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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. And it wasn’t only sadness. Parts of me seemed to go missing. Curiosity. Anticipation. The desire to see people or make plans. Small things required disproportionate effort. Things I normally cared about could suddenly feel strangely pointless. This was the most frightening part of depression: not simply feeling unhappy, but gradually feeling less like 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. It can last for years, and for me, cancer and tamoxifen have complicated that hormonal landscape even further.

I have therefore had to stop thinking of depression as something I can simply wait out once and leave permanently behind. Instead, I am learning what helps me when the cloud returns—not because these things cure depression, but because they help me find my way back to myself.

There are, of course, other important and better-known ways of getting help with depression: seeing a therapist or counselor, talking openly with friends and family, and, when appropriate, medication. I have relied on some of these myself. But below I want to focus on a few perhaps less obvious things that have also helped me—small ways of finding my way back when depression begins to pull me away from myself.

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 disappointment becomes proof that nothing will ever work out. A day when I accomplish very little becomes evidence that I am failing. An unanswered message, a rejection, a mistake—my depressed mind can take an ordinary setback and turn it into a verdict on my entire life.

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.

But I have also learned that this is not the same as simply telling myself to push through depression.

There have been days when taking action meant writing an article or going to yoga. On other days, it meant getting out of bed, taking a shower or telling someone that I wasn’t doing well. Depression changes what I am capable of, and the next step has to meet me where I am.

And sometimes hope 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 measuring my life almost entirely by outcomes. When the things I hoped for weren’t happening, my depressed mind treated that as evidence:

See? You’re getting nowhere.

Slowly, I began paying attention to something else—not only to what was happening around me, but to whether I was still participating in my own life.

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.”

My circumstances had barely changed.

But something in me 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 my life finally looked the way I wanted it to.

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 me toward some grander version of my life.

That was precisely the point.

When I first wrote down my goals for getting better, almost everything was about changing something—fixing a problem, achieving a goal, becoming a better version of myself.

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

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 nothing will change.

Perhaps all this effort is taking me nowhere.

Perhaps the future I keep working toward will never arrive.

I knew these were thoughts, not prophecies. But knowing that didn’t stop them from hurting. And then I started writing this. Writing hasn’t answered any of those uncertainties. It hasn’t magically made the darkness 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.