What was I like before I got depression treatment? It’s one of those things I don’t like to talk about. Before I got depression treatment, I was lost, more than anything else. Lost to myself, lost to the world: estranged from anything and anyone I’d ever cared about. I was a shell, was what I was. A husk. A ghost. A miserable facsimile of anything that might ever be called a human being.

If you’ve ever experienced depression yourself, you know how it goes. The weight. The darkness. The feeling like nothing you could ever do or say or think will fix what’s ailing you; the sense that hopelessness is less a state of mind that some kind of existential truth. Depression treatment, when you’re depressed, seems like a fool’s dream, the sort of thing that isn’t and couldn’t ever be anything more than a waste of time, given how you’re so buried that you don’t even know up from down.

Like I said, I don’t much like to talk about how I was before I got depression treatment. Some walks down memory lane, after all, are best left untaken.