Two days ago I was crossing the southern border of North Carolina, coming back from a trip to Georgia, where I’d handed Mia over to her mom to spend a week with her. I was driving up an unlit road; the mountains were ahead of me: huge, black shoulders, spangled with light. I was listening to the kind of music that lets something loose inside me, like some dark wing. I hear music like this and it has an almost physical effect; it’s as though atmospheres of pressure are lifted, and suddenly my lungs can fill deeply.

Normally, I would have let myself slide into an easy depression; it would have been comfortable and familiar. It may seem strange that I would describe depression as comfortable, but human beings can acclimate themselves to just about anything. There is a familiar rhythm to it, a cycle of emotion and thought that is as true as an ocean current, and as powerful. It is an easy thing to surrender yourself to it, and to let it pull you along its courses. You know where you’re going. You know how you’ll feel along the way. There are no surprises. There is pain, yes; but it’s pain you know. It’s pain you can prepare for. And pain, at least, is something. Sometimes, you think, it’s all you can get. And so you’ll take it. You might even get greedy for it.

But a few months ago I finally got tired of it. I started taking antidepressants, and it’s hard to overstate the change. What I think is best described as a steady spiritual deliquescence has stopped. Some measure of self-regard is returning. The impulse to work — by which I mean to write — is back in force. And I haven’t felt that in years. Depression was, I think, the chief reason for my small output over the past few years. My thought was, very explicitly, that there are too many writers in the world anyway — we’re drowning in pablum, and seem to have lost the ability even to recognize it — and one less would make no difference at all. It might even be a small good.

I still believe that most writers would serve us best by surrendering the pen forever (yeah, I’m an asshole), and that we’ve become so inured to mediocrity and small ambition that we celebrate that which should be condemned for its miserliness of spirit, but the drag on my own intent has been removed. I feel a drive to work like I haven’t in years. Shortly after getting on the antidepressant, I finished writing a story that has been languishing on my laptop for months, and submitted the collection to a publisher at last. It was work that could have, and should have, been done at least a  year ago. But the will was crippled then. And now it isn’t anymore.

I say this because even though the social stigma against depression is fading, I think there still exists a strong personal aversion to admitting one is afflicted. I know I had that aversion. I denied it and its severity for years. It damaged friendships, may have ended relationships, and slowed my advancement in my chosen career. Throughout my life I’ve seen it happen to people I know and love. It’s deadliest trait is that it makes you believe that there is no point in fighting it. And the kind I had — have — was so subtle that I barely noticed the breadth of its effect. There was no sturm und drang, no self-annihilating impulse; only the steady, creeping rise of cold water in my brain.

I still love this music. As I drove into the mountains, letting it fill my head, I was still lifted. I still find beauty in the desolate. I still have a melancholy soul. Those things are characteristics of me, and will not change; nor would I want them to. I like them. But I can love this music now, I can love the poetry I see in pale bones and cold nights, without the accompanying despondence that had all but frozen me. Antidepressants did not dull my feeling for all of this, as I’d feared they might; they enabled me to more fully engage with it.

I debated putting this up. I was afraid it would come off as fishing for sympathy, which is certainly not my intent. I can look back on it all with a fairly emotionless cast of mind. But I think some of you will feel some measure of recognition. I think we waste too much time trying to construct a social image of ourselves as characters from television commercials: clever, funny, unbeset by loneliness or self-horror. Fuck all that. That’s what leads to all the shitty writing I was talking about.

Tell the truth. That’s what this is.