When You Don’t Feel Like You Deserve to Be Depressed

A personal journey of privilege and sadness

By pretty much any measure, I’ve lived a charmed life.

I had a comfortably uneventful childhood. I experienced very little trauma outside of the relatively inconsequential distress shyness and social anxiety caused. For example, I had a persistent fear of public restrooms when I was in elementary school, which turned into a fondness for them in high school when I figured out they were a nice place to hide out during lunch period.

I’ve always had a nice place to live, air conditioning (critical since I live in Florida), and people to love me. School came easy for me, at least the academic parts.

As I got older, I always had people behind me — usually my parents — to provide a backstop against any real hardship. When I struggled finding myself after college, I still had a place to live. I’ve worked sporadically throughout my adult life. As a tennis court attendant, tennis coach, science writer, and, currently, stay-at-home parent who moonlights as a freelance writer and editor. I’ve never felt like I’ve had to work too hard. Certainly not physically. Although those bags of green, sandy material called HarTru that I had to spread on the clay tennis courts were quite heavy and the Florida summers were very hot.

Now, as I stumble towards forty, I have an amazing wife who is the primary breadwinner for our family. And, of course, I have three amazing kids who I love more than anything.

Yet, depression doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t care about all the good stuff — the comfort, the privilege, the lack of obvious struggle. Depression is some days feeling like I’m living outside my body, just observing. Depression is feeling like I could sleep for twenty-four or thirty-six hours straight even when I get a reasonable night’s sleep. Sometimes, like one Sunday afternoon recently, depression is lacing up my rarely used running shoes and heading out with the hare-brained idea of running eight, ten, twelve miles while my wife and kids are away. Only to end up aching and beaten, drenched with sweat and rain from a sudden cloudburst. Depression just is.

It’s been a fifteen-year journey for me. Probably longer, really, but anxiety and depression weren’t things I had words for until I was in my early twenties. The first depressive period I remember was during college. I lived at home. Commuting thirty minutes to school when I had classes. I didn’t have any friends to speak of. I didn’t meet a single person in college that I know today. Not one. And I went to a school with an enrollment of around thirty or forty thousand. Maybe it was the isolation that got to me, but I hit a wall the summer between my third and fourth years.

I was majoring in molecular and microbiology, which I didn’t like particularly, but it seemed like as good a thing to major in as any. I was taking organic chemistry and physics during the summer. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t go anymore. Leaving the house felt like an impossibility. I stopped going to class. I couldn’t make myself look at my books. I wasn’t scared of anything in particular or sad about anything I could put my finger on. I was just really, really down.

About a year later, I graduated from college. For some reason, I went to law school in Virginia. Probably because I took the LSAT and did well on it. And this law school was supposed to be quite prestigious. No matter what, I was always attracted to the idea of prestige.

Surprisingly enough, a vague interest in prestige and literally nothing about law wasn’t enough to carry me through. Particularly since I was eight hundred miles away from my comfortable home. Alone. For the first time ever. I had an apartment by myself at a complex that was right beside the law school. I remember a lot of red bricks and ivy-covered walls, and the fact that my patio, which was slightly below ground, flooded every time it rained. Also, the power went out during every thunderstorm.

My parents drove with me up and helped me get settled. I think I cried the entire drive up from Florida. I was in the car by myself, though, so it was fine. When my parents left, my dad and I hugged, which was odd, and he said, “Show them what us Southerners are made of,” which was even odder.

I tried to make it. I even drove by the bar where one of the myriad opening week social events was taking place several times before giving up and retreating to my apartment. I might have even pulled into the bar’s parking lot and sat in the car for a few minutes. Later, I joined the softball team I was assigned to based on my first-year law class. At this law school, everyone was required to play softball or risk being preemptively disbarred.

About five or six weeks in, though, the depression came back. I stopped reading and doing my work. There isn’t a lot of work to do in law school outside of exam time, so I could get away with it pretty easily. Except, I went to class one day and the teacher picked out my name to call on, as they do. I mumbled something about having read the wrong chapter. The teacher just moved onto the next victim.

