09/21/2019, 5:17am. I woke up again right at the time almost every day since last year’s full recovery from depression: 5am. Today it’s different, because the news about another Chinese (Qin Chen) living in the US, working for Facebook, jumped off from the office building and killed himself. Reading through posts around this tragedy, enough people don’t understand why the man who armed with degrees from top universities, had a pretty decent job that would give up his own life.
“If I am in his situation, I will be super happy and enjoy my life, why suicide?”
“Don’t like his job? Just change one, why suicide?”
“He survived by his wife and kids, even his parents, why suicide?”
“…”
“He must have depression”, someone said but soon being challenged. “Don’t blame everything on depression, he could use this extreme action to transfer a signal to the employer”. Obviously, depression is still a mystic to many people and they don’t know how it feels and why >50% of people who die by suicide suffer from major depression.
I feel sad. Because I know why but I don’t know whether I could help. This book draft has been completed for a while, but I was holding myself from rushing to get it published because:
1. Most (or all) ideas I am trying to talk about have been talked about before, the books with the information didn’t prevent me to get depressed and none helped me recover overnight;
2. I know how distorted but real image depression made one belief: depression can make the good things you have look so small and the bad things look so huge. It’s ridiculous to a normal person, either people around the depressed person or a fully recovered himself;
3. I used to talk to another person who had major depression before about my book and my public speech plan, he discouraged me: “thinking about when you were in the episode when many people tried to get your thoughts straight, did that work?” No, it didn’t work. I couldn’t walk out simply because a person analyzed things by clear logic. Actually even depressed, I was still clearly a very logical and performing individual, evidenced by the “exceed expectations” year-end review result in my 1st year on my newly promoted role while suffered from major depression badly.
Actually, after I finally delivered my public speaking with my own depression, a couple of colleagues shared with me their struggles. I tried to share with them the learnings I had, but don’t know how much it benefits them. Especially when one of them kept rescheduling meetings with me because he was having panic attacks even only because he has to talk to someone. I fully understand their suffering because I was there, but unfortunately, one conversation, one book, or one day won’t solve the problem.
I still talked and exposed my biggest “weakness” to my employer, with the risk of my own career, because I want to save more people from suffering. It was received well. Now it’s time for me to push this book through because depressed people are still suffering. My goal is to save even one other life. Yes, no book has cured me in one day, but they definitely cured me through time, I benefited from so many great author’s work and now it’s my turn to contribute a little bit more. Yes, most of my ideas are not new but I’m retelling it in a different way and in some areas, I do feel like I went deeper a bit, by “standing on a giant’s shoulder”.
Hope that depression won’t take one more life on this earth, but depression is not necessarily a bad thing for a person’s growth.
No pain, no gain.