Ann Yang is the co-founder of Misfit Foods, the company she started in college with her best friend Phil to turn ugly produce into delicious food and fight climate change in the process. She recently decided to leave the company in order to prioritize her mental health. Here, she reflects on depression, class struggle, and the myths of entrepreneurship.

Seven months ago, the stress of being an entrepreneur hit its breaking point and I decided to go to therapy. On a consultation call, a therapist asked me if I had considered whether or not I was depressed. As someone who has built a career and reputation around being unusually charismatic, I had not.

The word “depression” felt heavy and viscous in my mouth. I had misguided stereotypes around what depressed people look like, and I didn’t think I fit very well into them. I really like talking about feelings. I am the unofficial therapist in my social group, the one who can learn the entire life story of the bartender in a few minutes. I felt like if I admitted that I was depressed, my community would think that I wasn’t grateful for all the people and opportunities in my life. I hung up and scheduled another appointment. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I have depression, but I didn’t know that I had depression. The most important part of the previous sentence is that I didn’t know that I had depression. My life as an entrepreneur had not left space for me to think seriously about my mental health. And that’s what I want to talk about, how in the mythology of entrepreneurship—the intoxicating idea that you can build things and start things and be liberated from a “normal” day job—can bring on and normalize feelings of loneliness and stress. I’ve since learned that entrepreneurs are 30 percent more likely than the average person to experience depression, and I get why. Ninety percent of startups fail. Even if you’re successful, you’re spending other peoples’ investment money, you’re responsible for the livelihood and paychecks of your employees, and it’s difficult to not let your own self worth fluctuate with the highs and the lows of the company.

I have never felt more existentially nauseous and more 25 years old in my entire life.

For me, depression was a slow downward slope, punctuated with enough other emotions that I didn’t notice the slide. Last summer, in the sticky heat of August, my co-founder Phil and I decided to stop juice production, our first product line, to focus on products that had a larger impact on people’s diets and the planet. After raising a second round of financing, we moved our company, Misfit Foods, from DC to New York to be geographically closer to our investors and partners. I had just turned 25, and the weird side project that we started in a college apartment was finally taking off.

It was a time of transition, a noticeable inflection point during which I began really grappling with growing up in a low-income household and the contours of being a female founder of color. My parents are Chinese immigrants who grew up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. They came to the United States to go to graduate school and to give me a better future. In a way, their lives as immigrants has been one large and beautiful entrepreneurial project.

Money was always tight, but, at school and with friends, I learned to act as if I it weren’t. When I was a senior in high school, I was awarded the Gates Millennium Scholarship, a program created by Bill and Melinda Gates to send high-potential, low-income kids of color to college. My college counselor was surprised when I told her that I met the income requirement to apply for the scholarship; she had always thought of me as upper-middle class. When the local newspaper interviewed me, I was both honored and ashamed; the article meant being public about my families' financial struggle.