2. The Importance Of Acknowledging someone’s existence

2. The Importance Of Acknowledging someone’s existence

In this text I will be talking about some personal experience with depression and loneliness. If you feel like you’re not up for this today, save it for another day. Value your own emotional well-being.

When I was thirteen, I changed schools. I did it because at the last school some pupils and teachers had started bullying me, and the rest of the pupils were ignoring me. I had lost a lot of previously very close friends. At the new school, I immediately found a group of friends, but a couple of days in (we were on a class trip), I lost all of them but one. We became best friends, but basically, a couple of weeks later, I lost her as a friend and I had no one. This is when something that I now know to be depression, really started to hit me, and I developed a sort of school phobia, where I could hardly talk in class at all. I mostly sat there, silently crying. The other pupils mostly ignored me, again. If I said hello, they didn’t respond. Apart from people I talked to who were in a different class, I was by myself. In the years to come, I sometimes still hung out with that friend who was my best friend for the first couple of weeks. When three years after I had joined the school she left to go to a school abroad, my mum and I finally started conversation with my teacher and a guidance counselor, as well as the class president from my class. She told me that three years before a group of pupils had gone to the class teacher and asked her what was going on with me and what they should do. She said I was having some issues and they should leave me alone. I know that she was just trying to protect them from me, because fact was she did know there were some issues, but she didn’t actually know what was wrong with me and probably thought I would influence them in some negative way. Which would not have been the case, just to let you know. But I think it’s important to know that “Leave them alone” is the worst advice you can give if you actually want to help someone. I don’t know if this is true for every single situation you can find yourself in. But I do think that, for most situations, it is. Especially when you’re dealing with depression. Depression is a disease of loneliness. I took that sentence directly from Andrew Solomon’s article which you can read here: http://andrewsolomon.com/articles/depression-is-a-disease-of-loneliness/

Social isolation is not a cure for anything, least of all depression, or any level of loneliness. To be fair, neither my teacher, nor I, knew that I had depression. But it had to have been fairly obvious that I was lonely.

Today I am much better. It still bothers me, though, when people I say hello to, don’t say hello back. It’s a form of rejection, and it’s something that I don’t quite understand. I try to make it a point to notice the people around me, and even though it can be very difficult for me to even look at people, I smile and say hello. I offer an ‘how are you?’ I listen. I ask questions. The truth is, whether the person I’m talking to has any issues I might be helping with is not the issue. It’s that some have forgotten the basis of what it means to be human. We’re social animals. We need each other. In the situation I used to be in several years ago, even one word made a lot of difference. There were some people who did say that one word. And I am grateful for that. But the truth is, I shouldn’t have to be. Noticing that someone is there and acknowledging it in a friendly way is not an act of heroism. It’s an instinct in any social animal that we somehow  suppress. We shouldn’t. To say hello, to smile at someone, to actually care about someone, they don’t have to be your friend. They just have to be another living thing.

Another point I’m trying to make, is, of course, that you never know another person’s story. Not unless you ask that person.