On Depression, Meaning, & the Power of Self-Awareness

We are phenomena wrapped in flesh, creatures of impossible resilience who mistake our temporary dimming for permanent darkness. Depression taught me this paradox: that we can be both the architect of our own shadows and the light that eventually burns through them.

The first-time depression settled into my bones like winter; I was twenty and adrift on the far side of the country. Idaho stretched around me, vast and indifferent, while something unnamed coiled itself around my thoughts. I hadn’t yet learned to call it by its name. This heaviness felt less like sadness and more like the slow leak of meaning from everything I touched. In those early days, I believed I was merely broken, that the fault lines running through my days were evidence of some fundamental flaw in my architecture.

Depression is a patient predator. It doesn’t announce itself with fanfare or dramatic collapse. Instead, it observes, cataloging your vulnerabilities like a cartographer mapping unexplored territory. It waited for me to doubt my direction after high school, then slipped through that crack in my certainty. What began as occasional visitations—brief episodes I couldn’t name—gradually became a residency. The visitor had moved in, rearranged the furniture of my mind, and made itself comfortable.

Living with unnamed depression is like carrying weight you can’t see. Your unconscious mind, that ancient keeper of patterns, begins to believe you are the problem, not that you have a problem. These whispers from the depths shape how you move through the world, building walls that paradoxically feed the very thing you’re trying to escape. The walls become prisons; the prisons become personalities. Soon, you’re not sure where the depression ends and you begin.

There’s a particular cruelty in how depression can become a familiar comfort. After months of carrying its weight, you develop calluses in strange places—emotional muscle memory that makes the burden feel natural. Chronic depression wraps around you like a threadbare blanket you can’t bring yourself to discard. When everything else feels uncertain, at least the ache is predictable. Letting go begins to feel like losing the only companion who truly knows you, even if that companion whispers lies in your ear each night. We become both prisoner and guard, afraid that without the familiar weight, we might float away entirely or discover we feel nothing at all.

I remember the night I called home from a payphone—though memory is an unreliable narrator, painting scenes in the palette of how we felt rather than how things were. In my recollection, rain slapped against my forehead, sliding down the silver rims of my glasses like liquid regret. The cold seeped through my clothes until they felt fused to my skin, and my father’s voice seemed to emanate from another dimension entirely. The salt of tears mixed with rainwater, warm against the chill that had settled not just in my bones but in the spaces between thoughts.

That conversation—awkward, halting, and necessary—revealed family shadows I’d never noticed. Depression, I learned, had been moving through our bloodline like an underground river. My father and sister had wrestled this same demon. I had been a much older child than I realized before he found his footing again. The revelation was both relieving and unsettling, knowing you’re not uniquely broken while simultaneously understanding you’ve inherited a particular kind of darkness.

The psychiatrist’s office felt like a confessional for sins I couldn’t name. How do you explain the weight of meaninglessness to someone taking notes? How do you describe the color of emptiness or the texture of hope’s absence? I walked out with a prescription for Citalopram, a small white key to a door I couldn’t locate. The medication helped, not like a revelation, but like the slow return of hearing after being underwater too long.

However, medications are temporary scaffolding, not permanent architecture. When I moved to Utah and let the prescription expire, depression returned like a familiar visitor who’d never really left, just stepped out for cigarettes. It took moving to New York City—that electric cathedral of ambition and anonymity—for something in me to shift. The city’s relentless pulse seemed to jar me back into my own life, if only temporarily.

Yet even then, I remained a passenger in my own existence, watching life unfold like a film I couldn’t quite follow. Relationships became exhausting theater; joy felt like a foreign language I’d once spoken fluently but could no longer pronounce. Everything around me moved too fast while I needed time to pause and to catch my breath in a world that seemed determined to keep spinning without me.

The darkest period came later, in Santa Fe, when I finally understood that happiness wasn’t the opposite of depression: neutrality was. Trying to leap from despair to joy is like expecting to fly by jumping harder. You have to cross the neutral ground first, that quiet space where feelings neither soar nor plummet but merely exist.

A decade later, when I returned to medication, and this time Wellbutrin, which felt less like a chemical intervention and more like a gentle hand on my shoulder, I approached it differently. The pills weren’t meant to cure the darkness but to hold it at bay while I learned to walk through it. They bought me time to explore the geography of my own mind, to understand the difference between experiencing depression and being depressed.

The revelation came slowly: depression and sadness are distant cousins, not twins. Sadness responds to loss; depression responds to meaninglessness. When life feels inherently without purpose, sadness is the natural reaction. However, depression itself is the lens; it’s not the landscape. Depression is a way of seeing, not the thing seen. Once I understood this, I could begin to create distance between myself and the feeling. I wasn’t depressed; I was experiencing depression. The difference is everything.

Learning to recognize depression’s approach became like watching weather patterns. I taught myself to notice the subtle shifts, the way colors seemed to drain from peripheral vision, the way conversations felt like they were happening underwater. When I felt the familiar weight settling in, I spoke it aloud: “I’m depressed.” The simple act of naming it began to strip away its power.

I developed small rituals of resistance. Push-ups and sit-ups, focusing on breath and counting, anchor points in a world gone liquid. Walks where I forced myself to notice wind moving through hair, gravel’s crunch underfoot, the particular quality of sunlight filtering through leaves. These weren’t cures but acts of rebellion, ways of retraining my brain to find beauty in the unremarkable moments that depression insisted on were meaningless.

During meditation, I began asking questions of my own darkness: What lives at the root of this? What old wounds keep bleeding in rooms I’d forgotten? My mind sorted through decades of accumulated debris: memories, fears, abandoned dreams molding in the basement of consciousness. I rediscovered parts of myself I had buried so deeply I’d forgotten they existed. The process was archaeological, each session unearthing fragments of who I had been before the weight settled in.

The most profound moment came when I stopped running from depression and instead turned to face it directly. Instead of recoiling or evading, I squared my shoulders and met its gaze. I allowed it to come, welcomed it even, knowing now that I could separate myself from its influence. Like an exorcism in reverse—once you can name the demon, it loses its grip on your throat.

Depression lives with me still, a permanent resident rather than an occasional visitor. However, it no longer controls the thermostat or chooses the music. It’s simply there, acknowledged but not honored, recognized but not obeyed. The process wasn’t easy—healing never is—but it did become easier, the way all practiced skills eventually feel natural.

What I want you to understand, if you’re reading this from inside your own darkness, is that depression is not a life sentence but a challenge with an escape route. The way out isn’t around or over but through. A willing journey into the spaces you’ve been avoiding, armed with whatever small tools you can gather. Medication, if it helps. Therapy, if you can access it. Walking, breathing, the simple act of naming what’s happening to you in real time.

Your feelings are not a definition of your worth any more than the weather defines the landscape. Depression may write chapters of your story, but it doesn’t get to write the ending. The first step toward healing is often the hardest: admitting you need help, reaching for the phone, acknowledging that the weight you’re carrying isn’t yours to bear alone.

I offer my story not as a blueprint, but rather as evidence: if someone as lost as I was can find their way back to the light, so can you. The darkness is real, but it’s not permanent. The path exists, even when you can’t see it. Take the first step. The rest will reveal itself as you go.