Every now and then, I make the terrible mistake of actually thinking–really thinking–about the Internet. It’s not unlike those similarly misguided moments wherein I stop to think about the physical mechanics of speech; in either situation, I rapidly disintegrate into little more than vowel sounds and a killer thousand-yard stare. But, you know, think about it. Something about the fact that nearly ALL THE INFORMATION you could ever reasonably want is lurking out there in the ether, waiting for a few quick keystrokes to come and sate your curiosity. Want to know about recreational beekeeping? There’s a website for that! Want to know more about the biological advantages of having a disposable penis? The Internet is here for you! Need 5000 personalized sand dollars, STAT? No problem! And then there are the cat videos. Don’t even get me started on the cat videos.

And the best part? You don’t have to talk to anyone to get this information. You don’t even have to put on pants!

If you stop to think about it, it’s truly mind-boggling. We carry around–literally, in our pockets–a giant, intangible hive mind, where there are answers to almost everything. Including what it’s like to live with and treat depression, as chronicled here, brilliantly, by Allie at Hyperbole and a Half. (Please go read that now. I’ll wait.)

As most of you who read this website know, I had a bit of a rough time there at the end of last year. I was, in many ways, extremely fortunate, in that I had the incredible and unwavering support of my friends and family–a small army of people who bent over backwards to take exquisite care of me at a time when I could barely figure out how to feed myself or wake up in the morning–and good health insurance that allowed me to continue seeking the treatment I needed in order to keep recovering. I was lucky. But you know what? Even as I started to feel better, it still fucking sucked. It sucked because even after I stopped wishing I were dead, I didn’t know how to live with depression.

Living with depression is different than suffering from depression; to suffer from depression doesn’t require ever getting off your couch or taking a shower. Living with depression means figuring out how to navigate getting out of bed those mornings when you just can’t see the point. It means combing your hair and getting out into the world, even on those days when you would give your eyeteeth to just hide under the bed. Living with depression means figuring out what to do on those days when the yawning chasm in your chest decides to dilate a bit more than usual, threatening to pull you down into the void again. It means continually finding ways to keep moving forward–and sometimes you just run out of ideas. Fortunately for those of us living in the twenty first century, the Internet is chock-full of ideas. Sometimes those ideas involve an entire page of cat gifs, but ideas they remain.

At the beginning of my recovery, I spent a lot of time on the Internet–I needed to know that there were people out there going through what I was going through. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone, and that I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, or what I could do about it. I needed to hear the stories of people who understood, people who knew firsthand that this monster living in our brains is not something we can quantify or justify; it’s not even something we can explain most of the time. It’s just there, ready to destroy everything if we give it even the slightest opportunity. I needed to be reminded that I am not to blame for its existence, and that it is possible for me to keep it at bay. I needed all these things, but at the time I wasn’t comfortable talking to my nearest and dearest about it. And so, like any good product of the 21st century, I asked the Internet.

And you know what? The Internet came through. Somewhere in between the LOLCats and the Rick Astley videos, I found a goodly chunk of what I was seeking. I found lots of like-minded people going through experiences similar to mine; I found lots of good advice about how to cope with the monster on a daily basis, and the answers to a lot of questions I wasn’t ready to ask people face to face. I found tons of information about my doctors and my medications–the latter of which was invaluable as I found myself suffering through the SSRI crazies–and some very helpful information about how to make the most of my treatment. I found some great cathartic music and a lot of recipes to obsessively bake. I found out that there are a lot of people who care about me, more than I’d realized. I also found a lot of information about Sailor Moon, Mr. T and the construction of origami bells, which helped keep the monster occupied while I got on with things. With a few Google searches and a couple very chatty forums, I found the tools I needed to keep on going, all from the safety of my living room. I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO PUT ON PANTS.

And that, my friends, is (tangentially) why thinking too hard about the Internet makes my brain break: it has absolutely everything if you just look hard enough. Education. Music. Friends. Support. Significant others. Canning tutorials. Porn. A comprehensive history of jazz. Every issue of Spin magazine from the 90′s. It’s there, it’s all there, and people are offering up more and more every day. Someone, somewhere is also thinking about whatever it is you’d like to know, no matter how esoteric and/or absurd, and they’re willing to share. The wealth of the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. And that is amazing. It’s almost too much for me to bear.

Plus, you know. All the free origami tutorials you could ever want! What’s not exciting about that?

