Disclaimer: this essay is purely based on personal experience. If you are experiencing depression or suicidal thoughts, please seek help from a licensed professional.

If you ask my friends to describe me today, they’d tell you I am passionate, energetic, inquisitive, and philosophical. They would complain to you that I laugh too loudly or that they need to mute me during a Zoom call. This is my normal personality.

If you asked me to describe myself a year ago, I would tell you I was self-absorbed, tense, utterly humorless, and an automatic tear dispenser. Back then, it felt that overnight, my entire personality had changed. I became this living ghost. My therapist told me I was going through a mild depressive episode. If that was mild, I cannot imagine what “severe” might have felt like.

1 in 10 people suffer from depression during their lifetime and two times as many women experience it than men (1). In this Mental Health Awareness Month, I dedicate this essay, which I gathered so much vulnerability to write, to not only those who are suffering but the 6 billion who don’t have first-hand experience. I hope by sharing how my depression felt, how I overcame it, and what didn’t work, we could help our friends, family, even a stranger, who might need us more effectively.

What happened?

During my last therapy session, as I was crawling out of depression, I started recounting the techniques that worked for me. My therapist stopped me and said it’s more important to reflect on the root cause of the depression so that I can identify future onsets.

I tried to do it, but soon it became impossible to pinpoint — especially around biological vs environmental causes. A twin study (2) shows that 50% of what causes people to experience depression is genetic. An individual is more likely to experience depression if their parents have a history of depression or if they had depression during childhood. While academia is still making up its mind on how to interpret the studies and I have no insight into my genetic disposition, upon painful reflection, the following is what I believe happened to me:

Pre-existing mental condition + Multiple setbacks + Lack of support system -> Depression

Before I fell into depression, I was doing great. I had a lot of friends in college and I have always been close to my family. I had the best last semester: taking 7 classes purely for intellectual enjoyment. I also traveled to Thailand and Indonesia with my parents before starting my job: the prestigious af APM program at Google. My mind had been fine for all these years, though it does have a tendency to hold myself to too high of a standard. When things go wrong, I direct the blame inward rather than outward. I struggled to accept my imperfections. Maybe I had things go my way too frequently in the past that I thought I always had full control over every single situation. Such was my pre-existing mental condition.

Life is always filled with the good and the bad. When an unfortunate event happens, a healthy mind is able to process whether it’s in one’s control or not. If it is, find ways to act; if not, let go. Sometimes a few setbacks happen at once and tips the mind off balance. It confuses an individual to believe there is something fundamentally bad about them and they are the reason misfortunes happen — reality distortion sets in.

How it manifested in me was a breakup that stripped away what was pretty much my only support system and flushed my self-esteem down the drain. As I was beating myself up over the breakup and feeling lonely at the same time, work stress started to escalate. After 4 months on the job, expectations rose. I felt hopeless that I’d ever do a good job. Work was excruciating and I thought it was all my fault, only to realize after the depression that I also had a manager who was too busy to support me, insignificant projects that weren’t meant to go anywhere, stressful team culture, a remote team, etc…

I not only hated my job, I hated myself. What is worse is that I was new to the bay area with few trusted friends and no family around. What could have been resolved during a single dinner conversation ended up ruminating in my already not-so-rational mind. With both my relationship and career on the line, my brain called it quits and lurched into full-blown depression.

The hell that’s depression

**The sh*t you tell yourself**

I am not sure if hell exists after death, but I am absolutely sure we can create it for ourselves while alive. All you need to do is to sh*t talk yourself. Some conversation starters include “you are so stupid”, “you are a failure”, “no one likes you”, “why are you so weak”, “wtf is wrong with you”. If you are like me, tears will stream down your face after 10 seconds. Effective every time.

What’s going on here? When trying to cope with setbacks, I blamed them completely on myself. Blame then causes shame, which precipitates into self-hate. As a result, I constantly had a desire to hide under my table at work, or to “just disappear”.

Gradually, a two-voice dichotomy developed in my mind. One voice is of the torturer and the other of the victim. The torturer would reprimand the victim for being stupid and demand change and reason whilst the victim would beg for forgiveness. Even though both of these voices came from myself, I emotionally identified with the victim. Slowly I allowed the torturer to become too strong and it killed me inside. I became numb.

Suicidal thoughts

I started to have suicidal thoughts a month into my depression. After a conversation with my therapist, I learned that suicidal thoughts come in phases. I never got past the ideation stage to have a plan nor execute, so my therapist was not too worried. The fact that I turned to therapy, he said, was a sign that I still wanted to live.

