For a long time I didn’t think what I had qualified as depression, because none of it looked like the version I’d seen in films. I wasn’t crying in the shower. I got up. I went to work. I answered messages, eventually. From a distance, completely fine.
Flat is the closest word I’ve found for it. Not sad, exactly — more like someone had turned the contrast down on everything. Things I used to actually enjoy became things I had to schedule and then talk myself into. Deciding what to eat felt like an unreasonable amount of admin. A message from a friend could sit unanswered for four days, not because I didn’t want to reply, but because replying required a version of energy I didn’t seem to have access to anymore.
Explaining it was its own separate problem. People know what to do with “I’m sad.” They’re less sure what to do with “nothing feels bad exactly, it just also doesn’t feel like anything,” and I got tired of watching people search for the right response to that.
I became extremely fluent in tomorrow. I’ll sort it tomorrow. I’ll text them back tomorrow. I’ll deal with that tomorrow. Tomorrow ended up doing an enormous amount of unpaid work in my life.
There wasn’t a single morning where it lifted. It was slower and messier than that — a GP appointment I nearly cancelled twice, being more honest than usual with two people I trust, and forcing a couple of very small ordinary things to keep happening even on days I had zero interest in doing them. Some of that worked. Some days it very much didn’t, and I’ve had to make peace with that not meaning the whole thing was failing.
I’ve noticed you mostly only see the progress in hindsight. In the moment it rarely feels like anything is changing. It’s only later that you realise you did the dishes without deciding to, or texted someone back same-day, and think — oh. That used to be hard.
Discussion prompt: If you’ve been through something like this while still technically functioning on the outside, what first made you suspect something wasn’t right?
— greydays