My brain broke again and I’m sad all the time. Depression and anxiety aren’t foreign concepts to me; before I ever identified them using those words, the feelings have burst over me ever since I was in Elementary school. With no discernable origin¹, feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness accost my brain and leave it in some mental ditch. I can’t do much of anything without finding some sort of flaw in my actions, methodology, motivations, and execution. Anything I do or produce is bad and I should feel bad about it. This of course spirals to making me feel bad that I’m beating myself up this way, and gives me zero leeway to feel pride or accomplishment in anything I do².

How you get there and what it looks like is different for everyone, but the basic chemical feedback loop of hopelessness and worthlessness and not bothering trying things or enjoying things because what’s the point anyway, tends to be the same. This is of course infuriating because actively doing and enjoying things is pretty much the only way to work your way out of a depressive episode. It’s easy to feel hopeless and worthless when all you do is lay in bed all day doing nothing, so you just reinforce your cognitive distortions and end up transforming them from distortions into realities.

Working past depression is hard, monotonous work. Convincing myself that I’m worthy of treatment in the first place is tricky³. Therapy, medication, exercise, and celebrating my accomplishments all mean taking some amount of initiative to schedule an appointment, or drive to a gym, or do something in the first place, which to a person who views getting out from under the covers as an insurmountable challenge, these all are ludicrously difficult, not to mention what would be the point anyway? I can’t willpower depression away the same way I can’t just sheer effort myself better from the flu. But I can willpower myself towards the things that can help me.

This is where the title’s double-meaning kicks in: I still gotta work. Beating myself up while laying still in bed isn’t an option, I have to take the show on the road. Both to try and fix the issue, and to avoid even more issues. I’ve succumbed to the temptation to just bury my head in a pillow and eschew all responsibilities before, and the consequences can be immense. I nearly failed a couple classes in high school, which at the time felt like the end of the world⁴, but now I’m an honest-to-goodness adult, I have so many more opportunities to fuck up my life! I could lose my job, ruin relationships and opportunities while laying motionless, wondering what the point of it all is. So I’m still working, I’m still going to the gym, walking the dog, keeping the house clean, and trying to celebrate even the smallest of accomplishments. I just do it all through a haze, like I’m in some old allergy medicine commercial, walking through a beautiful field of flowers while frowning underneath a grey filter. Even now writing these words I’m frustrated at how cliche I sound, what a horrible writer I am, how no one will ever read this⁵ and I shouldn’t even bother. But I’m gonna fucking write it and post it through sheer determination that I can pat myself on the back that I actually finished something, even if I think it’s trite garbage. And I’ll do it tomorrow, committing some code I think is bad, and it may or may not actually be bad, but I won’t ever admit I think it’s good because I made it, making it naturally inferior. But I committed it, so I at least got that far.

This process is exhausting from a willpower standpoint, so you have to be smart about where to invest it. I’m getting my work done, but the bed if often unmade, the laundry piles up, and I’ve gotten trigger-happy with ordering takeout for dinner. It’s also exhausting from the pure banality of the process. It’s easy to get lost in the monotony of life on a good day, but when your brain has decided that it’s all going to be boring and unsatisfying no matter what, it’s suffocating. It’s made even worse knowing that there is no real end-game here. My prize is that I keep on living life, but with more flavor. I don’t reach some magical epiphany and ascend into Nirvana, I don’t even find an excitingly new answer. I know the answer, I beat myself up too much. I need to be kinder to myself. But telling me that is as good as telling someone with an eating disorder that they need to just eat differently. Or telling an alcoholic that alcohol is unhealthy. No shit. But you have to keep reminding yourself every minute of that same, uninspiring and uncomplicated answer to make any progress. And it never stops being annoying. The road to recovery is paved with tired platitudes, and sports a million billboards of infuriatingly obvious motivational posters.