I only realized I had a problem when the problem had become inevitable.

The plan had been solidifying in my head for the past year or two: I would persist, at least for a while. And then, at some point in the future, things would fester further, and I would hit the natural endpoint and conclude my life in the most efficient, painless way available.

I was unwell. You can probably figure that out on your own. The thing about depression—an unwellness that doesn’t appear with a bang but just seeps and trickles into you—is that it can lose its power to disturb you, morphing into something like a pet.

A strange pet, and never your favourite. It becomes a sleek black dog that’s been slinking around the corners of your room long enough that you feel confident about petting it. The clack of its claws on the hardwood becomes background noise. At a certain point, the way it flashes its teeth means nothing anymore.

But it’s a demanding animal. It sleeps in the middle of your bed.

This dog showed up whenever it was convenient. I was talking to a friend’s parent around the time that I realized my situation was actually very bad. 

We were taking turns moaning about the future, trying to be lighthearted but both maybe a little disturbed about it, when they said something to the effect of: “… And I don’t know how anyone in your generation is ever going to own a house. Let alone retire.”

Then the dog sat up on its haunches and said to me: HEY, NO WORRIES, MAN—YOU WON’T MAKE IT THAT FAR!

And in a way, that was comforting. The logic was at least pretty sound. At the time, I thought maybe the dog was onto something.

This was all happening as I pushed into my late teens, and at some point I set myself a deadline: if things hadn’t fixed themselves by age 18, I would do it. 

This became rattling as 18 crept closer, so I adjusted the deadline to 20. 

And so, in my mind, my existence was very simple. These conscious teenage years were just the interstitial spark between childhood and oblivion. Maybe I’d never have to pay taxes.

No matter how much it reduced my stress about grades and careers, it wasn’t in my best interests to be walking around with a self-imposed suicide contract hanging over my head.

The black dog offered convenient laziness—it excused me from any obligation to strive, to change anything, to make much of an effort to crawl out of the dim cellar my mind had locked itself in. It handed me a license to give up.

But I was not the only person I gave up on, and the psychological pain spread out like an oil spill. 

My misery made me cold, my acceptance of it made me unpleasant. I became a worse person to be near: fragile, incurious, self-centred, and prone to be wounded and irritated by the slightest inconvenience. 

The black dog reigned.

Close people in my life endured it. I alternately clung to them and pushed them away, forcing them to bounce along on the seesaw of my melodrama. I resented it when they tried to ignore my obvious problems, and I resented it even more when they tried to talk to me about them.

I was resolutely downbeat in the hope that someone would ask about it. I contributed to my friends’ conversations with only snark and sarcasm. Then, when they asked me what was wrong, I said it wasn’t their business, or I didn’t want to talk about it, or they wouldn’t get it anyway. 

And afterwards, I went right back into the black dog’s embrace.

I took a long moonlit walk the night before one Christmas Eve. I stared into the brightly lit living rooms along the street and felt pangs of nauseous resentment I couldn’t place. 

I could have been with my own family in my own living room right then—but somehow I preferred going out alone and then hating my own aloneness.

In David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Depressed Person,” an unnamed protagonist wrestles with the titular disorder. A component of this character’s pain is that they cannot actually describe that pain. This failure to communicate their psychological state leads to a feedback loop where their psychological state worsens and worsens.

And like that character, I can’t really describe what it felt like day to day.

Because this is one of the most brutal parts of being unwell in the way that I was: it’s boring.  

Life becomes a slog to be endured, and there is nothing to look forward to in the end. Whole days feel like watching paint dry. You feed the black dog day by day, and its empty food cans pile up until they stink.

I felt as if I was buried under snow. Everything became colder, quieter. It often made me sleepier, too.

I can’t tell you exactly when I realized that all this was completely abnormal. I’d grown up knowing that some teenage turmoil is common, maybe even an essential character-building exercise, and so I wondered if everyone else secretly wanted to end things. Maybe not as firmly as me, but at least sometimes, right?

My first reaction to figuring out I was unwell induces fits of cringing when I remember it now: What if I wasn’t unwell, but brilliant? What if I thought about dying all the time because I was smart enough to observe, unlike everybody else, that life’s drab brutalities were not worth pushing through forever?

Maybe I was just weighing the facts of existence wisely enough to see the virtue of surrendering. I thought of long lists of dead geniuses who had chosen to end their existence. 

I wonder if I would have made it through those years if nobody stepped in. It’s hard to say. 

Whatever might’ve happened, my time for isolation ran out: I hadn’t told my parents any of the details, but they must have noticed enough. They didn’t need to see the full dire picture to declare that I seemed off, or anxious, or something like that.

They offered to get me an appointment to talk to somebody. Maybe still wrapped up in the who-really-cares mentality that my deadline afforded me, I accepted.

“I should mention,” the therapist said within our first five minutes together, crossing her legs in her chair, “that I don’t officially diagnose. I think it’s unproductive.”

This was a real blow to the dramatist in me. Why was I even there if not to receive a handy label to slap onto my psychological problems?

Therapy was short and awkward. We did not get far because I mostly didn’t feel like talking. The woman in the chair across the room was an utter stranger, and I mumbled abstractions and clichés until the allotted hour had trickled away.

