Depression: How You Slowly Become a Shell of Yourself

I did not take depression seriously.

For years, I thought it was a trendy word for being unhappy or a way of justifying complaining. I didn’t really believe it was an illness. Somewhere in my thinking was the assumption that it reflected a lack of strength of character—that people who said they were depressed were, at least partly, responsible for being that way.

Until I didn’t anymore.

Flirting With Depression

I remember being newly pregnant with my first son. I had wanted so much to become a mother, to have children.

Yet only a few weeks after finding out I was pregnant, I found myself wrapped in a dark cloud. I couldn’t feel joy. I didn’t look forward to anything. I wandered through my days on autopilot, not really feeling alive.

It lasted until I was about four months pregnant. Then, suddenly, everything was normal again. Somehow, the cloud had lifted.

Something similar happened during each of my pregnancies, and it gave me tremendous respect for all those tiny hormones working quietly in the background. When I was younger, I hadn’t really believed women who talked about how dramatically hormones could affect their mood around PMS either. Pregnancy taught me otherwise. Whatever else was happening, it became impossible for me to believe that mood was simply a matter of deciding how to feel.

Imprisoned by Depression

I was fortunate never to experience postpartum depression. But after I stopped breastfeeding my last baby and entered perimenopause, my experience of depression moved to another level.

At first, it was like seeing a thundercloud on the horizon and wondering whether it was moving toward me or whether, this time, I might be lucky.

You again, I thought. I thought we were done.

But depression has a way of returning like an old acquaintance who doesn’t need an invitation.

Later came cancer and its aftermath, including tamoxifen treatment, while I was already navigating the hormonal upheaval of perimenopause.

And somewhere along the way, the cloud stopped hovering on the horizon.

I was inside it.

Some mornings I would wake up and then force myself back to sleep, simply to escape my own life for a few more hours.

An enormous amount of effort went into simply keeping myself functioning: getting out of bed, getting dressed, taking a shower. When I managed these things, I was genuinely proud of myself.

Showers were particularly difficult. There was nowhere to go and nothing to distract me from my thoughts. I remember standing under the water one morning and crying:

All this effort, and I am not moving forward. Am I really running on a wheel that takes me nowhere?

Depression didn’t arrive one morning and turn me into somebody else. It was more like mildew. It spread quietly into different corners of my life until I barely noticed how much of myself had disappeared.

I was becoming a shell of myself.

I wrote in my journal:

“All my efforts seem to just allow me to survive, to get by. Not to thrive. And I want to thrive.”

And on another morning:

“I did not want to wake up. Everything was dark.”

And yet, depression has also become more familiar to me. I no longer mistake every dark period for a permanent state. I have been here before. I know that the way I see my life when I am depressed is not necessarily the way I will see it a week, a month or even a day later.

Over time, I have also discovered a few things that help me find my way back—not miracle cures, and certainly not substitutes for professional treatment, but small practices that help me participate in my life when my instinct is to withdraw from it.

When Depression Visits: What Helps Me Find My Way Back

Perimenopause is not necessarily a short transition. For some women it lasts for years. I have therefore had to stop thinking of these episodes as something I can simply wait out once and never encounter again. Instead, I have begun learning what helps me when the cloud returns..

Writing

Writing has become one of the tools that helps me climb out of the hole of depression. When I write, I feel more alive. I become focused and connected—to myself, and perhaps to something larger than myself. It is almost a form of meditation.

Writing also gives somewhere for the voice in my head to go. When I am depressed, negative self-talk seems to sit quietly in the background, waiting for evidence.

You see? I told you. You’re not good at this. You’ll never make it.

It can attach itself to almost anything. A job rejection becomes proof that I will never find the right job. Nobody signs up for my newsletter and suddenly my blog is a failure. Another rejection from a literary agent becomes evidence that my book will never be published.

Writing helps me put that voice on the page instead of simply believing everything it tells me.

Feelings Are Not Facts

One of the most useful things I have learned is deceptively simple: feelings are not facts.

I began to understand that I didn’t need to defeat the negative voice before taking action. I could take action while it was still talking.

I used to think hope had to come first—that I had to believe my life could change before I could find the energy to change it. These months have taught me something different.

Sometimes action comes first. Hope catches up later.

And sometimes it disappears again.

Insight, I discovered, is not immunity. I can understand perfectly well that feelings aren’t facts and still wake up one morning believing every dark thing my mind tells me.

For a while, I was also measuring my life almost entirely by outcomes. Had I found a job? Had an agent wanted my book? Was my blog growing?

When the answer was no, my depressed mind had plenty of evidence for its case: See? You’re getting nowhere.

So I started paying attention to something else: what I had actually done.

I had applied for jobs. I had reached out to people I didn’t know. I had written new articles and improved old ones. I had sent my manuscript out and asked others for help with it. I had taken courses and pushed myself to do things before I felt completely ready.

At one point I wrote in my journal:

“I have much less feeling of hopelessness and negative self-talk. The outside metrics have not changed much… but I feel more confident and keep going with my goals.”

The outcomes had barely moved.

But I had.

Ordinary Life Is Part of Recovery

There was another realization that took me longer.

My life couldn’t consist entirely of trying to fix myself. Nor could happiness remain something I postponed until I found the right job, published the book or grew the blog.

So I began deliberately making room for ordinary things that made the day itself worth inhabiting.

Sometimes it meant cleaning the house, painting, gardening with my son, going to yoga, taking care of myself, or simply doing something because I enjoyed it. None of these things moved my career forward.

That was precisely the point.

When I first wrote down my goals for getting better, almost everything was about changing something: stopping unhealthy behaviors, growing my blog, publishing my book, finding a job.

A month later, I added another goal:

“To enjoy my present life”

It sounds obvious now. But it wasn’t obvious to me then.

I had spent so much time trying to build a better future that enjoying the life I already had needed to become a goal of its own.

Hope Doesn’t Always Stay

Certainly, depression has not completely disappeared from my life.

Yesterday, I had my third breast-cancer-related surgery. Today I am exhausted and in pain. I don’t want to do much of anything. I have been scrolling mindlessly, which makes me feel worse, and procrastinating on the things I think I should be doing.

For a while this morning, the old thoughts returned too.

Perhaps I will never find the right job.

Perhaps my blog will never grow.

Perhaps my book will never be published.

I could feel myself losing faith in all three.

And then I started writing this.

I still don’t know what will happen with the job, the blog or the book. Writing hasn’t answered any of those questions. It hasn’t magically made the uncertainty disappear.

But somewhere between the first sentence and this one, I began to feel a little more like myself again.

Maybe thriving isn’t a place I finally arrive at. Perhaps it is continuing to participate in my own life—even on the days when I cannot see where it is going.

And today, participating meant writing.

Writing never lets me down.