I am saying it anyway

I want to name something I have rarely named out loud.

Depression. My experience of it, starting in my early twenties.

I name it for anyone carrying it without the words for it. For anyone watching someone they love and not knowing what they're watching. Every May I set the intention to write this. This year I am.

Five years of psychotherapy has slowly given me the language for it.

I grew up hypervigilant. Sensing the gap between what people felt and what they said, because that gap was a source of chaos early in my life. I learned to close it fast. I became very good at reading rooms. What someone was avoiding. What they were watching for. All of it filed and used to navigate.

That skill kept me safe for a long time.

Then I walked into a system built around power. Who held it and who didn't. What happened to the people who didn't. I was in my early twenties. I walked in with a clear, solid, grounded identity. I left broken down and conforming for safety. I didn't know for years that the experience had broken something.

The voices that followed said the same thing on a loop.

I am broken. There is something wrong with me that needs to be fixed.

I believed those voices mistaking them for my own.

Anxiety came first. Something uncertain in my surroundings. Feedback felt or spoken. A sign I had missed. It would confirm what the voices had already decided. The verdict arrived fast: not safe. And the anxiety became depression.

What sat underneath the depression was despair. The specific kind that says: this will never end, no matter how hard you work. And so instead of resting, I worked harder.

I became a workaholic. Not because I loved work above everything else. Because I needed to run at 150% to manage the times I could only operate at 50%. I over-functioned professionally to compensate for what I experienced as dysfunction inside. My family only ever saw the exhausted, recovering version of me. I gave everything I had to hold it together at work. There was nothing left by the time I got home.

The loop ran for years. Trigger. Anxiety. Depression. Around again. And again. And again.

A constant high-frequency pulse, deep in my chest. Always there. When something triggered it, the pulse became an earthquake. Sometimes a tremor that settled. Sometimes the full thing, moving through my whole body. I lived with that pulse every day for years. Always aware it could shift.

I remember a deep depressive episode in my forties when a doctor offered a rescue dose. Four blue pills. He said: you will never get them again, so make them count. He said it with kindness.

I cut them in half.

The potential earthquake disappeared. Gone. A sense of calm arrived in my body that I had no reference point for.

I thought: so this is what it feels like to be normal.

I share that in case you ever wonder what people are walking around carrying. Into every meeting. Every conversation. Every ordinary Tuesday.

That moment also showed me something about addiction. A pill can reach inside and quiet what years of effort could not. I understand why people self-medicate. I felt the pull of it. I am grateful for what it showed me: that peace is possible in my body. Not earned through hard work. Just present.

The shame I carried for years was that I had let it happen. That someone who could read every room had failed to read the one that mattered. That I walked into a system that preyed on people and came out broken, and somehow that was mine to own.

Psychotherapy showed me something else. The shame was not mine. It had been placed there by a system that needed me to carry it so it didn't have to.

I am not broken. The darkest parts of my internal world were not shameful. They were scared. They were hurt. In need of compassion, not correction.

That is still the work.

What I did not expect was what the hypervigilance had quietly built.

The ability to read rooms became real and useful. I can sit with people and hear what is said and what is not. I can sense the thing blocking a room and find words for it. That is a skill. Built from something that was also a wound.

The years of managing the earthquake in my body became the capacity to sit in friction with other people without flinching. To hold discomfort long enough for something real to surface.

That is what I bring into rooms now. Not despite the depression. Through it.

I am writing this for the woman I was five years ago. And for the 25-year-old who walked into that building full of colour, creativity, courage and a true sense of knowing who she was. Who did not know what was coming.

One who hadn't yet learned what the world could do. One who was still managing what it had done.

Still in the loop. High-functioning on the outside. The earthquake always possible underneath.

The problem was never that she felt so much. That was always the gift.

The problem was the voices. The shame she was carrying for someone else. The belief that she was broken when she was not.

It can be put down. Not thrown away. Understood. When it is put down, something shifts.

Neither of them would have believed me. That's okay. I am saying it anyway.

I am still learning what that young women wanted. The colour. The creativity. The courage. The knowing. I put those parts on hold. They are still there. Still mine.