One. The performance of gratitude

Someone says you must be so happy. You say alhamdulillah, she is perfect, we are so blessed. All of that is true and none of it is what is happening to you.

Do that forty times and something sets. You stop being able to say the other thing, because you have been saying this thing to everyone for a month and starting now would mean admitting you have been performing.

The version that does the most damage is the religious one. Postnatal depression is a lack of gratitude. It is not. Gratitude is a state of the heart towards a giver. Depression is an illness of mood, energy, sleep and appetite. A person can be genuinely grateful and genuinely ill in the same hour, and thousands are.

If someone has said this to you, they are not describing your soul. They are describing the limit of what they know.

And here is the tradition's own comparison on the subject, which is made in your favour and makes no claim about you at all. A captive woman is described searching among the prisoners for a child to feed. The question put to the Companions is whether they think a woman like that could throw her own child into a fire. They say no. The answer given to them is that Allah is more merciful to His servants than she is to her son. Read it for what it says about Him. It is not an instruction to be as merciful as she is, and it is not a measure of you.