If you have depression, please please please don’t go it alone. There’s no point in pride, or its sister, shame. Doing it alone doesn’t get you a cookie. There are pros who can save you years of struggle.

I’ve thought a lot about being in the military, and a lot of it was spurred by depression. I told my mom when I first started noticing how bad it was getting, but I couldn’t convey my emotions because I spoke broken Bengali and she spoke broken English. When she glimpsed what I meant, she just said “No, [son]”. Her English wasn’t the only thing broken that night, heyo! The rest of the family wasn’t much help either. My dad just got angry, and picked a lot of fights with me (I reciprocated). My brother tried making the old jokes, but I needed someone to stand up for my right to exist. No one really did tell me I deserved to live for a while, me included. Given life was a drag, I wanted to die doing the things I thought fun at the time: scuba diving, martial arts, staying in shape, parachuting, being among kickass peers, camping, shooting, and -oh right, dying. A nifty military job was all the rage according to most of the media I’d watched, comments at parties I’d heard, and friends/role models I trained martial arts with. I heard about Marines OCS through college friends, but got rejected at MEPS. They told me my application would be flagged with the Navy for three years. So I looked for other branches, and I heard about Airforce PJs. The mission was charming, in that it involved the best of the best paramedics jumping into brutal situations and risking your life to save another, while maybe taking a few lives on your way. If I couldn’t enjoy living, at least my patients would.

Cruel jokes are everywhere. You can finally meet your estranged daughter when on your deathbed from alcoholism. A comically size anvil could be perched above you. There’s the joke of being born in a country of less emotional worth to a powerful nation’s zeitgeist. Collateral damage gets shrugs, but wounded American soldiers get pure grief. Nothing against our brave countrymen, just we should grieve for innocents just as much as our own troops. We should also fucking look out for our warfighters (first 7 pages should do) because funding a war without planning for casualties is either moronic and/or immoral. If you’re for the troops on the way out, you either have to be for the troops on the way home or be a consumed by kiddie bloodlust. I’m interested in hearing honest comments, stories, and criticisms. Shoot me an email if you want, or just shoot me. I’ve lived a great life, and one of my proudest feats is turning sorrow to strength.

Another cruel joke is depression. The quiet, bright tinge of life fades from your view for a period of time determined in a genetic lottery no one asked to take part in. The color goes from the light. The future only seems like a bleak wasteland where people kill over water. Moving outside your bed after the third bedridden day is a herculean task, so you become a sleepy, angry person and forget what having dreams mean. People will blame you, asking if you tried stopping. They’ll say it’s in your head and you’re being a stick in the mud. They’ll say they don’t know what to do and do nothing. They’ll get angry. You’ll feel alone. It’s a curse if there’s ever been one, and no small part of that curse comes from the perception of mental health problems. Some people just “deal with it”, but those some are monks of the highest caliber or people who struggled and suck at vocalizing it, empathizing with it, or legitimately “dealing with it”. One of the punchlines of depression is that it’s very difficult to seek help. Recognizing you are depressed takes awareness, and admitting that it’s gotten pretty bad takes strength. Reaching out to save your life is hard when you know you want to die. I had trouble reaching out because I didn’t consider myself worth the effort and didn’t want to bother my friends. I didn’t think the world needed me. I still don’t, but struggling silently was, is, and always will be a misplay. Every time after I broached my self-limitation of asking for an ear to vent to, I felt way, way better. Weird, right? I can’t urge you enough to consider seeking professional help. Mental illness is still illness, and you sure as hell don’t let tetanus run it’s course because “it’s just a phase”; you see a doctor.

Repeat because you and your friends are important: get professional help. If you’re trying to convince your friend, be firm, but polite. At the very least, just be there for her for the little things if you can’t understand how she feels. Little things seem like a monumental effort, like washing the dishes, folding laundry, showering, etc. A little effort on your part goes a long way.

To clear up some misconceptions, suicidal depression is sorta like wanting to scratch your junk in public. You fight the urge, but eventually you stop giving a fuck and do the deed. It’s not like you suddenly think death is great, it’s like you get a mosquito bite on a rash you already had. Easy access to things that can scratch the itch, like guns, the right pills, knives, etc. can often ease the ramp to suicide.

Of course, humans are hard-wired to survive for the most part, so people figure out ways to cope. People use drugs, sex, and crime, to name a few coping strategies. The measure of a man is in how he copes Find a constructive distraction. You don’t have to pick the right distraction the first time. Figure out something you’ve been dying to do, and do it to death. Having known how you might have died, it makes you question why you’ve never lived. Of course I tried the destructive methods of coping, but they eventually left me more tired and confused at why they didn’t work. I grew tired of wallowing at how few things I could do. Feeling useful is my cure. You can’t become useful without work, but the cure doesn’t come from the result. It comes from trying. Enjoying the process of getting better at skills helped me enjoy the process of getting happier. Additionally, hobbyist communities are extremely supportive and this positive energy is healing. In building up your skill, you build up yourself.

