A young lady graduated from UNILAG, and her family sold a lot of assets to sponsor her Master’s in Software Engineering in the USA.
The day she got to New York, her laptop was stolen on the train, and so was her wallet
She reached out to some friends in the alumni group of her university, and someone reached out to help
This person drove her to her school, helped her with all her registration process, and also put some money in her pocket
He drove back and forth to spend time with her until she was settled into her apartment on campus
He also gave her his old laptop and was exceptionally nice to her.
They started a relationship some months later.
She was in the top five of her class
Life was good!
She graduated and was recruited out of Uni into the tech space to work for a very good firm
Her first salary and stock options were the best among her peers
She has arrived.
She met another man in the tech space
He showed serious interest in her and literally swept her off her feet
She had already slept with him before she remembered that she was in a serious relationship
She decided she would stick with this new man, who was a 10, and gently let go of her previous man, who was a 6
The morning after her sex with 10, he told her he was married and only slept with her because she threw herself at him
She cried all the way to her apartment to meet 6, sitting on the staircase leading to her apartment, looking seriously troubled
“What is the matter?” She asked
“I saw you and a man kissing and smooching at a restaurant yesterday. I came to pick up my stuff. It was good while it lasted.”
She couldn’t even say a word
She opened the door, he walked in and picked a few things he had in her apartment, and left.
She got to the office the next day and got the sack as soon as she walked in
It turned out that the 10 she slept with was married to the daughter of the founder of the company
She was not only sacked, she was also blacklisted in the tech space
She returned home and locked herself in her room.
She was heartbroken, ashamed, confused, disillusioned, hemmed in on every side, deeply sorrowful and only wanted to cry her eyes out.
She was there for three days
Friends and relatives had called and called without getting any response from her
Someone called her landlady
Her landlady called the police
They broke into her apartment and found her curled up in the bathroom
She was sedated and whisked off to the hospital
She woke up with a head full of cobwebs and foams
She had been placed on antidepressants
She was not depressed
She was just suffering as a consequence of several mistakes and a lack of good judgement.
The drugs didn’t help in any way
She got lethargic and became zombielike
She was eventually brought back to Nigeria
Pastors prayed, and doctors doctored
Nothing worked
The Brother in Jeans and a T-shirt eventually met with her
They had a long talk
She said she didn’t believe the level of self-sabotage she threw herself into wilfully.
They laughed over a few matters
He encouraged her to write a letter of apology to both her ex-boyfriend and the wife of the man she slept with
No man is a 10 without a woman in his life, the best any man can be is a 9 when he is a bachelor
If you ever slept with a 10, he is married.
She moved from suffering to reigning
She recovered within a month
Today, she is back in the USA
Back in the tech space and pushing the boundaries of innovation
She is also in a relationship
He is a 7
The cure to depression is not always drugs
Sometimes it is a new job, sometimes it is a new relationship, sometimes it is prayer, and sometimes it is self-care
Suffering is what humans do
Reigning is what believers do
Depression is sometimes just a symptom of Suffering!
Let’s say you’re a conscientious person, and for the sake of argument, you lose your job because of mass layoffs in your company
It has nothing to do with you
It is fundamentally just like luck of the draw, but then what happens
As a conscientious person, especially if you’re also high in neuroticism, you will most likely take it very badly
It is going to depress you to lose your job. This then decreases the probability that you’re going to look for another job. It will put a lot of stress on your family and decrease the probability that you’re going to engage in positive social interaction.
So now, not only are you unemployed and suffering from economic stress, but your marriage is starting to suffer, and you’re starting to isolate yourself from your friends
Then of course as your marriage suffers and the stress builds up then that’s going to make you more depressed and that’s going to keep you even farther away from your friends and that’s going to decrease the likelihood that you’re going to have enough positive emotion and enthusiasm to look for another job and then you know maybe you want to add a bit of a drinking problem to that just for fun or your wife gets tired of your whining and decides to have an affair or leave and you can see that you can get a spiral going that’s just taken you down
Lots of times, people go to counselling, and you get a diagnosis of depression, and the thing about a diagnosis of depression is that it is an assumption that there’s something gone wrong with your psychological structure
This is called TREATING THE SYMPTOM!
Most times, the person gets pumped with drugs and sometimes is committed to a mental health facility when it is obvious that the depression came as a result of something totally external, like losing a good job
It is just a problem, and problems can stress you out
If you’re unemployed and you’re under economic stress and your marriage is starting to shake, and you’re isolating yourself from your friends, and you’re less likely to be motivated to go look for a job, you can sort of think about that as a depressive spiral, but you can also think of it as a conspiracy in some sense of external forces that are ordering you into the ground
We don’t tend to conceptualize psychological disorders that way, but we should because lots of times people are suffering from something that you could describe in Psychological terminology, and depression is a very good example of that
-GSW-