Depression is very often an obsession over a party of pity, an indulgence in one’s laggard and lacklustre life.

Since I came back to this country, much has happened that has taught me at least a trifle about what it means to be subject to the vagaries of an ostensibly rational system. There are too many dark crevices that I had to creep into for survival, only to be cognisant of yet uglier secrets. For purposes of my own wellbeing, I am not about to parade anything on this street, just in case there are eyes fixated on my every word and whim. A lot of what happened I have been quite honest about with myself, and a lot of time was spent cogitating either alone or with a select group of persons over the likely implications of all these ineffable grotesques that have come into my visual field. As it is, I guess partly due to my yet-to-expire youth, I like to think that I have a good number of years ahead and not everything has to end and collapse on me just because I have had a few setbacks of late.

I don’t know if I came out of the whole organizational tempest (am I even properly out of the domain of the storm?) stronger or yet more depressed. I am tempted either way to be honest. When a couple of friends told me casually that I was probably suffering from clinical depression while I was overseas, I already had that impression that depressed people (excepting the true geniuses, gifts of whom test the linguistic communicability of kudos) are just self-indulgent masochists who celebrate their bouts of neuroses as a sickly but nonetheless aesthetic expression of life. It is true that life has its ups and downs, and those who have a certain view of life, ethics, morality and beauty may have a penchant for materialising life into a series of actions and words caught in a time series, and articulating that ideal of beauty that is married inextricably to the dilemmas of the good life and the right actions through repeated declarations of self-deprecation and histrionics; at least, that’s what my ‘depression’ has been like.

In short therefore, when I was down overseas, I never quite had a good opinion of myself. In fact, I almost had no room except that for opprobrium. As it is, I chose and still choose to take a deflated view of myself to start, which is probably a safer route to take than unbridled megalomania. Nonetheless, as I have heard some friends advise me before, it is one thing to be modest, and quite another to hate oneself and be disgusted with the accolades that others see with my name but remain existentially diaphanous in my own consciousness more often than not: they are admittedly there, but really are not worth much mention. To me however, it’s a thin line, but more importantly, I’m sometimes drawn to the edge like a moth is drawn to the very same candlelight that will reduce it to ashes. It’s just that perhaps I’ve been terribly fortunate so far, and things never quite got out of hand ever.

I mean to say more, but it is late and I want to do some reading now. Hence, excuse me for my departure, but I will return.