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.

Even outside of depression, I sometimes need video or photographic proof of things to remember that they happened, so this writing is doubling as a time capsule and my own recollections/reflections after everything. I also have borderline aphantasia lol.

When spring came around, things took another nosedive.

Going back to cleanliness, at some point in the spring, a bag of chips spilled on the floor. The crumbs stayed there for basically the entire semester, similar to the rice.

I think I only vacuumed my dorm like twice the entire school year. Same goes with my sheets, which, whenever I think about it, makes me nauseous and makes me want to wash my sheets again. (editing again, still feel nausea/dread)

My lack of cleaning my room affected the choice to invite people over or not too, with the added problem of me not consistently doing laundry, so I was rewearing clothes when I really should have washed them. I felt very self conscious about if I smelled or not (I did), so I just ended up self Isolating further.

As a result, in the spring, I barely saw my friends. Maybe fewer than ten times the entire semester. Maybe even fewer than five.

One of my very good friends had originally been my roommate and had become one of my best friends. He had been in Italy during the first semester, so it made sense that I hadn't seen him much then.

But even after he came back in the spring, I think I maybe only saw him twice.

After two years of living with someone, I only saw him twice in a whole semester. We’ve still been a bit more distant than I’d like as I’m getting my life back together, but I got to hang out with him a couple times this summer, and hopefully will again in a couple weeks!!!

But, that was a huge example of how isolated I'd become.

And I had another rationale for it too, despite how fucked it was.

In my head, I couldn't allow myself to be out in the world until I had caught up.

I treated socialization like a reward because I kept telling myself, "I'm not going to let myself do anything fun because I don't deserve it. I need to sit here and catch up on my homework."

But I couldn't catch up.

So I never got to do anything fun.

I didn't let myself go out with friends. I didn't let myself participate in activities on campus. I just sat in my room.

If I had enough energy, I spent it by going to class.

The main thing I consistently did was go to my on-campus job. I don't remember ever calling out unless I was actually sick. I think my job was the one consistently good thing I had this past year because of my coworker turned friend. I love her so much, and when I got out of inpatient, she and her partner picked me up and took me grocery shopping :]

My shit memory meant that by the time I would have therapy, I’d forget the worst of my experiences and get to an ok point by the time I had therapy again. I remember a couple times I would talk about how I was working towards catching up on work and getting better, but I don’t think I realized how bad things had gotten for me to be actually able to communicate it.

Eventually, even my student teaching started slipping.

Before I got COVID in April, I was going to my teaching fieldwork 4 times a week, with thursday being my day off because I had therapy. It was graded, so I was supposed to be there. I was mostly shadowing, but it was still something I had to do.

I don't even want to look back at the messages I sent to my collaborating teacher during that period because I know they're probably the pathetic pleas of someone who didn't understand what was wrong with them and was desperately apologizing for not putting in the effort they knew they should have been able to put in.

I was a wreck emotionally.

I wasn't a danger to anyone else, but I was clearly not myself.

Even the students could tell something was… off?

And because I didn't know how to fix it, it hurt when I couldn't connect with them the way I wanted to.

In my teaching program, you're taught that you should try to build relationships with your students. You should learn about them and make connections with them.

I would try to act like my normal self by being friendly and trying to connect with people whenever I could—but there was something hollow about it. And my fieldwork in general is one of my biggest regrets to come out of all of this.

I think the worst of it was the last week of April leading into the first week of May.

Going home for my birthday made me realize how bad my environment had become, and I think that was part of my breaking point.

At 5am on May 5th 2026, I went down to the front desk of my dorm apartment and told the security desk worker that I needed to admit myself to a mental hospital.

I could go into my time there later, but I ended up being diagnosed with Depression, and medicated for it, as well as being given paperwork to get a medical exemption to drop 2 of my classes. By the end of my 3 day stay, I was feeling a lot better and was a lot more hopeful.

Eventually I might talk about things I’ve been doing to get my life back, and the insanity of trying to enroll in classes for the fall, but the later has finally been resolved, so I’m taking one class through my home university and another through my local community college because 1. It’s 4x cheaper and 2. The class is full at my home university. The class I am taking at my home university though is only offered there, so.

The story with that is I can't actually do any of my senior year classes until I do my fieldwork requirement that is only offered in the spring, but I don't want to take a semester fully off because then FAFSA will start asking me for my loan money back. The classes I'm taking work for my major though! But taking an extra year is expensive.

Joining fictish has been a part of my recovery, because just over a month ago, I started reading for fun for the first time in literal years. Right before I joined fictish I started feeling like I wanted to write fanfic again, but didn’t have the confidence. Eventually I ended up coming across fictish. This platform, for as short of a time I’ve been on it, has genuinely been helping me connect with my younger self and heal the parts of me I lost.

Depression took away the parts of me that I associated most strongly with who I was: creating, writing, learning, connecting with people, being curious, being passionate about the things I cared about, and my drive to even communicate my interest in these things to others.

What I mean by that last part is basically my infodumping was a lot more muted and there was a lot less detail to it since I didn’t have the energy to explain and I kept forgetting details. Like I genuinely feel like my thinking muscles atrophied. Also because I turned to AI but that’s something I really don’t want to talk about, just know I’m better about it now.

I was so worried that with a new school year coming up, I wouldn’t be able to undo whatever broke in me. I feel a lot better about that now, but there’s still aspects of myself I’m still mourning. I’m getting myself back, but like how losing a limb can affect you, you can still relearn how to do the things that matter to you.

Medication go crazy though, It's definitly working! But also if you are a person who also take hormones (like testosterone) the effectiveness of your meds also depends on if you take your hormones on schedule. That was another major factor that hurt my mental state. Drink water, take your meds, and get good sleep kids!