The Depression I Refused to Have
Depression arrives quietly. That’s the thing nobody warns you about—it doesn’t announce itself. It seeps in through the ordinary seams of a day, until you realize the ordinary seams are all there is, that nothing has felt different for a long time, that the gray has been there so long you stopped noticing it was gray. And then you notice it, and the next problem is that you don’t want to admit what you’re looking at.
Part of my resistance was the spectacle. Depression had become a social currency—a hashtag, a branding choice, a way of getting attention when other methods had dried up. People performed their burnout the way they performed their vacations: publicly, with good lighting. Someone in my peripheral social circle announced their breakdown to several hundred followers and watched the engagement roll in. I observed this and decided I wanted none of it. Whatever was wrong with me, I was going to fix it privately, through intelligence and willpower, the way a sensible person would.
This did not work. What followed were several years of attempting every internet-prescribed cure except the one that would have actually helped. I deleted social media because articles told me it was making me miserable—and it probably was, but the app wasn’t the root of anything. I deleted WhatsApp and Telegram and Messenger because managing four chat applications felt like unpaid labor, and also because most of what arrived through them were ancient memes sent with the energy of someone doing me a favor. I deleted my games because I’d decided I was too old for that, a judgment I’d absorbed from somewhere without stopping to examine it. I stripped my devices down to functional tools and sat back and waited for the better version of my life to begin.
It didn’t begin. The laptop was empty. The phone was empty. I was certain this was the correct direction. Mark Zuckerberg had no power over my social life. Everyone else was out there somewhere, shouting voice messages into WhatsApp, liking photoshopped holiday photos, sharing misinformation on Facebook—and I sat alone in my superior solitude, laughing myself to sleep. The loneliness got worse by the week. I called it discipline.
The actual solution was sitting there the whole time, requiring no research: go to therapy. Talk to someone trained for this specific problem, in a professional context, where the goal is your actual wellbeing rather than anyone’s follower count. But that would mean admitting I needed it. The theory I was operating under was that technology had made me depressed, and therefore technology should be able to unmake the depression—a logic so circular I could feel it in my chest every time I tried to reason through it, and still couldn’t escape.
The cycle I got stuck in: delete Facebook, feel righteous for three days, re-add Facebook, feel briefly connected, delete Facebook, repeat. In between I reorganized my music collection with a meticulousness I couldn’t bring to anything that actually mattered. I spent hours in privacy-focused forums absorbing anxieties I hadn’t arrived with. Somewhere in the internet, I remained convinced, was the correct arrangement of habits and tools that would produce a functioning human. I just hadn’t found the thread yet.
The truth kept almost surfacing and then sinking again: that technology can’t heal what it breaks, not because it’s evil, but because it’s simply the wrong instrument. The internet is extraordinarily good at giving you the shape of connection—the notification, the scroll, the reply—without the substance of it. I used that shape as a substitute for years and felt increasingly hollow, and kept returning to the source of the hollowness looking for the cure. What a thing to recognize and then continue doing anyway.
I still haven’t made the appointment. I know this, and I’m saying it plainly because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of performance—another way of managing the presentation rather than the problem. The black hole in the middle of my days is still there. I keep building around it.