I had major depressive disorder two times during my life, during my sophomore year and towards my gap year the year after that (and possibly an undiagnosed time in high school). I haven’t died (yet), and I’d like to think that after my year-long recovery in 2013, that my life got back on a reasonably happy and fruitful path. I graduated undergrad (despite taking an extra quarter), finished a MS degree, and after a bit of trial and error, found a job that I’m currently very happy with. Depression is mostly behind me, though sometimes I still get my fair share of spiraling negative thoughts, which I deal with by dancing, playing DoTA, or talking them through with a friend.

I just wanted to put that out there because I spent a lot of my worst days Googling my university + depression / undergrads + depression, and nothing on the internet I ever read about depression (at least during that time) gave any shred of evidence that someone had gone through it and had gotten better. That was very devastating to me at the time, so I hope this will at least provide some kind of counter example to whoever that is currently in a similar situation.

Spring, 2011

Probably depression round 1 at its worst. I could not fall asleep at night, and could not keep awake during any class at all during the day. Studying made my eyes glaze over, and I could not comprehend the textbook for ECON 1B. A friend of mine took me running in the mornings several times a week, but even when I knew he was knocking on the door, it was incredibly hard to get myself out of bed. I think that might have been the quarter that I failed POLISCI 1. Couldn’t stay still. Couldn’t deal with free time. All free time spiraled into a session of pessimistic negative thinking that always drifted towards hopelessness, death, and suicide. Randomly cried a lot. Obsessively found myself things to do at night because I couldn’t sleep, but procrastinated on everything that had a deadline. Tried to find a different friend group because I had alienated a lot of common friends due to an unfriendly breakup.

Summer, 2011

I dealt with my depressive thoughts by keeping myself too busy to have time with them. I was helping to organize a conference for a student group at at a local university in Beijing while doing an internship at the same time. It was good because it kept me busy and focused on things other than my ex and negative thoughts, and ensured that I still had contact with other people. The downside was that it ate into sleep a lot. I voluntarily “worked” maybe 18 hours a day, and didn’t really sleep, eat, or exercise.

Fall, 2011

I insisted that I was fine, but my parents insisted that I take the year off and go meet with a psychiatrist in Beijing. The psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar disorder (later overturned by a different doctor in the states), which scared the * out of my parents. I read Kay Redfield Jamison’s Unquiet Mind. To me, that diagnosis was devastating. I thought I had finally climbed out of my depression. Summer 2011 in my own opinion was so much better and more productive than Spring 2011. I thought I was on the road to recovery, but the “diagnosis” was that everything I thought of as “recovery” was just a symptom of “insanity”. I fought that diagnosis hard, but it was a very strange and draining argument to have with your parents as a 19-year-old over whether or not you were manic. In situations like this, I strongly recommend having a second or third doctor’s opinion, and preferably one from a doctor that isn’t from China (China’s stigma regarding mental health and quality of mental health institutions is also a full story in and of itself). It was also a terrifying experience to have the doctor take you through the locked up psychiatry ward for lifelong committed patients. It was like an extremely grim foreshadowing of the rest of my life. Anyway, I slowly lost that fight over the winter and spring of 2012 and sank into a much worse case of depression than ever before.

Summer, 2012

(Otherwise known as taking the entire summer to scrape a C in CS 107.)

I had previously had a lot of confusions about what to do with life and what to major in. In the summer of 2012, that decision boiled down to what major would most likely allow me to pay my parents back for tuition in the shortest amount of time and whose graduation requirements involved as little essay-writing and people interaction as possible.

There were the normal depression challenges. Like, it was really hard to get out of bed in the morning, I spent 30 minutes per shoe tying my shoelaces. Everything seemed hopeless and pointless, and I was absolutely terrified of human interaction so I didn’t go to office hours. I couldn’t stay awake in class. I tried strange things to stay awake in class like stabbing my hand/arm/thigh with a pen. I tried less conspicuous ways to stay awake in class like playing an online game of Pokemon and then of course I spent the entire class playing Pokemon which was not better for my comprehension of class material than falling asleep. These things are funny in retrospect, but caused me a lot of terror and mortification at the time.

But anyway, one thing that was incredibly helpful to me about CS 107 was the idea of “decomposition”. If a task was too difficult, you broke it down into smaller, manageable pieces. If assignment 6 was too hard, you broke it down into parts. If part 1 was too hard, you broke it down into steps like reading the assignment handout, writing down what you didn’t understand about it. For me, reading the assignment handout was usually an insurmountable task. So I broke it down into sticky notes checklists:

• Read paragraph 1.
• Read paragraph 2.
• etc.

It was a very good feeling to cross out something on the checklist, because at the end of the day when I went to bed, I could think about the things I crossed out on my checklist (however trivial) and convince myself that it wasn’t a wasted day.

Fall, 2012

I decided to do only two things that fall. 1) get a job, 2) pass all my classes. I think I took CS 103, CS 110, and CS 144, and of course I did not pass CS 144, which had CS 110 as a prerequisite. I got a job at the university library as a tech desk consultant. It was great because one of my lines of reasoning justifying suicide was:

I’m so useless that I will never find a job and I will be homeless and starve and be a burden on other people therefore should die.

A lot of cognitive behavioral therapy is about using logic to counter your spiraling negative thoughts because they’re just thoughts, they’re not true. Well, sometimes hard evidence is more convincing than good logical reasoning. Another reason was that it forced human interaction in a relatively simple way. People asked you to do relatively easy tasks like check in / out a piece of equipment and you did that. I wanted a way to convince myself that interacting with other human beings would not cause them to eat me alive, or rather, to point and laugh at / judge me for the worthless and useless creature that I was.

The job was still terrifying though. Writing the resume was hard, showing up for the interview was hard, being terrified (albeit for very little reason) throughout the entire interview was hard. The first day of work was hard. I think my voice was shaking the first few times I talked to people. I think I spent way too much time trying to find a video camera and gave people mac chargers for windows laptops or something. But nobody was sentencing me to death for making those mistakes. And after maybe two quarters of convincing, I came to see that for myself.

Reflections and Takeaways

I wish that my younger self knew how to forgive herself for things that don’t actually matter. I wish my younger self made eating, sleeping, and exercising a higher priority. I wish my younger self wasn’t so terrified by other people, but that’s a different story.

• I think there’s a spectrum for depression and mental health, and it’s a good thing to prioritize keeping yourself mentally healthy, just like being physically healthy. It’s easy for anybody to think about things negatively or pessimistically, or to procrastinate and find tasks / projects insurmountable. Depression is just what happens when these things reaches a certain point (possibly combined with other triggering incidents and situations).
• It helps to break things down into bite-sized things that are easily doable. I do that with household chores, which unfortunately I have still not learned to like.
• It helps to have a counter that goes up. A checklist to cross, a number of push ups / pull ups that you can do, anything that goes up over the course of a day, or anything that trends upwards showing progress over time. Learn to forgive yourself when it stays flat or goes down, and make it easy to keep trying.
• It helps to think in shorter periods of time. When I was 17, I used to try to plan out my entire life; I mostly plan in chunks of 2 years now, with more detail for the upcoming three months. Sometimes, it helps to just think of enjoyably spending the next 5 minutes.

Speaking of which, I’m really hungry. I think I will go find food.