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Gaya

Content Note: This story contains discussions of depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm. Reader discretion is advised.

I cannot tell you exactly when it started. Depression does not announce itself or give you time to prepare. What I know is that I woke up one day and realised I had started wishing I would get hit by a car, and it wasn't a new thought. It had been there for a while. I had only just started paying attention to it.

It started playfully. At least, that is how it looked. I would say to my friends in the middle of ordinary conversations, "I wish a car would just hit me," and they would laugh. I would laugh too, and the conversation would move on as if I had made any other joke. Except it was not a joke.

Somewhere beneath the laughter, in a place I did not yet have language for, I meant every word. I wasn't exaggerating, and it wasn't the frustration of someone having a bad week. I wanted to rest and I felt getting hit by car and slipping into a coma would be the best way to rest.

To everyone around me, I was Vee. Normal, friendly, happy Vee. I showed up. I smiled. I attended lectures, went to church, replied to messages, laughed at the right moments, and carried on as though nothing had changed. By every visible measure, I was exactly the person I had always been.

That is one of the cruellest things about depression. It does not wear a sign. It does not announce itself to the people who love you. It can live inside someone who is functioning well enough to convince everyone, sometimes even themselves, that everything is okay. I was not okay.

Life felt unbearably heavy. That was the only language I had for it. I said I was tired. I said I wanted to rest. People heard sleep because, for most people, tiredness has a simple solution. Go to bed. Get some rest. Tomorrow will be better but that was never what I meant.

I was sleeping. A lot. If I wasn't in class or at church, I was asleep. Long stretches of unconsciousness that I climbed out of every morning only to discover that the weight had been waiting for me. I woke up just as exhausted as I had been before I closed my eyes. The sleep wasn't the rest I wanted. It simply felt like the closest thing to disappearing.

Everything felt impossibly heavy. School. Money. Family. The ordinary burdens of life had accumulated into something that no longer felt survivable. It had nothing to do with how many hours I slept and everything to do with how long I had been carrying something invisible without anyone realising it was there. Including me.

It felt like a dark, terrible pit, and it only got darker. What started as wishing a car would hit me became something else. Slowly, and then all at once. I began to believe the world would be better without me in it. It was not a passing thought. It was a conclusion I arrived at over and over again, calmly, almost logically. I was a terrible person. A burden. My absence, I believed, would be a relief to everyone who knew me.

I believed this. I was not performing. I was not being dramatic. I believed it completely. I believed it while sitting in church. I believed it in lectures. I believed it while laughing with friends. Underneath every ordinary moment was the quiet certainty that everyone would be better off if I disappeared.

One day, I picked up a knife. I looked at my wrist. I looked back at the knife. I stood there. I did not go through with it. I told myself I was a coward. It never occurred to me that maybe something inside me still wanted to live. I framed it as failure instead. One more thing I couldn't even do properly.It was not the last time. It happened again. And again. The knife. My wrist. Standing there. Walking away. Then crying myself to sleep because I hadn't gone through with it.&nbsp;

Every morning, I woke up carrying something close to disappointment that I was still alive. Then I got dressed. Went to class. Went to church. Laughed when people laughed and became Vee again.

Depression is not sadness.I want to say that clearly because when I tried, in small ways, to tell people something was wrong, they responded to sadness. They offered comfort for sadness.&nbsp; Advice for sadness. Encouragement for sadness. None of it reached what I actually had. Sadness has texture. It feels like something.What I experienced was the absence of feeling altogether. A flatness so complete that I could sit in rooms where good things were happening and feel absolutely nothing.

I was not withdrawn. I wasn't hiding in my room or cancelling plans or visibly falling apart. I was outside. I went to class. I went to church. I answered messages. I laughed. I showed up. By every observable measure, I was functioning. The depression existed underneath all of it, invisible even while it consumed almost everything inside me.

