I found this text in a group for psychotherapists. It touched my heart, not as an ‘opinion’ but as a meditation. It took me a few days to fully grasp its deeper sense.
As it touched many other people who have or have experienced depression, I am sharing it here. For its light, and its loving kindness.

This post is for anyone who suffers from depression:

“At the heart of depression is the belief that one has lost something of fundamental importance. Whether or not through bereavement, depression is essentially a grieving for a part of one’s self that has been lost. It is always the loss of one’s own life that is mourned, and with it the loss of meaning. The depressed person longs to return to a time before loss, and this breeds an unquenchable desire, which is the basis of his suffering.

Slowly a fantasy to return to the womb develops, representing a time before loss. But now, having been born, the closest approximation to the uterine existence is death. It is death that then becomes unconsciously equated with not just the cessation of pain, but a return to a time before all pain and longing- to the pre-birth experience of the womb. And it is the womb he really longs for, and not in fact death, because never having experienced death he can have absolutely no idea what it actually is, and thus cannot long for it.

Knowing this I would like to tell you something- what you have lost is not really lost. It is simply no longer in the past. It has changed position, because time does not move backwards. It is no longer behind you, but in front of you, and to return to it you must advance forwards.

Thus the way forward becomes the way back- not to simple happiness (as any drug addict well knows) but to meaning. Suffering thus becomes your means of transformation, and your transformation is your means of return.

Ultimately the depressed person has grasped an essential truth- that life has no point, and that nothing lasts. But the mistake he makes is in confusing this with making everything meaningless, when actually it is precisely the fact that there is no point, and that everything is temporary (that death is real) that makes everything uniquely and transcendentally meaningful.

Therefore you resurrect your life through the shadow of your dying. What you have lost lies ahead of you. Just as what you will lose lies behind you, in every moment you have so far created.”

Fabio Valenti, Psychodynamic therapist