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.

I know the first semester was particularly bad when it came to motivation and being able to stay focused on a task. At some point, I felt something break in me.

I've always had ADHD and struggled with executive dysfunction, but there was something different about this.

Before this year, I had never really been someone who simply didn't turn in an assignment. Even if I was working right up against the deadline, I would get it done. If I knew I was going to be late, I would ask for an extra day. It didn't happen often, but it was something I was used to managing.

Then I found myself genuinely unable to finish assignments even when I knew exactly when they were due.

I could feel myself screaming at myself, "This is important. You need to turn this in. You need to finish the work."

And I just didn't.

It was like deadlines stopped having any meaning to me. They stopped having consequences in my brain.

That terrified me.

By the end of that first semester, I knew something was seriously wrong.

I had become much more forgetful. I was more isolated. I was even becoming a worse boyfriend because I was forgetting things my partner had told me.

For years, my partner and I had said goodnight to each other every night. We'd been doing that since I was sixteen. If I forgot, I would usually realize it the next morning and make sure to respond.

I would tell him about what was going on in my life. I'd tell him about random things I was doing, creative projects I was working on, places I was going, whatever.

And then, at some point, I just stopped.

I could go a week without really talking to him about anything substantial. It could take me a day or two to answer his texts.

At the time, I didn't understand that this was depression taking hold of me.

I just knew that something was wrong.

And one of the clearest signs of how badly I was doing was my attendance.

Really for the first time in my life, I had started skipping classes.

Before this, I might have skipped a class three times in an entire semester. But now my attendance record became terrible. I think one of my classes was somewhere in the high sixties by the end of the semester.

And that really hurts to think about, because I know myself.

The healthy version of me would have loved to go to those classes. I would have wanted to sit there and absorb the information and actually learn something.

I'm someone who thrives on information. I thrive on learning. I love having access to information and being able to engage with it academically.

But in that state, I couldn't.

I just started turning into a pile of mush.

And when I say that I don't remember much of this period, I genuinely mean it. I already have a terrible memory, but there are huge stretches of this year that are just blank spaces to me.

I was taking international politics, Native American history, ASL, geography statistics, and has taken a basic history class over the summer.

I know I barely passed geography statistics, even though at the beginning of the semester I had been really invested in the research project. By the end, I was just dragging myself through it.

It was also the first semester I ever pulled an all-nighter.

Then I started pulling them chronically, which was genuinely terrible.

And I think it's important to talk about that side of depression, because when people talk about depression, they don't always talk about how messy it can get when suicidal intention isn't part of it.

Surprisingly enough, I wasn't suicidal at all during this period.

When you're someone who defines yourself through your academic abilities, your ability to create, and your ability to learn, having all of those things ripped away from you is devastating.

It's not that you literally have no value without those things. It's that, when depression takes away the things that make you feel most like yourself, you can end up feeling like there's nothing left.

I would have loved to give more effort to all of my classes because they were classes I was genuinely interested in.

The international politics class wasn't even one I'd originally intended to take. My original class got cancelled, so I had to quickly find something else.

And I actually found the material interesting.

But I don't think I read more than a couple of chapters of the textbook.

Whenever I was able to read it, I enjoyed it. I just never had the energy.

I knew there was a certain amount of reading I was supposed to do every night, but it kept compounding. Eventually, I would have needed to read two hundred pages in a single night just to catch up.

So I didn't.

I didn't catch up.

And it wasn't even quite the same as ordinary executive dysfunction, where you know you need to do something but can't make yourself start.

Somehow I still managed to scrape together enough energy for the quizzes, midterm, and final that I ended up getting a B in the class.

My Native American History class hurts even more to think about.

The professor is such an interesting person, and I genuinely love listening to him speak. I'd had him before, and I'd been looking forward to taking this class for about a year.

There were so many interesting readings. There were so many assignments I wish I could have put more energy and passion into.

But I couldn't.

My final project actually turned out pretty good, but I did it in essentially a single night.

If I'd been able to give it the time and energy I wanted to give it, I think it could have been something I'd be much more proud of.

The depression also affected my ability to take care of myself and my living space.

This was the first semester where I had to cook for myself all the time and had my own kitchen instead of having a meal plan.

At one point, I was extremely depressed and decided I was going to make myself a meal. I put rice in the rice cooker and cooked some General Tso's chicken from one of those boxes.

By then, most of my dishes were dirty and stacked up in my room. I had stopped even bringing them back to the sink.

I had run out of space on my desk because there were so many dishes, so I used an ottoman to eat off of. I didn't even plate the food properly. I just put everything into the inner bowl of the rice cooker and ate out of that.

At some point, because the ottoman was unstable, the rice tipped over and spilled all over the carpet.

And I just scooped as much of it back into the bowl as I could and finished eating.

The rice that didn't get cleaned up stayed there until I moved out in May.

I barely passed my classes that semester. After I got home in December, I went to a crisis center. That's when I started therapy and was given enough resources to start looking for a therapist.