From the outside, I looked like someone living her life. From the inside, I felt like I was performing one. Every ordinary task required an effort I could not explain. Caring about the future. Feeling excited. Looking forward to tomorrow. Finding the motivation to get out of bed for reasons beyond obligation. These were things I once did without thinking. Depression made each one feel impossibly far away.

It was not a spiritual attack. I understand why that was the language people reached for. It was the language available to them. Nigerian Christianity does not always have the vocabulary for depression as an illness, and so it often reaches first for spiritual explanations. I went to prayer sessions. I sat on plastic chairs while women who genuinely loved me prayed over me. I smiled afterwards. I thanked them. I told them I felt better and I did but it wasn’t a fix.

I am not saying prayer cannot help. I am saying I needed something prayer alone could not provide. I just didn't know how to say that. There is a particular loneliness in needing one kind of help while everyone keeps offering another, even when they are offering it with love. That loneliness stayed with me almost as much as the depression itself.

For a long time, I thought the problem was me because every explanation I was offered seemed to point back to me. I needed to pray more. I needed to be stronger. I needed to be grateful. Everyone was stressed. Everyone had problems.

Nobody around me was trying to be cruel. They were using the language they had. But Nigerian culture does not yet have good language for depression. We have words for hardship. We understand grief. We know what suffering looks like when there is an obvious reason for it. What we struggle to recognise is suffering that happens quietly, inside someone's mind, while they continue to show up to work, to school, to church and to life.

When I tried, in the small ways I knew how, to tell people something was wrong, I was often met with encouragement instead of understanding.

"Pray about it.""You'll be fine.""Just keep trusting God."

Those words came from love but love, by itself, is not always enough. I remember sitting through prayer sessions, grateful that people cared enough to pray for me, while also knowing that I was leaving almost as exactly as I had arrived. The heaviness was still there. The thoughts were still there. The exhaustion was still there. That made me feel guilty.

If everyone believed prayer should have fixed me, and it hadn't, then perhaps the problem was my faith. Perhaps I wasn't praying hard enough. Perhaps God was disappointed in me. Depression is already cruel. Believing your illness is also a spiritual failure makes it crueller.

Looking back now, I wish someone had told me that what I was experiencing had a name. I wish someone had told me it was an illness instead of a character flaw. I wish someone had told me that needing more than prayer did not mean I lacked faith. Most of all, I wish someone had told me I wasn't alone.

For a while, something shifted. I met someone. I told him things I had not told anyone else; my fears, the heaviness, the thoughts that had become too frightening to carry alone. He listened in a way very few people had listened. He spent time reminding me that I mattered, saying it so often that, for brief moments, I almost believed him.

For a while, the weight became lighter. Not because it had disappeared, but because I no longer felt like I was carrying it alone. Looking back now, I can see the mistake I was making. Without realising it, I had built my survival around another person. He had become my reason, my proof that maybe life was worth staying for but he was also just a person, carrying his own hopes, his own expectations, his own limits.

We wanted different things. Eventually, he left and when he did, everything I had been leaning against disappeared with him. I returned to the pit. The crying every night came back. The wishing I would disappear came back. The heaviness came back, only this time it carried grief too. It felt worse than before because I had remembered, however briefly, what lighter felt like. I stayed there for a while.

Long enough that despair became ordinary again. Long enough that I stopped expecting tomorrow to feel different from today. Every day blurred into the next. I woke up. I went to class. I went to church. I laughed when laughter was expected of me. I answered, "I'm fine," because it required less energy than explaining the truth.

Time passed, though I couldn't have told you how much. Depression has a way of swallowing time. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Nothing changes dramatically enough for you to notice that you are surviving them.

Then, slowly, something did. Recovery did not arrive all at once. It came quietly. It was the morning I got out of bed without arguing with myself for an hour. The afternoon I laughed and realised, afterwards, that I had actually meant it. The night I fell asleep without wishing I wouldn't wake up. I did not notice I was getting better while it was happening.

