When The Light Goes Somewhere You Cannot Follow

Depression, in Nigeria, is often treated like a rumour. Something that happens somewhere else to other people, in other countries, with different kinds of lives, in foreign films, people with therapists and insurance and the luxury of falling apart.

We like to believe we don’t have time for it.

So when it shows up, and it does, we rename it, and we dress it in other clothes.

We call it a spiritual attack. We call it laziness. We call it ingratitude. Anything but what it is.

I have sat with young Nigerians who described lying in bed for days, staring at the ceiling, unable to eat, unable to pray, unable to explain themselves to the people who loved them. And what broke my heart was not the situation itself. It was the shame, the quiet, suffocating shame of not being able to rise.

But depression is not sadness. Sadness moves. Depression is a state that feels permanent. A room with no windows and no door, you can not find it from the inside. It can feel like stillness that won’t lift.

If you are reading this and something in you has gone quiet, not peaceful, but absent, I am not going to tell you to pray harder or to snap out of it.

I am going to tell you that this is not a failure of will. It is not a lack of faith. It is not something you caused, not a moral failure. It is a real condition. And it deserves real care

You did not choose this. And you cannot think your way out of a condition that lives in the body.

You are allowed to ask for help. You are allowed to say: I am not okay. 

Even here. Even in Nigeria. Even now

All my love,

-DandelionPrecious from MANI