Not everyone who says they’re depressed is, but the ones who are can barely say anything at all.
That sentence took me a long time to understand from the inside. I’d had four depressive episodes by the time I was 22, and for most of that stretch I was still explaining it away as burnout, or a rough patch, or just the price of being ambitious. I had a physics degree to finish, startups to build, and wait for it… a wife to show up for. I thought: “Depression isn’t something that happens to people like me” — as if I’m somehow superhuman, which is of course precisely the delusion that lets it happen to you over and over again.
At my worst I was sleeping until late afternoon, thinking in slow motion (0.4x speed), struggling to string a sentence together out loud. Imagine your phone at 5% battery except the phone is your entire personality and there’s no charger in sight. Sadness would have been a luxury because sadness at least means you’re still feeling something. This was more like someone had gone into the settings of my brain and turned everything down to zero. Motivation, speech, the ability to care about anything, all of it just switched off. The people around me could see it immediately, which if you know me at all, you know that bothered me almost as much as the depression itself.
Sadness would have been a luxury because sadness at least means you’re still feeling something.
I resisted medication for a long time because I was convinced I could think my way out of it (the beautiful arrogance of mine is unbelievable, truly). Fix the schedule, fix the workload, fix the habits, and the brain chemistry would fall in line. That logic sounds reasonable until one realises that they are not 100% responsible for everything that they are. The dear brain I was relying on to solve the problem was the problem, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit before that became obvious.
Bupropion (anti-depressant) changed my life, and I know how much that sounds like a pharmaceutical ad. But the first two months were some of the hardest weeks I’ve lived through.
Then it worked, like a slow sunrise where I didn’t notice the sky getting brighter until suddenly I could think clearly again. I wanted to go outside. I wanted to play sport. I wanted to take my wife out and be present for it instead of performing to be okay. I wanted to be alive, and that sounds dramatic until you’ve spent months where wanting anything at all felt like a luxury your brain couldn’t afford.
The most useful thing I’ve learned, and I learned it embarrassingly late, is that my depression was never random. Every episode followed the same pattern. I would take on more than I could carry, fall behind, let the weight of that gap compound, and eventually the whole system would crash. Same sequence each time. Once I understood the depression was the final stage of a cycle and not something that just descended on me from nowhere, how I approached the treatment changed. Medication stabilised the biology and understanding why I kept overloading the system in the first place through therapy helped me empathise with my own story.
I spent years being the kind of person who thought asking for help was an admission of weakness. Getting on medication felt like losing an argument with myself, like I was conceding that I wasn’t strong enough to handle my own mind. That’s rubbish, obviously, but it felt true at the time and feelings don’t care about your logic. The smartest thing I ever did was stop trying to be clever about my own suffering and let someone who knew more than me help. It only took four rounds of my brain shutting itself down before I got there. I’ve always been a slow learner when it comes to the things that matter most.
Aryan