Flowers and Chains - An Essay on Depression and Life's Meaning

When I was a teenager, my grandmother told me after church service about her lifelong struggle with depression. She stated that she had been taking antidepressants throughout her life. I remember thinking, "You don't need that; you just need Jesus." It was a shallow answer to a more complex problem that I did not understand. Not yet.

Life, of course, has its challenges. Along with light, people have darkness; along with gratitude, they have bitterness. Catastrophe can strike anyone, even at the most inopportune times. Some suffering is arbitrary; some is evil; some is of our own making. My mental health became a long-term struggle that was compounded by all three.

At the age of eighteen, I joined a course for my job at Panda Express called Landmark. The seminar had an interesting take on life, with "Life is empty and meaningless," being one of its most exuberant claims. Many people heard a dangerous and cynical view of the world. How could life be empty and meaningless without it being a bad thing? The idea portrayed the fact that humans have a unique niche for attributing meaning to experience. If something happens to us, we naturally weave it into the story of our lives. Landmark argued that these stories were not objective truths; they were something we created. The claim seemed liberating. One does not need to carry the burdens of the negative stories they tell about themselves. It appeared to break the shackles of the darker parts of the human experience. But this liberation came with a cost. If all of life's stories were subjective — if every chain was an illusion — so was every flower.

Over time, my mind could not escape this conclusion. I could not unsee what I saw. Meaning was unique to humanity. Meaning was not "objectively true." Meaning was a story we told ourselves. Meaning was a lie. There are few mountains to stand on when this view has terraformed the entirety of life's landscape. Over the course of a decade, I found not level plains but deep and dark valleys that came with no hope of climbing out. One could say I should have known that the darkness I was feeling was "subjective" and "not real." But it is not easy to rationalize your way out of hopelessness; and when my parents divorced, and my family shattered, and my foster child ran away, and my wife miscarried, and my grandparents harmed our loving relationship, that "illusive" darkness was the only thing that was real. Every flower was plucked, and it was the chains that remained.

Eventually, I accepted the fact that I was not well. I started talking with a psychiatrist and began to take SSRIs. Unfortunately, it took three medications to find one that worked, and the first was detrimental. I was driven to a state of even darker depression coupled with insomnia and suicidal ideation. The journey of getting off one medication and trying another with no hope in sight was debilitating. Life, unfortunately, does not stop when you are on such journeys. It can continue to throw its punches at the seemingly worst of times. And throw it did. The darkness overwhelmed. On January 31 of that year, I attempted to hang myself.

My wife was my rock during all of these times. She gave herself to help me through challenges that most people could not bear. She demanded I go to a treatment center. Her stubbornness could not be argued with. It was what I needed.

Over the following months, I began to repair my relationship with life. We had found a medication that worked. We found a competent therapist. We got involved with our family. Slowly, I found my way. I learned to live. And I made it to see the day of my daughter's birth. Atlas Nyanuer Foral was born on April 17, 2022. I have wept many tears of joy in gratitude for living to see such beauty. To find a belief in life — to see the living flowers that blossom around me — has been a path that seemed hopeless. But the strength of friends and family and a willingness to try have gotten me through. My journey now continues with a pursuit of a Doctoral Degree in Clinical Psychology. I hope to assist others along the way through their battles in life — to help them find a meaning that can sustain them during hard times.

My teenage view of depression was uninformed and shallow. When the gates of hell came knocking, I was not prepared for the darkness. But I will forever be grateful for the journey and to have learned that I am the type of person who can make it. Life is not empty. Life has meaning.

May the flowers of life blossom and the chains of it break.

— GCF, July 31, 2022

*This essay was submitted as a financial aid scholarship to Bellevue University on July 21, 2022.