A moment that changed me: when overwhelming sadness drove me to seek counselling | Sachin Nakrani

I still don’t know whether I had – or have – depression. But it was only by coming to terms with my feelings that I avoided sliding into an even darker place

I’d never said goodbye to a man before. Not a man like David, anyway. A man I had been so close to, a man with whom I had shared so much of myself. But now it was time to say goodbye. So I stood up, leaned forward and shook his hand. I smiled, he smiled, and I walked out of the door, almost certainly never to see him again.

A total of 20 times, stretching from spring to autumn, each for precisely 50 minutes: those occasions David and I spent together will live with me forever. Part of me wonders how I will cope without him, but I know there’s nothing else he can do for me now. And there are no regrets, because seeking help was exactly the right thing to do. David was kind and attentive from the start, and while he knows an awful lot more about me than I do about him, I don’t feel used in the slightest.

Related: It's OK not to be OK: why we need to embrace sadness | Johanna Leggatt

This was rock bottom, and for the sake of my family and friends and my wife and daughter in particular, I had to rise up

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Continue reading... December 15, 2017 at 02:30PM