Because of the pushback against the pervasive myth that depression can’t simply be shut on or off, many of us who fight for mental health awareness tend to downplay the power of environment. We say that depression can come at any time, for any reason, and when we talk about things like external factors or our thought patterns (also external, by the way), we give a voice to those claim things like, “Just think happy thoughts!” or “Push away the sad!”

It’s perhaps good that so many people work to dispel these myths, but doing so eliminates the nuance and reality behind depression.

I am bipolar. For the most part, depressive episodes have tended to take the form of waves, things that would rise in my life and fall. As I grew, evolved, and learned skills for managing the rise and crests of depression and mania, it felt less like a wave and more like a finger bumping on glass, reminding me every now and then that it was there, that I was not immune to this thing that had once put me in a hospital and almost killed me multiple times.

Evolving to this point has in many ways felt like a vindication. I’ve been able to stand on my own two feet, and more and more, I haven’t felt like mental illness is something I have to write about or talk about. I can mention it when I have to, but it no longer feels like a defining trait, like some sort of iron weights attached to my feet, making everything heavier, harder.

Until it does.

In many ways, maintaining an internal and external narrative that I have reached some higher plane of mental health has allowed me to fashion a time in my life where the story has ended. I am no longer suffering, I am no longer in pain. You can depend on me, you can work with me, you can trust me, because I don’t have that baggage anymore. Look at me, I’m normal. I’m okay.

Until I’m not.

And then the narrative hurts. It turns into a painful rebuke.

I started volunteering for a cause I care deeply about. It was taking off, it was doing incredibly, it was changing the world. They asked me to run their social media department.

I tried. I really tried. But I would get up, and I’d look at the computer, and I’d think about talking to people, and I’d… something would turn off. I don’t know how to explain it, perhaps because it is still there. Perhaps because I’m still afraid to talk about it, even though the few people I’ve mentioned it to have been understanding, have been loving and caring. But in my mind, I have let them down, and some part of me is convinced they are thinking, “We should never have depended on him.”

I know that I have no idea of knowing what they’re thinking without asking them. But when you’re going through this level of deep depression, the years of therapy that have taught you such lessons are harder to bring to the fore. And try as you might your old patterns have a way of rising, rising, part of that larger wave.

And if I don’t tell people, it makes it worse. I know that this is a painful reality for most people suffering from mental illness. How many people are truly open about it, even if they haven’t created some fairy tale narrative that ended with their happy stability?

So then some of the people will say the very things that we tell ourselves. They’ll call us lazy, or undependable, or unreliable. They don’t know what we’re holding onto, they can’t understand it, unless perhaps they themselves talk to themselves that way because of their own struggles.

Little do they know they become unwitting partners with the depression of others. Because depression is, in many ways, a disease affected by our thoughts. That’s the idea behind cognitive behavioral therapy: we treat our mental illnesses through our thoughts and behavior. Even medication is meant to be a tool to give us a leg up to get to the place where we can use those skills.

The point is that thoughts are powerful, be they our own or others’. When you can hardly bring yourself to leave the house (I now tend to go at least 5 days of the week without leaving my home), the thought that you’re unreliable, bad, lazy, failing others, hurting others, etc is enough to make you want to buy new locks and put them on the outside to make sure you never leave at all. Which makes the depression worse. Which makes the thoughts worse. Which makes the depression worse. Which makes the thoughts worse. Which…