Depression is the gap between where you want to be and where you actually are

“Depression is the gap between where you want to be and where you actually are”

Bismillah Al-Raḥmān Al-Raḥīm.

That sentence sounds insightful on the surface, yet it hides both a partial truth and a dangerous illusion.

Let us dissect it through three lenses — psychological, existential, and Qur’ānic-spiritual — so that you can see what it really points to.

Yes — part of what fuels depression is a discrepancy between expectation and lived reality.

Cognitive-behavioral theory calls it discrepancy stress: “I should be somewhere else, someone else, doing better.”

The mind then produces helplessness and shame: I am not what I ought to be.

But this is a symptom, not a cause.

The deeper cause is identification of worth with outcome — the belief that my right to joy or peace depends on closing that gap by my own effort.

The modern self lives inside a perpetual comparison loop.

Every human being lives with a gap — between the finite and the infinite, between what is and what could be.

In secular existentialism, this is called angst.

In Islamic metaphysics, this gap is the fitrah’s homesickness — the soul remembering its origin with Allah and aching for reunion.

When you treat that gap as failure, it becomes despair.

When you treat it as longing, it becomes drive toward Allah.

So the difference between depression and tawbah is not the size of the gap, but the direction of attention within it.

“Truly, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.” Qur’an 13 : 28

The heart finds peace not when the outer situation meets the inner ideal,

but when the heart’s orientation is corrected.

Depression often comes when that orientation is horizontal — toward standards, comparisons, productivity, image.

Healing begins when it becomes vertical — toward al-Rabb, the One Who is already nearer than your jugular vein.

1. Name the desire. Ask: What am I truly yearning for beneath this goal? Usually it is safety, love, meaning — all Names of Allah (al-Salām, al-Wadūd, al-Ḥakīm).

2. Transmute the ache into duʿā. When you feel the gap, say:

   Yā Rabb, You placed this longing in me. Guide it back to You.

3. Practice murāqabah instead of measurement. Replace “Where am I on the scale of success?” with “Where is my heart facing right now?”

4. Tawbah as movement, not punishment. Each moment of awareness is already a return. Depression freezes you in guilt; tawbah re-introduces motion toward Light.