Every morning is starting to always begin the same way. A ceaseless strife between hopelessness and melancholy. Too long has it been since the heavily sketched pages of your private diary have been scribbled with stories of garnished conviction and cherishing albeit ridiculous stories. Hours have slipped past your frail grasp just by lying down on an untucked bed and embracing the silence. With confidence all but broken, you desperately seek to protect the scraps that remain by staying hidden behind locked doors. Away from the madness, the monsters and the haunting fear of failure. How did it get to this point in your life? You once had dreams. No shortage of ambition or goals. A hunger to claim everything. But things have turned disappointingly sour. Somehow no matter what you did. No matter how much passion was injected or how many prayers were chanted to your deity of faith fulfillment was never any closer. You look onto others with envy for having the success you struggled for to this point in time. And yet all eyes seem to surround you with expectations of glass framed achievements and shiny rewards engraved with your namesake. Tension continues to brew inside you and day by day a little bit more of you will get to be consumed. Nightmares will manifest. Thoughts will be fogged. Reason becomes stunted. The brightness emulated from nurtured talent shall be dragged into the muck of agitated fingers. It will eventually start to steal your breath and play gleefully with your heartbeat. And despite the suffrage taken in by your body the best thing you can think of doing is to continue punishing yourself without extending mercy for failing to live up to the standards of a perfectionist.

Perhaps your life story is not such an overly simplistic plot but rather deeply rooted with misunderstanding, contradictions, unjustified judgments and uncertainties. You seek for answers from the trusted but none offer the satisfaction you crave for. You remain restless. Capricious. Forever distant from the promise of peace. You feel certain that the world wants to ridicule you. That the pleasures of life are only to be toyed by the privileged and the lucky. Not the outcasts such as yourself. Maybe you have not found the right friends. The right course to study. Maybe you are indeed different from the rest. The way you talk. The jokes you like. The hairstyle you pull off. But make no mistake you are also not so very different from the rest of the passers-by. You too were born from bones and flesh. Sinew and spirit. Instinct and passion. But most importantly you also bear the potential to accept wisdom and strength which will help you to be a better human being. It is easy when faced with depression to behave as helpless martyrs. We all want to be loved. To be respected and surrounded by both acceptance and attention. But martyrs do not create the ending of a great story. It is only the heroes. The survivors of struggle. Look up to the unsung victors. The single mothers, the cash-strapped inventors tinkering in sheds, the homeless actress sleeping in her second-hand estate wagon. Be inspired by them. Stop hating yourself. Stop allowing yourself to continue be consumed by bottled shame. Open those window curtains that dim your bedroom. Forget about the shipwrecks you will meet tomorrow. Focus all your strength on a new goal. The pursuit of happiness. Many routes are available to guide you to that goal. All you just need to do is take the first step.

For information on how to better understand and address depression you can find more in the following address:

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/depression/depression-treatment.htm

This article has been written with the help of Betapsi Malta