The ironies of life can nibble at our souls like a thousand stray kittens. Perhaps I should not even call it irony, it’s more like a sublime interposition that initially starts off as pains but in time transforms into blessings. I’ve seen many painful moments in my life, from leaving my beloved land of birth Ethiopia at the age of seven, seeing my father toil and labor away from home to feed his family, to my mother struggling with depression and as a teenager bearing witness to her attempt to put an end to her distress. It seemed each successive decade from the time I left Addis Abeba and came to America as a young lad presented new forms of crucibles and new ways to enfold me into agony.
I admit I felt a tinge of reticence and had to reflect about whether I should share my pains on this level on such a public forum. This deliberation was actually a temporary dissonance I felt with respect to whether I should share the pains of my mother. I know there is a universal stigma associated with depression and this imputation is magnified triple-fold when it comes to the extraordinary steps that people take to end the hopelessness that depression can induce into the soul. The mark associated with depression is that much the greater in the Ethiopian community where ennui is avoided like biblical plagues. Depression is not talked about, a topic so hush hush it is shrouded in the netela of secrecy. It is for this reason that I paused recounting the way my mother struggled with depression and in the process how depression invaded my soul through the osmotic transference of seeing my mom in the deepest of laments and the times I walked in to see her listless body.
I figured out a while back ago that pains cease to have a stranglehold on our joys when we share our burdens with other people. The power of depression is lessened greatly when we have the courage to share our tribulations. Moreover, our stories can help others who suffer in the shadows of sorrow for the most insidious aspect of depression is the feeling that you are alone. In reality, the world over there are billions who struggle with their own set of crucibles for pain is a universal language that everyone is fluent in. Thus I started sharing my own struggles with the blues when I first got a smooch on my soul from depression’s kiss back in 2008. I once had a website called Brown Condor and I wrote an article called “Depression Fikre”. My last name means “my love” in Amharic, so Depression Fikre was a testimony of how pains that once bewitched me became a source of my resilience.
Alas this world has a way of reflecting darkness to those who want to shine their light. That one article became the focal point of endless derision over the years as in my own community used my confession as a cudgel to bash me endlessly with one slander after another. My problem became thus, the more my kindness was met with malice or indifference, the more my light started to turn towards darkness too. I decided to fight fire with fire and to return each malicious remark with a rhetorical blowtorches and grenades. But these acts of spite and counterattacks only buried me into the cauldron of anger and eventually right back into anguish. There is no profiting in fighting those who want to blow at your candle; this world is full of folks who love to troll and tread on others as a means of hiding their own pains. I knew this one axiom along but I kept disregarding it as I insisted on fighting malice back with...continued…
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