and more.

I’ve always felt lonely. My best friend said he lost all his old friends when someone started rumors about him that everyone believed. True friends shouldn’t have believed the rumors. But he has me, and a handful of other friends who stayed. We’re the real friends.

STRESS:

Ah, yes, of course this was going to be on the list. Stress and pressure from all sides – parents, school and teachers, society… We can’t cope with it all. Sometimes there’s just too much. And I get that everyone goes through this, and that it’s a part of growing up and part of life, but sometimes it leaves people broken up.

Expectations:

In my opinion the worst things we have to face these days are the expectations everybody throws upon us. Functioning. Studying. No Complaining. Getting along with everyone. I've never been good at it. Sometimes there's a switch flipped in my brain that pushes off any good ideas or thoughts. On these days I can't function. I'm no use. I have to keep myself together to not start crying and put on the mask of the rebel girl that just doesn't want to fit in. Many people are annoyed with rebel attitudes, but they don’t understand what’s going on in the person’s mind and that they rebel out of self-defense.

A friend once told me: When I come home, my parents expect me to help my siblings with their school work, or want me to help in the kitchen or in the garden. I have lots to do because of school. My mind is messed up and I don't know how I'm able to stand. But still they tell me to participate here, I shouldn't be so lazy. These are the things hurting the most. That people tell you to do what they want you to, without knowing how bad you actually feel.

TRUST ISSUES:

Some people have natural trust issues. They have a wall up around them. You can’t classify them as introverts or extroverts because both types of people can have trust issues.

LOVE LIFE:

Last but not the least, people are messed up because of their messed up love life. Every kind of problem one can have – unrequited love, breakups, bad relationships, betrayals and being cheated on, being hurt and emotionally preyed on… Any of these things can mess a person up too. It isn’t just these on the list though; for some people they themselves are the issue, because there are some people who cannot let themselves feel anything in a relationship, as much as they want to. It’s almost like self-manipulation.

Messed up people end up with depression, suicidal thoughts and/or tendencies, and horrible habits of self-injury.

DEPRESSION:

Depression is not just sadness. It is a vortex of despair. No matter how happy a person may seem on the outside, you can’t tell just how badly they’ll want to die.  We want to feel happy, but we can’t because everything is making us sad. And we feel like nothing we do is ever enough. The worst thing is depression can be because of one thing or many things. The reasons vary and affect people in all kinds of ways and degrees. Everybody seems to have depression these days. It is found at an alarming rate in high school and college students. Not only that, but somehow there are a handful of people who think it’s cool to be a depressed emo – and to those people, let me tell you from personal experience that not all depressed people are emo, and depression is not a prize or something. It is not a great achievement. It is a horrible disease that brings nothing but misery that will drag you down, no matter how many times you try to get out of it. It takes time to overcome it, so talking to a depressed person ONCE is not going to help for very long.

SUICIDE:

I was a great actor so nobody really knew how often I actually considered suicide two to three years ago when I was in tenth grade. The wanting to die, to disappear from existence, to vanish and never return, is a constant visitor in the minds of the depressed. I used to call myself a walking, talking disaster. We are like bombs ready to explode at any minute. We think death would be great, we think heaven is a better place. We think life cannot get better and we do not deserve to live. The voices in our heads say horrible things to us. Fighting back can bring us down to fragility. But suicide is not bravery, as addressed in the Divergent series; it is cowardice.

SELF HARM:

This is a taboo topic in today's world. I have friends who do this. None of their friends noticed without them telling them though. People who practice self-harm develop their own technique to prevent leaving scars behind that could tell anyone they cut themselves. People who practice self-harm don't necessarily cut themselves. Scratching off your skin or banging you head against a wall until you have a headache counts too. Some people want to talk about their problems and some don't. If you want to help a friend, you have to calculate whether it's a good idea to just confront them or to ask them more subtly. Sometimes it's a good idea to just ask them and tell them directly because they can't tell other people, even their friends, about their problems easily. Sometimes all they need is a hug. If you have a friend who hurts him-/herself, just make sure he/she knows that you want to help and you want to listen. Also: don't play with their trust. If a person with self-injury problems tells you about it, keep your promise to keep it for yourself. As a person who’s heard so many friends tell me they cut themselves, I am honored that they trust me enough to tell me, and at the same time horrified that they would go cause themselves even more pain and scar their beautiful and handsome bodies. It hurts me and worries me a lot. That’s especially why I always talk to them and tell them to talk to me whenever they feel like cutting themselves. I myself have wanted to die, but I have never attempted cutting myself because I have a fear of pain. I also know that the last person who should harm me is me. I cannot betray myself by cutting myself. I tell the same thing to my friends who cut, and sometimes it helps but other times, sadly, it is not enough, because self-injury is like a drug in itself. One becomes addicted to sliding that silver blade across their papery skin until it shines of maroon red, digging deeper and deeper into soft flesh. I once ended up blackmailing my best friend into stopping, and it’s only ended up help control his cutting fetishes. I have spent days at school with my head back in a text conversation, worried about my friends so much. I really want to help them.

I have gathered some comments from people I know about depression to share with you today, so that people can understand better what it’s like for them.

Mukund: Depression makes different kinds of people – the lonely, aggressive, patient, and mad.

Badam: I hate people who hurt themselves in the name of depression. If I see any of my friends doing that, I slap them. I can’t bear to see them doing that to themselves and they need to snap out of it.

Alice Tyle: Parents’ lack of attention destroys their children. The environment can make a huge difference – a violent one will scar the child for life. Parents and teachers MUST show affection towards children and hide their frustrations. Multiple things lead a person to suicide. The biggest reason is lack of love and hatred in its place.

Anonymous: I got depressed because all my faults were being pointed out and it came to the point where I felt like I was being defined by my failures. I was a person who took everyone’s opinion into account. When you get messed up because of a combination of things, you slowly get into drugs, binge eating, cutting yourself, etc. In the long run, it stops working when you still feel numb and at that point you either end up harming yourself subconsciously or do it because you like it and it’s become an addicting habit now. In extreme cases it leads to death.

Ricky: Hey, you broken heart lonely person. Damn, it’s hard right? People telling you to "get over it", "you are gonna be okay" and "happens with everyone". Nobody gets you right? I know each person has a different type of heartbreak but in the end it all comes to the point where you keep moving on in life and smile. It happened with me. Million others too! So. Don’t. Die. On. Me. Live for me and love again for me.

Anonymous: The world is depressing. We’re not diseased, we just feel everything. I’m the way I am because I know what’s out there, and it’s scarier than not knowing.

Divya: Depression for me was finding solace in the cold blade and not being able to stand up in the shower. It's a different hell for everyone. But remember don't let your struggle become your identity. Fight.

Anonymous: Okay so I feel like depression is a topic that goes unmentioned a lot of the time - especially in a place like India. Mental illness is an important issue that needs to be treated, but the only way we can is if we remove the taboo placed on it.

Maryam: What I think is the major issue here in our society is that people deny realizing the fact that depression is just as serious as any other deadly disease. Just because you can see cancer symptoms on the physical body while depression affects a person psychologically or mentally doesn’t mean depression doesn’t deserve to be treated with the same concern. 



STOP being depressed and START being "awesome" - Barney, How I Met Your Mother
Read part 2 of this post to find out how to help yourself and depressed friends.