She did tell me, though, to talk to a doctor.

The doctor I visited was a brusque man whose bald bronze head gleamed under the lights in his office. When he sat across from me, he never relaxed in his chair, staying poised and tapping his fingers. Reading a list of questions from his computer, he rarely glanced at me.

I hauled out the same wooden sentences I’d given the therapist, except he was more easily convinced and wrote me a prescription for Fluoxetine. The shockingly childlike scrawl of his signature was my ticket out of hell.

And so I took a daily pill. I have taken it ever since.

The early ones I picked up from the pharmacy—the smaller introductory dose—were a dull uniform green. They left a plastic aftertaste when dry swallowed, but they afforded me my first glimpse of relief. Not bliss, but a brief lessening of the burden.

The pills persuaded the black dog to loosen its bite for a few moments, and sometimes it let go of me for a day or two at a time, leaving my life ordinary. But it would always bite again, sooner or later.

So a few weeks after that, at a friend’s suggestion, I called the doctor late in the afternoon and asked him to ramp up my dosage.

In all honesty, I exaggerated the ineffectiveness of the first doses. He relented; the call was quick, and I felt he was mainly focused on moving onto the next patient.

He altered my prescription with an air of why the hell not?

I felt strikingly good when I put the phone down. There—I had finally done something. Somehow I had improved my mental state then and there without even taking one of the stronger pills I would soon have.

The new pills were green and white, and a little larger. They came in orange bottles.

I wish I could tell you I fought my way out. It would feel good to say I had pressed myself onward with total fortitude, that I marched ahead through sheer force of will until the pills did their work and life settled into normalcy.

But for the most part, I crawled out. I came out of my darkness bleary-eyed and helpless.

There were moments of resolve, and episodes of optimism, and nights when I lay awake wondering what could be done. But often I waited for the unseen pharmacologists to prop me up. I accepted things as they came.

Antidepressants are not an immediate path to happiness. Instead, they are meant to restore the brain to its basic functional level. They numb the wounds and nothing more. Life did not become bright and sunny; it just became life. 

I think I’m still a pessimist. But life, even flat and dull ordinary life, is better than the feeling of the dog sinking its teeth in.

The fact that the world’s most convenient solution worked for me was a stroke of luck—luck that the medication had its proper impact, luck that its infamous side effects have been tame, luck that I was able to get it so easily, and luck that I made it far enough to take the first pill at all. Sometimes I wonder if the medication only works because I believe that it works.

I write this from a position of utter privilege. I had the blind luck to be born in adequate circumstances to make it this far. 

To live in a place where help was available, to exist in conditions where I wasn’t obligated to have many external fears or hurdles facing me in teenagehood, to have people who did their best to haul me out of that dark little cellar—all this is pure circumstance. 

The dog that followed me could be coaxed into a cage.

Many others do not get support, and many others do not make it through. They wade through it forever, or else surrender the same way I planned to. Their black dogs are ravenous.

The National Institute of Mental Health lists “genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors” as sources of depression while citing “a mix of genetics, brain chemistry, biology, and environment” for anxiety (the doctor and therapist repeatedly mentioned both). Those are enormous umbrellas. Certain aspects are impossible to guard against.

My own illness was just that: an illness, a chemical imbalance, localized in myself. 

There are others who have mental illness forced on them by social, economic, medical pressures—by things from outside themselves or things they cannot control.

I think my crisis had internal origins. Meanwhile, the threat of an outer origin looms over countless populations. Living on a bloodied and burning planet is more than enough to plunge someone into far deeper recesses than I ever saw. Each bit of uncertainty is a possible pressure point.

And uncertainty comes with change. Right now, the seasons are shifting. The nights are colder now, and people are back in classrooms and lecture halls. Even in the stablest places, this is another weight on the pile. With each change in circumstance, there is a flash of risk. Black dogs are afoot somewhere in the distance, waiting on the hilltops.

Mine does not live in my room anymore. These days I don’t wake up to find it crouching on my chest. 

Already taking one prescription, it’s now easier to turn other scraps of my life into more prescriptions.

I prescribe myself a certain amount of outdoor time, of socialization, of work dedicated to something I care about, even when these prescriptions are unpleasant pills that just need to be choked down. I dare myself to scrape something interesting from life’s duller places.

The deadline is gone. When I imagine my own death, it is decades away. 

My 20th birthday came and went more than a year ago, and only recently did I realize I haven’t thought about that deadline in months.

I cannot give you a firm solution. It’s difficult to even tell you the proper way to crawl your way out—because, compared to many others, I had an easy go of things. There isn’t even a unique or groundbreaking thought to leave you with, although certain platitudes are true: it does not have to be like this forever, and you do not have to be alone.

All I can tell you to do is what I wish I’d begun to do sooner: to push forward, in whatever way you can. I stumbled and staggered out of this. I staggered my way right into survival.

I wish I had tried earlier to scrape and scratch towards every flicker of light—to crawl into tomorrow, and then keep crawling, one tomorrow after another. Even if the fight was long and gruelling and barely seemed to move. Even if I had to reach right into the dog’s jaws before escaping.