After hearing a suicide story, people often accuse the victim for being selfish for finding an easy way out and leaving those who love them dearly to suffer. If you have been depressed yourself, you’d understand that suicide was not “an easy way out”. I hope to shed some light on why an individual might consider taking their own lives, even though I absolutely do not encourage it:

1) Eternal pain

It’s not just painful to be depressed when you cannot experience joy for an extended period of time, it’s hopeless. And it’s the hopelessness that kills. I viewed my world with such a grayed-out lens that everything felt terrible. I had such low energy and such a victim-mindset that I did not see how I could change my situation. As a result, I thought my suffocating situation would last for an eternity. If such a situation lasts for a prolonged period of time, I would understand why someone would opt out of life.

2) To kill the oppressor in the head

The “torturer’s voice” I had in my head was a crime I was committing to myself. As long as the oppressor lived, the oppressed could not see the light. As a result, the oppressed had to kill the oppressor. The unintended consequence, ironically, is it would also kill itself.

3) The unbearable lightness of being

Meaning is not necessarily required for living, but we all want our lives to be meaningful. For the vast majority, meaning comes from those who love us. Unfortunately, when you are depressed, you lose most of your connections quickly, putting the question “who cares if I don’t exist?” in the spotlight. “Being” suddenly becomes so light that it’s unbearable. Even if the meaning isn’t important to a person, they can still live out of habit; but when living is painful, one might deem it unworthwhile to continue the “habit”.

I am grateful to be alive. It is easy to see why suicide was not a great choice in hindsight, but it was so damn hard to stop thinking about it back then. If you are or a loved one is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please seek help from a professional ASAP.

Crumbling friendships

As I was new to the area, I didn’t have many existing friendships. Depression doesn’t only make it hard to form new friendships, it breaks down existing ones.

Friendship is a two-way exchange. Unlike familial relationships, it isn’t quite unconditional, with the exception of a few super long-term, durable friendships. People are only happy for you to partake if they determine you have something to offer now or later. Similarly, your conscience would only be happy to take from another if you think you’d have something to offer.

When you are depressed, there is no giving. You just take and take and it still isn’t enough. I was drowning, gasping for air, and had no capacity to care for anyone else. In such a state of mind, social interaction became almost impossible. First, it was so much more difficult to drag myself out of my room to socialize. Second, I had trouble carrying a conversation at all because I was so self-absorbed that most of the time I simply wasn’t listening. Even if I was, I didn’t have enough empathy left to produce any meaningful response that resonated. My response was dry and negative. There was no spark in my eyes. I was humorless. Sooner or later the other person would think I was a dull person to talk to. Third, even if I am blessed with friends who stick around, I would soon feel ashamed that I could not bring anything to this relationship and cut contact. In the end, I felt utterly alone — and it was a hard battle to fight alone.

Getting help

After a few weeks, I found myself outside of my therapist’s office. I was lucky to have the Google office perk of free therapy and got matched to a well-trained professional within days. I still remember crying even before I went into the office for my first appointment. My therapist joked, “wow, you are prepared for this”. Indeed, in my life, I have been prepared for pretty much everything — except for depression.

People say you always get worse before you get better. That was my experience with therapy. A few times, I cried until I choked at the end of a few visits and the therapist had to send me into the meditation room next door. While sobbing on the floor, my world was spinning. The present was unbearable and the future was fearful. Luckily, I had blind faith in therapy because I ran out of options.

My situation drastically improved after three months. I started to smile again and even joke about being depressed. I worked really hard executing my therapist’s instructions during these months. In the last few sessions, I could see he was genuinely proud of me. He was also happy to get to know my real personality: the once depressed tear ball turned out to be someone who’s kind of funny.

How did I get out of it?

1. Family’s acknowledgment

The concept of depression still pretty much does not exist in Asia. In the outset, my parents were in denial. Perhaps they were trying to comfort me by playing it down saying it’s normal to feel sad after experiencing hardships: “you are not depressed, don’t scare yourself”. I felt unheard every time. It felt as if they were telling me my problems weren’t real. I wanted to scream: I NEED HELP.

After crying to them every day for what seemed forever, my mom finally acknowledged that I “seem a little depressed, but we will get through this.” I am still grateful to this day that she was able to educate herself about a foreign concept and validate my suffering. Ever since then, checking in on me was the first thing and last thing they do in a day.

2. “One day at a time”

As a chronic overachiever, my expectations for myself were still unrealistically high even when depressed. I was expecting myself to perform exactly how I would normally at work. After finally getting over the denial phase, I had to adjust to a new reality and radically lowered my expectations for myself. “Getting through a day without crying” became my new success metric. I stopped worrying about the future and focused on just getting through the day. It worked.

