Buddha smiles
"How do you always have a smile on your face, don't you have any major problems and worries in your life?" asked someone. "Who said I don't! I have a thousand odd problems originating from my life as such, another thousand odd that I volunteered to borrow on to my plate from others and a gazillion other work related ones that are un accounted for! So much that I am pretty sure I have been managing with depression constantly, to an extent that of depression were to be personified, it would be considering itself to be a lame joker after living with me all these years" thought another who was posed the question in the first place!
Above paragraph is a brutally torturous vernacular translation of a recent meme that resonated with me. But the crux of it, that no matter what goes on the mind gets trained to hide it behind and put a smiling face on, I feel is actually the purpose of life. For those who know my thousand problems, it might not be news that I have said I will laugh and enjoy when I can, because life gives me enough reasons to cry. For those who know me as the lively, smiling person, I think I have done justice to what I just said!
I believe the feeling of being depressed that almost all of us face at some point, due to the way life is designed, almost certainly has phases or stages through which we navigate. I call it the storm! Always begins with the calmness before, the period that has more of the smiles, less of everything else. There's music, dance and above all a good routine to life. Second stage are the warnings that we ignore, the patterns that our mind subconsciously falls into. It could be addictive games on phone, randomly out of normal craving for weird food items, on the other extreme a sudden loss of appetite, different approach to work, overnight changes to hobbies and plans, and the list goes on as it can be highly personalized and customized to one's own. Third is the trigger, that alerts the mind to finally react! Comes unannounced, unexpected, but makes a dramatic entrance opening flood gates, leading us to the next phase of downpour. Literally downpour - of words, outlets, streams, tears, rants, vents, cries and or screams, again specific to one's own palette! Finally comes touchdown, when the mind knows it's time to gather the events of the storm together into the trash can and move back to the calmness as silently as it can. And how it does it so successfully depends on the controls you have in place, I guess. Know your symptoms, the triggers that leads to the downpour, the custom settings you didn’t opt for but just got tagged to and have lifelines to reach to, I always believe in and vouch for phone a friend!