Depression

'When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore. I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes.
What was the root of all this despair?
Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?)
Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?)
Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.)
Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a post feminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?)
Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?)
Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?)
Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?)
Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?)
Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental?
Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God?
Did I have a chemical imbalance?
Or did I just need to get laid?
What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!'

(Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love)