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      Depression Is Not Our Identity

      <Acceptance>

      My late maternal grandmother was extremely poor, and she had to work tirelessly to feed her family of ten children. I remember my mom telling me how she grew up in a rubber plantation where she and the elder siblings would wake a few hours before sunrise and take turns accompanying my grandmother out into the rubber plantation to tap rubber. Home was tiny quarters on the plantation provided by the plantation owner.

      When my mom was in high school, my maternal grandparents moved and started running a coffee shop business in the small town of Malacca, Malaysia.

      My grandmother would cook and sell Chicken Rice, Economy Rice (simple fare consisting of a variety of Chinese-style dishes, perhaps better known as “Chap Fan”), Fried Mee Hoon (rice vermicelli), and Nasi Lemak, a fragrant rice dish cooked in coconut milk accompanied by condiments. My grandfather would make ‘Bao’ from scratch, a Chinese steamed pastry delicacy. He would knead the dough by hand and patiently cook the different sweet and savory fillings nestled within the delicious buns. The buns are similar to what you would find in a Dim Sum restaurant, but my grandfather’s steaming “Baos” were sold to neighbors and friends, with the help of his children knocking door to door.

      Home was then a small flat where all ten siblings slept on a makeshift bed made out of desks pushed together. “You slept on a desk?” I later asked my mom in disbelief.

      It’s interesting how something so hard for me to imagine was so normal for my mom. I couldn’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable it must have been to use desks as beds, but it wasn’t even an issue for her. The family was poor all through my mom’s growing-up years, yet my mom remembers having had a really happy childhood.

      Happy as they were, things were not easy, and in fact, were often extremely difficult. They were always trying to make ends meet. My late grandfather was asthmatic, and when he had an asthma attack, which was often, he couldn’t go to work. My grandmother was the backbone of the family and the business, and she never took any breaks. She worked through all ten pregnancies and was always right back on her feet right after giving birth. There was no luxurious time to take a proper rest as one should after childbirth.

      All this took a huge toll on my grandmother’s health. She suffered from a constant stream of bodily aches and pains in her later years. She also suffered through a severe menopause, feeling listlessness and entering a deep depression.

      Without knowing at the time it was menopause that was causing this discomfort, the family tried to cheer her up, taking turns to be with her so she wasn’t alone and helping her to think positively. It was only later that the family learned what menopause was—thinking positively didn’t really help because it wasn’t her mind that was causing her to feel depressed, it was her body. The moment they understood this, they sought professional help for my grandmother.

      This was when I saw what acceptance means when it comes to depression. Nobody tried to “fix” my grandmother because they didn’t see her as anything that was broken. My grandmother herself didn’t fight against it once she understood what it was. I know my grandmother lived with pain almost daily, either physically or psychologically, but I never once heard her complain.

      Whenever we would feel sad to see her in pain, she would say, “There’s nothing to be sad about, this is part of growing old.”

      My grandmother was human, so she clearly must have felt every single emotion, but whenever she experienced pain, she had always accepted it as something she had to go through as part of her life. My grandmother never went to school; she never read books or lived beyond the life she created for her family, yet she has this infinite wisdom that always came from deep within.

      I don’t think my grandmother actively practiced acceptance as an intentional way of doing things, it was just the kind of person she was—she didn’t complain, she didn’t pity herself, she wasn’t pretending to be happy or sitting around wishing things were different. To her, what was happening as simply what was happening, and she took joy in the smallest things in life.

      My grandmother may have suffered physically, but because she accepted her situation, she was able to go through live with peace of mind and live each day with happiness.

      Later, my mom, too, went through menopause. I was staying with my mom then, so it was literally closer to home, and I could see how difficult some days were for my mom. Yet, like my grandmother, my mom was able to accept the waves of depression that came with menopause. Even now, when she has days that aren’t particularly good, she just tells herself that her feelings of depression are a hormonal imbalance caused by menopause and that this is just another part of her life process.

      When we think about fighting depression, fighting for survival, or fighting for happiness, it is almost instinctive to fight with a refusal to accept our circumstances. Acceptance can be seen as weak or passive, but in truth, it takes someone extremely strong to accept a situation they cannot change and to learn to find a way around that. A fighting spirit comes not from resistance but acceptance. This is because our fight against our negative emotions and the challenges we face isn’t about crashing against the waves and going against the current—the way to fight successfully lies in the ability to accept the situation and the reality of what is happening, without the “if onlys” and “what ifs.”

      We might not like our reality, but we should understand that if we keep wishing that our reality was different, it doesn’t mean that we’re actually fighting it, it means that we’re resisting. We cannot be focused on being strong or moving forward when we are occupied with pushing back.

      My mom fought her depression, but she did it by accepting it and telling herself that it was just temporary. My mom explained to me that while she might be feeling depressed, she was not in depression. To her, this was a very important difference. My mom accepted her feelings of depression, but not for one second did she allow depression to be her identity.

      There was no denial or resistance to how she felt during that time, and because of that, it was easier for her to see that she was more than her depression.

      Acceptance is the best way to win a fight.

      Winning in life isn’t about achieving a goal or reaching a destination, winning in life is about having a quality of life while we are pursuing our goals and dreams. Our quality of life is much more linked to our peace of mind than it is to what we have or don’t have.

      This is the main reason why my grandmother and mother are able to feel depressed yet happy at the same time, because they see that happiness is more than a feeling, it is a state of peace and contentment. Both of these women are an inspiration, as they are an example of how we can all always value ourselves no matter how we feel.

      It’s Okay to Be Not Okay

      <Acceptance>

      When we are physically injured, everyone can see it; most people will even have sympathy for a physical injury, like when we have a broken arm or leg. But when we’re mentally and emotionally hurt, it’s something that people cannot see. And because of the lack of tangible evidence, it is so much harder to actually explain and justify our unhappiness, even to ourselves.

      No one thinks they are “not normal” when they have a fever, yet we’ll ask ourselves if we’re “not normal” when we feel depressed.

      One of the problems with happiness is the way we view unhappiness. We seem to see unhappiness as “not normal.” But there is no normal state of being—to be human is to experience all emotions: happiness and sadness, joy and grief.

      So many of us think that when we’re not happy, something is wrong. We take note of the times we feel sad, down, and depressed, and we allow these experiences and feelings to make us believe that our life isn’t very valuable. We don’t think it consciously, but the despair we feel comes from a sense of worthlessness, where it becomes hard to see the meaning of our lives.

      We do not look down upon a child born without arms or a person who is deaf, we don’t pity them or treat them with disdain; we see

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