The thing about depression

The thing about depression in an African home is that you can never say it out loud. It's not something you give life to, you don't speak it, you don't breathe it, you don't dream it, you don't even think it. You swallow it with your eba and gulp it down with water, you bury it and burn it the way you burn used sanitary pads.

Having depression in an African home means that you need to find a realistic reason to explain why you can't possibly make your lower limbs move faster when your father asks you to get him some water or when your mother asks you to fetch a broom from the kitchen.

You'll learn to blame your incessant migraines on physical stress and you eventually learn to stop talking about them because you really can't be stressed everyday, can you?

As for your highly irregular sleep pattern, you learn how to deal with it and not let it affect your duties, because how could you possibly explain that during the day, your brain wants nothing more than to sleep and drift into oblivion while at night, all the thoughts you've struggled to neatly arrange and fold like your father's clothes come crashing down and plague you through the night and no matter how hard you try to sleep, your brain won't just shut itself down. Soon, you learn to bury yourself under your blanket or wrapper and force your eyes shut whenever anybody comes in to check if you're asleep because how do you explain to your African mother that your reason for staying awake is because you're depressed? 

You could try, of course. You could attempt to confide in your mother and say the dreaded words; "Mother, I think I'm depressed", but then, you need to have had a near death experience or at least something truly life changing for you to have any real grounds because this is Africa and it makes absolutely no sense for you to feel sad and empty for no good reason, and even if you were to have been through something that would put you under the exclusive list of people likely to get depressed, your African mother still doesn't think it's something that requires special attention because "hey, it's all in your head and you're probably not praying hard enough, you're not talking to God enough". And because you're desperate for something, anything to take this weight off your chest, you throw yourself into religion and like a man dying of thirst, you gulp it down greedily without giving yourself time to breathe until as expected, you come down from your high, you're disappointed. You continue going to church or mosque and the weight is still there, but you can't disappoint your mother and you don't want her to worry so as usual, you swallow it and go through the motions until you can't bring yourself to care anymore and you're right back where you started.

Don't forget you still have school, you need to keep your grades up but then you can't possibly concentrate because no matter how hard you try, your attention span is shit and you really don't have any interest in what you're studying, but your parents can't know that, they've spent a lot of money to put you through school and you mustn't be a disappointment to your siblings, so you start to feel like Kambili from Purple Hibiscus who felt as though she had a sack of gravel on her head and wasn't allowed to steady it with her hands.

You resort to cramming and you try to get as many words and meaningless sentences from your books into your head while going into every examination room with a sick feeling of dread in your stomach. You wait for every single test and exam score with sweaty palms and bitten fingernails and you release a breath you had no idea you'd been holding when you see that somehow, you managed to pass again. Of course you start to avoid your classmates because you're not sure you won't make a total fool of yourself when someone asks you a question relating to any of your courses.

But you go through all of this with a permanent smile on your face, because what reason could you possibly have to be sad?

The thing about depression in an African home is that everybody acts like it doesn't exist and those who acknowledge the fact that it does exist, would rather not talk about it while hoping that you somehow just get over it.

©May