Whatever passion you choose to chase, it will feel pointless at the start. No one has had your exact struggle before, and no one knows why you chose to be a champion apple carver. You may start to realize doing something beats doing nothing forever. That’s great. You let your mind dive in to what you’re doing and forget who you are. I hated myself, and I found this escape a blessing. You are the skill. The skill slowly becomes you, and each progression is daylight to an EOD tech. It’s a tiny ray of plain daylight, but it’s your daylight. You’ll still struggle with depression though, even with all the skills in the world. Warding off the itch is work, but it becomes habit after a while. It’s a survival tactic. Once you realize the dark clouds will pass over the mountain, the world warms, even if the clouds are on you. You get good at finding your daylight. Colors pop like never before; air is sweet. You’ll treasure the friends you have, and you treat every embrace like it could be your last. You know all too well it might have been.

I got lucky and met two great Special Forces operators. These warriors saved my life. They saved me from wasting my life. They helped me see I had more to give the world than bullets to hajjis. Both came at what felt like fateful times in the trajectory of my accidental wrathful practice. My negative emotions were brought out of me for me to change. Feeling the lack of familial support really brought out abandonment and mistrust. I struggled to make friends because if family couldn’t back you, why could friends? Slowly that changed into finding friends to trust, and towards the end of college I knew who my friend-family was. I felt that the world was pointless, the environment was going to shit, and garnering force and independence was the only way to win. So I set down that path and realized understanding force and its implications are a necessary component to make big changes. I felt mucho hollow when my mom just said “No.” to my suicidal desires. If I don’t matter, why does my rage matter? Why do any of my emotions matter? So I let things go; after a couple of years of course. What good are emotions if you don’t feel them? Am I more than a tool with some talent and fewer skills? If not, what do I use my talents for? It took me a few years of grappling with those feelings. The first operator I met taught me how to make smoothies and use what talents I had to make sales. With many years in the physical security field, he showed me you could refine perception into a sharp weapon. He opened my eyes up to what I had, and knowing my toolset is a major part of any fight. I had more than a sick cross and mean hooks. I could’ve easily followed his path, but instead he used history as it should be used and bettered my present.

The first operator screwed my head on straight, and the second one pointed me where to go a few years later. I was walking towards my door one day and thought “I want to know how to pick that lock.” About a week later, I feel unusual and go to a bar of my own volition. There I see some old friends, and I start chatting with a guy at the bar. I bring up my budding interest in computer security and he flips out. We nerd out hard. He was a Recon Marine who picked locks and planted bugs. He shows me his electric skateboard, gives me a book on Windows 7 security, we bash on bullshitting hippies and yuppie scum. I let him crash on my couch for two weeks and we grapple, swim, pick locks, and make knives out of megaladon teeth (don’t do it with old teeth). We talk about our mental health, and he helps me drastically with my PTSD. He takes off, but comes back to help keep a girl he loves from staying a heroin dealer. She’s a gifted violist, and we play music together. She talks shit about how bitchy and scratchy a violin’s E string is. She’s also a roller derby girl, so go to the roller skating rink. The couple races each other while you could keep a clock to how regularly I eat shit. Disco music, matinee roller skating: life is good. I’m glad I’m not dead.

Wishing for death is a blessing, as it helps you understand what your happiness is. Each moment that makes you glow is a moment you know you couldn’t have witnessed had you scratched the itch. Shitty days pop up, but they’re peanuts compared to the demons you’ve faced. Even the sad days are sweet to feel just because you’re feeling at all. There is nothing that can tear down your happiness because you’ve built it from the base up. Every smile you give is a sun ray. There’s a quiet type of pride that comes to the person who intimately knows how to be happy because they’re innately sad. It’s emptiness all the way down, and depression is the guide to realizing that. Some people have no guides, and I used to envy them. Now I see what they’re missing. The huge weight of meaninglessness can crush you, or it can crush your shackles if you can do just enough to guide it. Depression is a great challenge, and seems monumental, but beyond it lies an unshakable contentment in life. You won’t be happy all the time, but you find that just as alright. That is true strength. Not everyone gets an opportunity like this. It gives you a chance to grapple with the void and be okay knowing you’ll lose. It’s wonderful training to run head on into emptiness and anxiety. It’s wonderful training to understand that no one is ever done growing or suffering. It’s wonderful training to live humbly and chuckle at it all.