“Monsters like depression live in the dark, and the way to turn on the light is by talking about it.”
And that is exactly what Shaheen has done in her book. She talked about it. About her struggling with something since she was a child. Didn’t have name for it then, but it was a struggle none the less. Through this amazing memoir, Shaheen has started a much needed conversation that we all ought to be having now. She is normalising mental illness, which is so important in our growing societies now.
It takes a lot of your inner strength and courage to be able to pour your life out in such raw and honest manner, and Shaheen has written every heartbreaking chapter out so beautifully. She has revealed layer after layer of her battle with depression and anxiety all the way back to her childhood. Incidents that maybe shaped a part of this anxiousness, when she felt invisible or maybe not enough. Every account told in her book broke my heart a little bit just reading about it.
“‘Mama, I feel so empty. Why do I feel so empty?' And that was it. I spent the next hour heaving with drunken sobs with my head on my mother’s lap, repeating the same words back to her every five minutes.”
Reading this particular anecdote was heart breaking. She really did go all in, digging out every little detail and to then write about it. I can only imagine how hard it must have been. Shaheen has also talked about feeling suicidal and her occasional panic attacks in such detail that you could almost feel what she was going through. Opening her heart out and writing about her pain is helping us be more aware about the whole ailment and perhaps how to deal with it, weather its happening to you or someone around you.
I am so glad Shaheen wrote this book. It definitely will help start some conversations that we are all awkward or shy to talk about. Through this tell-all on her journey with depression, Shaheen has shown how much she has accepted and grown as a person because of it. And in her own words, she ‘survived them all’. If I look at the positive side of all of this, that is what I have take away from this, we all go through these different nuanced stages of sadness for some it may even be depression, but its how we deal with it and crawl out of those black holes makes a difference.
“Depression is not a one size fits all illness, and the diversity of its markers makes it that much harder to identify.”
Comments