Get up. Take a shower. Shave your legs. Put on your face. Do something about that hair. Go get your nails done. Do something for yourself. Go out and see people. Pick up your guitar, you know that always helps. Dance. Go to work. Go to the movies. Put on some lipstick. Spend time with your friends. Bake something.

Get out there and be you. Right now you may not think you’re wonderful, but we do. We think you’re wonderful, and we hate seeing you be so hard on yourself.

We think you’re wonderful, and we want you back.

Appropriately enough, I had a massive panic attack right before I left for my doctor’s appointment the other day.

It was severe enough that by the time I arrived at my doctor’s office (5 blocks away), my knees were weak, my hands were convulsing, my heart was racing and I couldn’t actually formulate thoughts. Despite all this, I managed to keep it together long enough to register with my new physician–barely. Once I got called to the exam room, it took me less than two minutes to burst into hysterical, racking sobs. I think I alarmed the woman taking my vitals; I guess people don’t usually react so strongly to the pulse meter.

My doctor, however, was cool as a cucumber, even when I told her that the reason I was there was (and I quote): “I think I’m losing my mind.” To her eternal credit, she didn’t laugh me out of her office (though I did get a distinct side-eye from her when I told her just how long I’d been feeling these symptoms*, and how long it had taken me to finally seek treatment), and after a very long and frequently embarrassing conversation, it’s official: I have been diagnosed with severe depression.

This is good news, for two reasons:

1. Getting a diagnosis means that there is actually something wrong with my wiring–it’s not just me getting high on my own drama.
2. The fact that it is A Thing means that there are treatment options.

There are treatment options. Which means that there is a very real possibility that someday, SOMEDAY, I might stop feeling this way. Someday, I might start feeling better. 

I don’t even remember what better feels like right now.

I walked out of her office with a long list of prescriptions, an order to see a small army of mental health professionals, and, for the first time in about a year, the tiniest glimmer of hope.

This, of course, does not change the fact that right now, all I want to do is curl up in a ball under the kitchen table and cry endlessly (hello, Friday afternoon), or perhaps lock myself in my bedroom with a bottle of whiskey and never come out; it doesn’t change the fact that I would give just about anything to never have to be alone in a room with my brain again. But, when life is reduced to surviving each 12-hour period without hurting yourself, even the slimmest prospect of relief is a little bit of a miracle.

* Intermittently for most of my life; acutely for the last year; unbearably for the last few months, for those of you playing along at home.

It comes on slowly. It always does.

It starts when you realize just how tired you’ve been lately, and how frustrating it is that you can never sleep. You discover, to your intense surprise, that you’ve gone months without touching your guitar, or singing for the pure pleasure of it, or speaking at all when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. You find yourself watching more TV and reading fewer books, watching the same things over and over again.

You bake a lot, but don’t eat any of it. You drink more than you used to. You drink alone.

You start avoiding your friends, and you push your significant other away until s/he can’t remember why s/he loved you in the first place (or that’s what you tell yourself). You decide you didn’t really deserve that love anyway, and you probably never will. And it just seems to unfair to ask someone like that to waste another second loving something like you. You stop returning your family’s phone calls.

You lose all faith in your ability to do anything right, ever. You second guess yourself constantly, which makes it virtually impossible to accomplish anything at all.

You find yourself crying a lot (everything sets you off), until the day you realize that a good hysterical sob no longer loosens the pressure in your chest. So you switch to being angry, for a while. And then you stop feeling much of anything at all, because feeling is exhausting and painful and who cares anyway.

You find that you can’t concentrate on anything.

You realize it’s been almost a year since you’ve described yourself as “happy,” despite the fact that when you look at it objectively, your life is pretty amazing. This intensifies your feelings of inadequacy and guilt.

And, I mean, whatever. It’s cool, it’s fine, this has happened before. It happens a lot, always has. But you’re stubborn, and you’re tough, and you’ve always been able to pull yourself out of it eventually. You’ve always managed to turn the lights back on. No problem.

But then one day you find yourself telling someone that it’s not that you wish you were dead, exactly, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you could just stop existing.

You hear these words coming out of your mouth like they’re being said by someone else; to your incredible surprise, you find them to be true. You realize you believe them with everything that remains of your tired, tired heart.

If you’re lucky, this revelation scares you enough that you finally decide to ask for help.

And that is why I have an appointment with my doctor on Thursday.