Letter About Depression

Dear Me,

I’m writing this down because otherwise, I won’t say it. Not in words. Not out loud. Not even under my breath in the safety of an empty room. And I’ve learned—pain withheld curdles. It doesn’t dissolve, it ferments. That’s the thing about bottling up emotions: eventually, they don’t stay bottled. They explode, or worse, they erode.

Let me say what I don’t say in texts and don’t post in photos: I am tired. And I don’t mean the pleasant fatigue after something worthwhile. I mean the kind of tired that settles in your marrow. The kind of tired where I would rather be sleeping even after ten hours under a weighted blanket. Sleep doesn’t reset me—it delays the moment I have to pretend again.

There’s this dangerous cultural preference for the breakdown. The crash. The spectacle. It’s cinematic. An emotional breakdown letter would get more likes, more concern, more intervention. But what I live with isn’t dramatic. It’s sustained. A slow corrosion. Less “trainwreck,” more “invisible leak in the hull.”

That’s why I’m writing this—not because something urgent has happened, but because nothing ever really changes. I still fake smiles at the coffee counter. I still answer, “Good, and you?” when I’m not. I still show up to work, though most mornings I’m gripped by anxiety about going to work everyday, as though the office itself is a stage and I’ve forgotten all my lines.

You see, the truth is, I often function. That’s the trap—the myth that depression only counts if you're crumbling. I am not collapsed; I am suspended, held in place by routines I don’t believe in and responsibilities I no longer feel tethered to.

Here’s one for the algorithms, the clipboards, the depression paragraph copy and paste crowds who need to quantify suffering:

“Today I showered and ate and answered emails. I also thought about dying in traffic, in passing, like one thinks about what to eat for lunch. I laughed at a meme. I held my breath on the subway. I considered calling someone and didn’t. I bought oat milk. I stared at the ceiling for twenty-six minutes. I did not cry. I am not okay.”

This is what a day looks like when you’re not “bad enough” to be in crisis but far from well. And if that sounds familiar to anyone reading, then welcome. You’re not alone. You’re just quiet about it, like me.

Writing this, oddly, is one of the few things that makes me feel like I still exist. There’s something almost alchemical about it. Emotional alchemy, I guess. The way ink and thought create coherence, if not peace. It doesn’t fix anything. But it filters. That’s enough.

I started writing letters to myself when I realized no one else could decode what was happening inside me—not really. Not in the way that mattered. So I took up the pen, not as a writer, but as a witness. That’s what this is: a record of observation. Of symptoms. Of metaphors. Of attempts.

No bruises. No blood. No cast. Just absence. Absence of joy. Absence of interest. Absence of future. But the wound is real. And it bleeds invisibly.

I once read someone ask, "What does an emotional wound look like?" I think it looks like staying up until 3 a.m. because silence feels like drowning. It looks like turning off your phone, because every message feels like a test. It looks like working overtime because the alternative is confronting the hollow.

It looks like me. Right now. Writing this.

A foghorn in a vacuum, a map with all the cities blacked out, a candle stub in a rainstorm—these are my metaphors for depression. They shift daily. Some mornings, depression is a thick coat in summer heat. Other days, it’s a cold draft through a closed window. It is always present, never explainable, and always doubtful.

I remember trying to explain this to someone once and watching them blink, slow and concerned, like I’d grown another face. I haven’t tried since.

I haven’t told you how often I think that. Even now, as I write this. I would rather be sleeping than maintaining the illusion of function. But I write because silence is worse. I write because otherwise, the thoughts multiply. Fragment. Split. And then I forget which version of me is the real one: the one who smiles in public or the one who writes these paragraphs?

I don't know. But I’m betting on the one writing.

There’s a moment when the alarm goes off and your first instinct is terror. Not the dramatic kind. Just a quiet, seeping dread. Anxiety about going to work every day isn’t just about the job. It’s about the performance. The maintenance. The charade. The fear that if you slip even once—if you stammer, if you yawn too deeply, if you forget to ask “how was your weekend?”—someone will notice.

And then what? What happens if they notice? Will they ask? Will they help? Or will they withdraw, politely, the way people retreat from illness they can't sanitize?

If this is a sad letter , let it be an honest one. One without false crescendos or inspirational reversals. I don’t have a ribbon to tie around this. I don’t have an arc. I only have the page.

But here’s the thing: even this page means something. Because I’m here. Still. Writing. That’s not nothing. It might even be a form of resistance, however quiet.

I’ve read depression letters that make you cry. This isn’t meant to be one of those. It’s meant to be a depression letter to myself, from the part of me that still believes in the act of documenting. In bearing witness to my own condition without shame.

I guess that’s what this is now—a kind of template. A sample letter for depression and anxiety, though I detest the phrase. Too sterile. Too academic. But maybe someone else is searching for that phrase right now, trying to find language for the thing inside them that doesn’t want to be named.

Here’s your sample:

You’re not broken. You’re breathing. You’re existing. And in this moment, that is enough.

Print that. Tape it to a mirror. It might help. It might not. But it’s true.

Because sometimes I reread old letters and remember I’ve felt this before—and survived it. Because writing is the one place I don’t have to perform, correct, retract. Because I believe, somewhere deep beneath the apathy, that expression is the opposite of erasure.

Also, I am afraid of silence. When no one speaks the truth, it calcifies. Shame thrives on silence.

And because writing is a strange kind of prayer, even when I’m not sure who, if anyone, is listening.