Despondency

It is a word that the Treccani dictionary defines as “the state of mind of someone who has been belittled, mortified, or deprived of their value and moral strength.” For psychiatry and clinical psychology, it is not an illness and therefore not a diagnosis: consequently, it is not the subject of attention nor, let alone, treatment. Yet, for those who have experienced this diminishment firsthand, for those who have felt their spirit die due to someone or something that has deeply offended their worth and moral integrity, humiliation is much more than an illness.

Those who fulfill their duty, who serve others, who know no limits to compassion, who willingly offer themselves on the altar of sacrifice and renunciation, become disheartened. Those made this way feel disheartened when accused of being unkind, unavailable, or lacking patience and empathy in the face of others’ insistence and traps.

Because those who accuse do not know what crime they commit just to support their own paranoia or their own cynical insensitivity. It is not a world of equals, that inhabited by those who offend and those who are innocent victims and, precisely for this reason, do not understand why.

Now, how to cure despondency? This is the Hamletian doubt: to take up arms or to disappear, to no longer be. If the world rejects you, you either fight it or you leave.

But the words of Oscar Wilde help us when, from his De Profundis, he cries out: “If existence is a problem for me, then I am also a problem for life, which I must compel to accept me as I am!”.

One should not fight against those who belittle, because the struggle is the weapon they use to eliminate us completely. Ignore them, yes. Because life can do without them, but not without me.