3. Routines & check-ins

When you are depressed, your energy is so low that you just do not want to do anything. I would sometimes fall to sleep not because I was sleepy but because I just wanted to escape.

My therapist got me started on a 30-day happiness challenge. Every day I would journal 3 things I was grateful for, 1 good interaction I had, 1 interaction I initiated one self-love act, whether I meditated, and whether I exercised. Later, my therapist wrote down my entire week’s schedule on the whiteboard: A Capella, Swimming, Yoga, Zumba, Hip-hop, drawing… I still joke that it was perhaps the most active period in my life thus far.

My therapist would check in with me on a bi-weekly basis while my parents checked in on a daily basis. When my internal motivation was running low, they provided me with the external motivation I needed to keep going.

4. Actually change my situation

As I began to feel better, I finally gathered enough courage to actually fix my situation. I sought help from a senior PM who in retrospect might have helped reach out to my manager. It was performance review time and I used it to have a candid conversation with my manager. Luckily, he hired a new manager for me, gave me an additional team to run and a high-priority project. In my personal life, I decided to leverage my passion for reading and created “Truly Curious”, a book club, and a friend group that’s still buzzing today.

The few things that didn’t work

1. Just snap out of it

Some of the advice friends and family gave me are overly simple. “Just don’t take work that seriously”, “It’s not your fault”. Yes, I agree and I know it is not my fault. If it was that easy to think that way, no one would be depressed.

When you are depressed, you don’t run your thoughts — your thoughts run you. The hard part is not knowing what is the rational way to think, it’s actually thinking that way. Upon doing some research, I was surprised to find that the brain physically changes during depression (3): there is decreased activity in most part of the brain but an increase in Amygdala (emotion center); a cortisol (stress hormone) surge could result in shrinkage of the brain in the hippocampus (memory) and prefrontal cortex (decision making). What this means is a depressed brain tends to be more emotional and less rational. It comforts me to think I was not just being weak; being rational is difficult when your brain isn’t healthy.

2. Offering advice

I appreciated my friends who were trying to help me gain a more balanced perspective on things, but at times I simply wasn’t ready to hear advice. What I actually needed was love and empathy. When you lose respect for yourself, you wish you can temporarily borrow it from a friend. Sometimes I just needed a friend to hold me while I cried my heart out.

It’s also difficult to give advice well because judgment comes out unintentionally. When I received advice, I felt the obligation to show the friend that was recovering, even though I really wasn’t, so I stopped hanging out with them.

3. Getting frustrated. Why are you still like this?

Trust me, the depressed person is frustrated with themselves. They don’t want to be depressed; it just takes a lot of time to recover. They need patience. They need people who are willing to check in on them and not judge them even if they are feeling worse than before.

4. Respecting distance

In the West, people respect each other’s personal space and hesitate to touch on sensitive topics. When I brought up feeling depressed, a lot of times friends would just freeze. I would imagine if a person tries to be vulnerable, they are seeking help, understanding, and love. They desire for you to sit down and hear them out, not to scratch the surface and walk away. They want you to spend time with them, even just sharing the same physical space. They are simply scared to be left alone with their toxic thoughts. If you are not sure what to do, just ask them what they need and let them tell you.

I want to give a status update of how I am doing right now: I am celebrating being single (read more: A monologue of a perpetually single person) and thriving at my job. I am enjoying the community I built and pursuing passion projects that give my life a lot of meaning. I joke a lot and make others laugh. If you were to ask me if I’d be living such a life right now a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. To those who are still in deep water, I send my love to you and hope my story can give you some strength. There is light at the end of the tunnel even if you can’t see. I can see it. I promise.

Citations:

Sincere thanks to Medium curators for picking the essay again. I hope more people can benefit from it. Thanks, William HangDenalex OrakwueVincent Yang for your edits!

Feel free to share! no need to ask me. If anything, I would appreciate if this can be helpful for more people <3
In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I gathered enough gut to put myself out there to write about the darkest experience in my life.
The mission of me writing it is to fight the stigma around depression, though while I type this sentence, I can feel the stress in my stomach. I am still so intimately affected by this stigma. I am not sure if 90% of the people would judge me after reading it and if there would be strangers leaving unkind comments in my post.
But courage is exactly what we need to fight this battle. If it can be helpful for the 10%, I’ve done my part.

NOTE: This blog is published with permission from Mojia Shen

Crawling out of Depression