I never returned to that classroom or any other law school classroom. I couldn’t bear the humiliation. And the prospect of humiliation offered me an out. Was it a rational out? No. But depression doesn’t care if something is rational.

Skip ahead several years. I finally got help. I went to a psychiatrist, I tried a medication called Paxil. It made me panicky, so the doctor switched me to Lexapro. It seemed to work. I switched to other medications over the succeeding few years as my doctor saw fit, but I remained stable. I started doing a little bit more. I worked as a tennis shop attendant, maybe ten hours per week. I have very little memory of what I did all the time I wasn’t working. Eventually, I started teaching tennis too, but it was never more than part-time. I was in my mid-twenties, but I was embarrassed by my standing in life, so I always let people think I was in college. I kept this charade up for several years.

“How are your classes going?” old gentleman in ill-fitting tennis shorts would ask as they stirred creamer into their coffees on Saturday morning.

“Great,” I replied every time through gritted teeth.

A few more years later, I finally started to hit my stride. I was well medicated. I got a “real” job working as a science writer for a neuroscience professor. I bought a house. I even started exploring online dating. This last bit didn’t come without some mishaps. At the urging of a friend from high school, I first tried a site called eHarmony. You might remember the ads. Their survey allegedly screened potential matches for levels of compatibility or some such nonsense. I completed the survey and the website told me they were unable to match me with anyone. I was rejected by an online dating site. My friend didn’t believe me.

“That’s not possible,” he said, clearly alarmed.

“Oh, it very much is,” I replied.

I was secretly pleased. I was too broken even for online dating. I had long suspected as much, but it was nice to have confirmation from the experts.

Later, though, I did meet a girl on a Facebook dating app who was from Florida but happened to be living in California. We got married less than two years later. We’ve been together ten years now and we have three kids. Before the kids came along, though, we lived in England for about ten months while I did a master’s degree at Cambridge. I was thirty at the time and it was probably the best year of my life. I finally felt energized, engaged, grown up, everything I’d expected I’d be when I was twenty or twenty-five.

That year ended, and we moved home. Our first child was on the way, so we had to get serious about making money instead of just borrowing and spending it. Thus, my wife went back to work at her hospital since she was well-established in her career, and I did pretty much nothing. When our son arrived, I became a stay-at-home parent. Not exactly where I expected to be, but I was feeling pretty good for the most part.

Until right before our second child was born. Suddenly, I hit a wall. This time was familiar, but different. Darker.

When my wife was about seven months pregnant with our second child, I thought I was finally going to have that legitimate nervous breakdown that I had long been waiting for. No more messing around the edges of moderate depression and social anxiety; this time I was going right for the real stuff.

I remember lying in bed very early one morning, the soft pre-dawn light of the Florida winter sky seeping in through the blinds of the bedroom on the second floor of our townhouse. Our son was still asleep, he slept reliably late back in those days. My wife was snoring softly beside me. Normally I would have been sound asleep as well, but this morning I was wide awake. Sometime during the night a thought had wormed its way into my head and I couldn’t get it out.

You’re going to die one day and cease to exist. And so is everyone else you know and love. Nothing you do matters. When you’re dead, you won’t remember anything you do anyway.

The same thoughts kept looping through my brain over and over. They varied a little, but the main point remained the same: everything was meaningless now. I pulled the covers up tight under my chin, turned onto my side, and pulled my knees up to my chest. I thought I might stay in bed forever (why not?) so I might as well make myself as comfortable and small as possible. The fun thing about depression is that it makes you not care about anything. This is particularly useful and convenient when you’re the person primarily responsible for caring for other small humans.