Somewhere in the middle of that slow, almost invisible recovery, I met someone else. This time, everything was different. Maybe because I had learned, painfully, that no one person could become my reason for living. Maybe because healing had already begun, even if I could not yet see it. He never tried to rescue me. He simply stayed.

He spent hours talking me through the lies my mind insisted on telling me. He prayed for me, but he did not stop there. He checked in. He asked how I was really doing. He noticed when something was off before I found the words to say it. He reminded me to eat. He reminded me to rest. He paid attention.

It is strange how extraordinary ordinary care can feel when you have spent so long believing you are invisible. Looking back now, I do not think he healed me. Healing was slower than that. Messier than that. It happened over months, through countless ordinary moments, through people who loved me, through grace I did not always recognise while I was receiving it, but his kindness became part of that story. He reminded me, over and over again, that my life had value until, one day, I found myself beginning to believe it too.&nbsp;

Sometimes I think about how many people unknowingly become part of someone else's survival. Not because they have all the answers, but because they stay. Because they listen. Because they keep calling. Because they refuse to let someone disappear into the lies their own mind keeps telling them. I was fortunate enough to experience that kind of love. It did not save me but it helped me find my way back to myself.

Before depression, I thought feelings belonged only to the mind. I did not know they could settle into the body. Depression lived in my chest. A heaviness that was not quite pain and not quite numbness, just a constant presence that, over time, became so familiar I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing the hum of a fan that has been running all day.

It lived in my sleep too. Sometimes there was too much of it, thick and unrefreshing. Sometimes there was almost none at all. Either way, I woke up exhausted. It lived in food losing its taste. Not metaphorically, but literally. I ate because my body required it, not because eating gave me any pleasure.

It lived in my face. When I look back at photographs from that time, I see someone who had quietly disappeared behind her own eyes. People called it tiredness, and I agreed because tiredness was a word they understood.

For a long time, I existed in two places at once. Present enough to function. Absent enough that the functioning felt like a performance. I was there but I wasn't.

I got through it. I am here but I want to be honest about what "here" means because I think dishonesty about recovery is part of what makes so many people feel alone. I do not know if depression is something that ever completely leaves you. I do not know whether the pit is behind me forever or waiting somewhere further down the road.

What I know is that, today, the weight is lighter. Today, I laugh and mean it. Today, I wake up expecting to live. I do not take those things for granted anymore.

Sometimes I think about the version of me who stood in front of a mirror with a knife in her hand and believed surviving made her weak. She was wrong. She wasn't weak. She was exhausted. She was carrying something far heavier than anyone around her could see. She was trying to survive an illness she didn't know had a name, in a culture that did not yet have the language for it, surrounded by people who loved her deeply but did not always know how to help. She deserved more than she believed she did.

If you are reading this from inside your own pit, so do you. When this essay began, I told you I wanted to rest. For a long time, I thought rest meant disappearing. Now I know what I really wanted was for the weight to stop. Those are not the same thing.

The weight became lighter and somewhere along the way, without even noticing when it happened, I began wanting tomorrow again.

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These words belong to Vee. What follows belongs to Aura. No one should read something like this and not know there is somewhere to go.

If any of this described something you are living right now, please reach out.

She Writes Woman Free, confidential helpline for women and girls — 24 hours, 7 days. 0800 800 2000 @shewriteswoman

Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) Mental health support, resources, and community. mentally-aware.org | @mentallyaware_ng

Suicide Research and Prevention Initiative (SURPIN) Crisis support. 0800-78774-61

The Therapy Department Affordable therapy across Nigeria. thetherapydepartment.com | @thetherapydept

You do not have to be in crisis to call. Tired is enough. Heavy is enough. You are enough of a reason.

What does depression really feel like? In this deeply personal essay, Vee reflects on invisible suffering, faith, loneliness, and the slow, imperfect journey back to wanting tomorrow.

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