I Almost Forgot Myself

I know I’ve been missing.

I haven’t been posting. I haven’t been showing up here the way I want to. And if I’m being completely honest, it’s because I haven’t been showing up for myself, either.

The truth is, for the past several months, I’ve been fighting to feel like a person again. Fighting to remember what it feels like to wake up and not be instantly exhausted by the weight of simply existing.

Because that’s what depression does. It doesn’t just make you sad; it makes you disappear.

Not all at once, but slowly. Subtly. One missed call at a time. One canceled plan. One “I’ll do it tomorrow” that stretches into weeks. Until, eventually, you wake up one day and realize you don’t recognize yourself anymore.

Depression doesn’t always look like what people think.

It’s not always crying on the floor. It’s not always dramatic breakdowns or rock bottom moments. Sometimes, it’s just silence.

It’s staring at your phone, watching texts pile up, knowing you should respond but feeling too drained to type out even a simple “hey.” It’s letting the dishes sit in the sink because the idea of cleaning one more thing feels impossible. It’s people asking, “Where have you been?” and not knowing how to answer because you’ve been here, technically, but also… not really.

It’s sitting with yourself at the end of the day and realizing that you don’t feel anything… not joy, not excitement, not even sadness. Just nothing.

And the worst part is that after a while, you stop questioning it. You convince yourself that this is just who you are now. Tired, unmotivated, uninterested. And you forget what it felt like to be you before this.

That’s the real trick of depression. It steals from you quietly.

I knew I was depressed. I could name it. I could recognize the signs. I could pinpoint the moment when I started to slip.

And still, I waited.

I waited for it to pass on its own, the way bad moods do. I waited to just wake up one day and feel different. I told myself to push through it, to “try harder,” to just be grateful for what I have because other people have it worse.

But depression doesn’t care about logic. It doesn’t care that you have a job, a roof over your head, people who love you. It doesn’t care that you can see all the reasons why you should be happy. It sneaks in anyway, settles in there, and convinces you that something is missing… or worse, that something is wrong with you.

And the hardest part about being in it is that you start believing that it will never get better.

But the truth: It can get better.

And I say that as someone who wasn’t sure it would. As someone who had to drag themselves, literally, physically drag themselves; toward the help they needed. As someone who had to fight to find the right meds, the right balance, the right anything that made life feel livable again.

Healing isn’t pretty. It isn’t linear. There’s nothing poetic about forcing yourself out of bed when your body is screaming to stay. Nothing glamorous about relearning how to take care of yourself in the smallest, most basic ways. Nothing cute about sitting across from a doctor while they adjust your medication for the third time because the last one made you feel worse.

But…

It’s worth it.

Because one day, you wake up and realize you actually want to open the blinds. That you feel like responding to a text. That you laughed at something and it didn’t feel forced. That you’re starting to feel something again.

That’s the thing about depression. It lies to you. It tells you that this is forever. But it’s not. It never was.

If You’re in It Right Now, Please Hear Me

You are still in there.

You are not broken. You are not weak. You are not a burden.

And no matter what depression tries to convince you of, this isn’t how your story ends. It’s just a chapter, and chapters change.

I know because mine is changing. Slowly. Imperfectly. But surely.

And if nothing else, I want you to know: You’re not alone in this. You never were. And you don’t have to figure it out by yourself.

I’m still here. And if you’re reading this, so are you. And that matters more than you know.