Eventually, I got up. I carried on. I felt dead inside and scared, but I was able to go through the motions. Physically I felt like I had a flu. And when I looked into my son’s face, I either felt like I was about to burst into tears or I felt nothing. I tried to tell myself that it was just a bad day or a bad week and that I would come out of my funk soon. I mean, it wasn’t like this was the first time I realized I was mortal. Maybe I had never seriously reckoned with my mortality, but I had thought about it, I had had anxious moments in the past. But it had never consumed me like this. It had never pulverized my entire self. I had never lost control.

I didn’t believe it would pass. The darkness had me in its grasp and it wasn’t going to let go. The thoughts were so insidious, and even scarier, so irrefutable, I didn’t feel like there was any way out. I knew I was going to need help. In retrospect, I can see that I wasn’t in quite as deep as it felt from my position inside the fog. I wasn’t willing to give up. I still knew that I had people I had to live for. I eventually talked to my wife and my mom and my sister. I tried to explain, to talk it through. Just saying it out loud helped a little, but not enough. So, I found a psychiatrist. My old one had recently moved away, so I had to start from scratch. That was likely why I ended up in the hole in the first place. Because I had tapered off my medication .

The psychiatrist I ended up with was basically worthless, but at least he could give me drugs. The only things I remember about him are that his body was shaped in a way that he could nearly rest his head on his torso while seated and he often complained of sudden and seemingly substantial back pains during our sessions. Actually, he didn’t really complain, he just randomly clutched at his back and winced, often while I was talking. Maybe it was something I said. Perhaps I’m being too harsh. He did impart some excellent wisdom such as, “You’re young and healthy. You have children. What do you have to worry about?” I mean, yes, I agreed one hundred percent, but I wasn’t paying him to mimic my inner critic.

You’re young and healthy. You have children. What do you have to worry about?

Luckily, the medications work no matter who prescribes them. And I was eventually able to switch over to a therapist who was much more attentive and useful. I remember trudging into her office once every two weeks for several months, dressed in baggy sweatpants and a hoodie because I was always cold even though it was late spring and summer in Florida, and sitting down on a small leather couch. We just talked about things for an hour each time. Despite the heavy anxiety I have talking to strangers and particularly talking about myself, it started to feel okay. Talking to another adult felt good. One time I even started crying when I talked about my kids growing up. Slowly I started to return to the world of the living. I think I made it back just in time for the birth of our second son, but I’m not quite sure. It’s still a bit hazy. Yes, I was physically there, but I’m not sure if I was there. If you know what I mean.

The first sign that the medication and therapy was working was that I slowly started to worry about day-to-day matters again instead of only feeling existential angst. Instead of worrying about fading away to nothing, I worried about the new baby, moving to a new house, or talking to strangers. At the same time, the dark, existential thoughts receded to the background. They were and are still there, lurking in the dusty corners of my brain, but for the most part, they stay out of sight. I know they are there, but I usually have to do a little digging and searching to find them.

This time around, it’s not thoughts of death. For whatever reason, I just find myself retreating to my bedroom at every opportunity. I curl up on my side and pull my knees to my chest, trying to make myself small. I cuddle with my son’s gray, fuzzy stuffed Flip-a-Zoo dog. My bedroom adjoins the living room, so the kids are usually playing in there while I’m hiding out. The sound of their voices talking, laughing, living floats in through the cracked bedroom door. It feels kind of like falling asleep with the TV on, except I’m not falling asleep, I’m just not completely there. I feel guilty because I should be out there living with them, but I don’t want to get up. The most painful part is that it’s interacting with my kids that I find the most difficult when I’m struggling. For the most part, I can keep up with the dish washing and laundry and fixing meals and getting kids to school and on and on, but talking and playing and doing things that are supposed to be fun? Nope. As you might imagine, the fact that this is my particular hang up only makes things worse.

The fog recedes after a few days. That’s the beauty of having access to treatment to medication to a support system. Without it, an impenetrable, seemingly impervious blanket of darkness would be too much to bear. For many people, it is. For those with means, thankfully it doesn’t always have to be. Even if we think we don’t deserve to be so lucky.