Depression Looked Like Productivity in My Case

I want to tell this story because the version of depression most people recognise - the inability to get out of bed, the withdrawal from everything, the unmistakable flatness that announces itself clearly - was not how it arrived for me. My depression wore much better camouflage.

I was, during the worst of it, extraordinarily productive. I was 26, working as a product lead at a company in Toronto, and I was producing output at a rate that my colleagues found impressive and that I maintained by simply never stopping. I worked before anyone else arrived. I worked after everyone left.

I filled every gap in the day with tasks because the gaps, when empty, contained something I could not name and did not want to. I did not connect any of this to my mental health because I had a specific idea of what poor mental health looked like and I did not look like it.

I was achieving. I was functional. I was, as far as anyone could observe, doing very well. What was happening underneath the productivity was a complete absence of genuine feeling in either direction. I was not sad in the way of crying or overt distress.

I was absent - running on something that looked like motivation but had none of its texture, doing things that had previously given me pleasure with an efficiency that produced no pleasure at all.

I had stopped being interested in things I had previously been interested in but I had replaced the interest so quickly with more work that the gap had never been obvious to me or anyone else.

I had also developed a very sophisticated internal explanation for everything: the tiredness was the workload, the flatness was maturity, the absence of enjoyment was temporary and would return when things slowed down. Things never slowed down because I was the one keeping them fast.

My GP identified what was happening during an appointment I had booked for something entirely unrelated. She asked me a series of questions and I answered honestly for the first time because I had no idea where the conversation was going.

The diagnosis was a relief and also an enormous shock - not because I did not believe it but because I had been so completely persuaded by my own productivity that I had missed something happening in a very different layer. Treatment was medication and therapy together.

The most important thing the therapy gave me was the understanding that busyness and health are not the same thing, and that a life organised around avoiding feeling is not a life being lived.