“Depression is your body saying, ‘I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.’” — Jim Carrey

Not feeling like yourself isn’t an experience just for depressives. Every person has a slightly different face for those at home, those at work, and those we randomly meet in line for coffee. See a relative in the hospital as a fragile shell of who you know them to be and you see just how exhausting maintaining appearances can be. While most don’t find themselves in the hospital, we all know how much it costs ourselves to try and keep up with life.

The super mom who gets four kids to every extracurricular activity while looking flawless.

The teacher who runs a lesson on two minutes of prep, but cannot help taking all their students’ problems home with them.

The father who gets laid off, but never tells his family and leaves in silent shame at his usual time in the morning.

There are countless examples from all walks of life, and, like a Greek tragedy, everyone knows the final act is coming. Something external prods us to continue even when our insides are screaming at us to stop because something doesn’t feel right. We can all do this for a time. How long exactly depends on the individual and their circumstances, but the outcome is the same — shame that we don’t feel like ourselves while looking like we are.

Coming out of this isn’t like the beautiful metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly. It’s more like the birth of the xenomorph in Alien. A chest-bursting transformation where the host must cease to be so something new can develop without any strings.

It’s painful, it’s terrifying, and it’s destructive. So much of therapy is finding who you really are and coming to peace with an identity that has been buried under everything else in life. It’s such a common process that those of us in recovery often ask variations of the same two questions:

1. When will I feel like myself again?

2. Who am I without [insert illness or traumatic experience]?

The first question inevitably leads the unsatisfying answer: “Everybody is different.” This is so deeply unsatisfying that it predictably leads to angry retorts, at least it did for me. “Just tell me when!” I’d yell at my implacable group leader, but no concrete answer ever came because there isn’t one. I call my recovery permanent because that’s the only way I can deal with not having permanent answers in recovery. Most days I feel like myself, and some days I feel like the selfish degenerate my depression once convinced me I was. My permanent recovery is acknowledging that I can’t judge myself on a single day.

That second question I’m leaving for another post because unpacking why I was so attached to my old, depressed self takes a measure of doing. Looking back, letting go was the easier part. Crafting an identity where my depression wasn’t the main character continues to be a daily effort, and I’ll show you how I’ve managed so far. I will leave you with one of my favorite poets, Shane Koyczan, describing a return to who he really was even though life, most certainly, got in his way.