In our last post, we talked about understanding depression through patterns rather than just chemical imbalances. Today, I want to share something more personal: a little of my own experience with depression. Not because my experience is universal, but because understanding how depression feels from the inside – what we call the “lived experience” or phenomenology of depression – can transform how we think about mental health.
My journey with depression didn’t match the stereotypical image of constant sadness. Instead, it manifested as a gradual dimming of vitality – like watching the sun slowly set, but instead of darkness falling, the world just became increasingly flat and gray. The most striking aspect wasn’t emotional pain or sadness, but a shift in how I experienced my own body and being. I felt old, weak, and frail. A persistent low backache and deep fatigue became my constant companions, not just symptoms but fundamental alterations in how I experienced being in my own skin.
What made my experience particularly challenging to identify as depression was how it slowly affected my capacity for joy while leaving other emotions relatively intact. I could still feel satisfaction – a quiet acknowledgment when things went well – but the vibrant, embodied experience of joy became increasingly elusive. It wasn’t that I couldn’t recognize things that should bring joy; they just didn’t reach me the same way anymore. The world’s colors were still there, but they had lost their ability to move me.
Perhaps most disorienting was how this state affected my usual strategies for managing life. The tools and practices I’d relied on for years – the ones I’d taught others to use – gradually lost their effectiveness. It was as if my brain’s predictive systems had shifted, no longer able to generate the positive outcomes these strategies had reliably produced before. When feelings did break through, they were predominantly uncomfortable ones, leading to an unconscious dampening of emotional experience altogether. After all, if feeling meant feeling bad, why feel at all?
The mental slowing was the thing that bothered me the most. I can push through fatigue. I can accept satisfaction instead of joy for a surprisingly long time. But dampen my ability to think, to have the processing speed to hold long-term plans in my mind and execute individual steps as a part of a whole – that almost drove me crazy. It was like being stuck in a perpetual hangover, but without the comfort of knowing it would lift by afternoon. That constant cognitive fog, the way everything required more mental effort than it should, watching a core part of my identity slip away into the fog – it was profoundly unsettling. My thoughts, usually quick and clear, became thick and sticky, and simple tasks required conscious attention that they never had before. This wasn’t just about cognitive function – it was a fundamental shift in how my consciousness processed and engaged with the world.
Understanding depression from this perspective – as a profound alteration in how we experience being alive – might help explain why simple solutions often fall short. It’s not just about “cheering up” or “pushing through.” When your basic experience of reality has shifted, when your brain’s predictive systems are filtering everything through a dirty lens of depletion and meaninglessness, you need approaches that acknowledge and work with this altered state of consciousness.
Later in this series, I’ll share some of the strategies that actually helped – the herbs, practices, and perspectives that gradually helped me rebuild my capacity for embodied joy and vital engagement with life. Some might surprise you, as they surprised me.
Until then, I invite you to consider how this way of understanding depression – as an altered state of consciousness rather than just a collection of symptoms – might change how you think about mental health, whether for yourself or others.
With care,
-Thomas