Getting my life back after a depressive episode has not been easy.

It started around June 2025. I started becoming a lot more forgetful and a lot less motivated than I normally was. At the time, I didn't really understand what was happening. Looking back, though, it was clearly the beginning of genuinely the worst depressive episode of my life, closely followed by the one I had when I was 10.

My entire junior year of college has basically been screwed up by this, and I've made peace with that. But now that I'm on the other side of it, I feel like I'm having to rebuild myself from square zero.

Depression robbed me of my ability to create. It robbed me of my ability to write the stories I used to be able to write. It robbed me of the creativity I had when I was seventeen, or even just the year before all of this happened. It robbed me of joy. It robbed me of companionship.

But I've made peace with it.

Part of the process of getting back to myself has been organizing my room. Ever since I got back from school, I've been going through old things, and that has meant looking at old writings of mine, old notebooks, sheets of notes, and all the random ideas I used to write down.

If I open almost any old notebook of mine, I know there's probably going to be some half-written story full of ideas and life and passion. It reminds me of the kind of person I used to be, who was someone constantly overflowing with dozens of ideas.

And I don't want to romanticize who I was back then, because I wasn't some perfect creative person. I struggled with motivation even then because I have ADHD. But depression compounded everything and made it so much worse.

Looking at those old writings makes me realize how much I feel like I've lost. I'll look at an old fic I wrote in, God, probably 2020 or 2021, and there will be descriptors, little plot points, and tiny details that I feel like I would never think to add nowadays. They're genuinely interesting and engaging, and I look at them and think that I couldn’t come up with ideas like that anymore

And that's something I mourn.

But I'm trying to get it all back.

One example is my story Sparks Will Fly, which used to be called Eurus: Owl of the Storm, and wayy earlier was called Spark of Mortis. I used to take a notebook and write out basically a stream of consciousness of every idea I had for it. You could literally see me working through the story in real time.

I have so many random post-it notes from when I was younger, with little ideas or story blurbs for anything and everything. I have half-written chapters and fics in so many notebooks. Even freshman year of college, I remember sitting in my English class when I was bored and writing scenes for Sparks Will Fly.

I miss that kind of creativity. It used to come naturally to me.

And it wasn't just writing. Academically, I used to be someone who was constantly engaged with what I was learning. I was the person who always raised their hand in class to answer questions. I was invested in the reading. Even when I was gaming the system (which I absolutely did sometimes) I still knew a lot about the subjects I was learning about.

If I wasn't interested in something, I might do the bare minimum to get a good grade. If I had a reading assigned, I might skip straight to the questions, grab keywords, use stuff like Ctrl+F to find what I needed, and get an A anyway.

But when I was genuinely interested, I could become completely absorbed in something.

I used to write extremely passionate papers. I had a writing style and I would make my opinions on things clear in whatever I was writing about. For a while, I couldn't write a paper shorter than three pages. My favorite assignments were often research projects because they gave me an excuse to go learn a bunch of completely random things and fall down rabbit holes.

When I was really into Star Wars, for example, I would go down research rabbit holes just to find some obscure detail that I could use to fuel a single scene.

And that person is still in me somewhere!

I've been starting to feel glimpses of them again.

And before I really get into this, I want to address the common arguments about why depressed people can’t just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and discipline themselves through it.

The best metaphor I can come up with is that depression was like someone sawing off both my arms and legs, scattering all my belongings all over the room, throwing me onto my bed, and then telling me I had to work anyway.

I'd ask, "Can I have my arms and legs back?"

And they'd say, "No. They're hidden somewhere in this room. You have to figure out how to put them back on yourself."

Sometimes I somehow managed to get an arm or a leg back. I'd manage to do some work.

Then the limb stealer would come back into the room and take them away again.

And I'd be left thinking, "What am I supposed to do? I don't have any arms or legs. I can't do the work."

The limb stealer's name is depression. OoooOoo

And if you ask me what I was doing during all those periods when I wasn't doing anything, I genuinely don't know.

There are literal gaps in my memory that I cannot access or find.

I assume some of it was doomscrolling, but I don't even think that's all of it. I'm sure there were periods where I was supposed to be doing homework and was genuinely trying to do it, but it just didn't happen.

And now I don't remember what happened instead.

There are also some aspects of this period of time I won’t talk about here because even compared to the content I will be talking about, I still feel nauseous thinking about it, and haven’t fully processed yet.