It’s strange how much of our personhood is tied to markers of “success”. I’ve struggled with depression for years but this new, more “adult” depression, brought on by dragging periods of unemployment or underemployment in the gig-based system that I must subject myself to in order to pay my bills…is a different beast.
When I graduated from college in 2015, I felt on top of the world. School had been marked with struggles with my health and such financial difficulty that I went the majority of my college days unsure if I would make it back the next year. But I worked. And I did it. My parents and I were in a frightening amount of debt but the investment would undoubtedly pay off. I’ve been a model student my whole life and with a hard-earned degree from a prestigious private university, things could only go up from there.
Except they didn’t.
I couldn’t find that first job right after graduation so I left New York City and moved back in with my parents to get my bearings. I was freshly 21 years old so this didn’t feel like a huge deal. From my childhood bedroom, I filled out application after application. Two years passed before I knew it. I had spent two years taking on small projects, mostly for free, just to get experience.
I finally got a big break toward the end of 2017.
I was finally moving back to New York City to work a “dream job” that would end up wearing at my spirit so badly that when I unexpectedly had to move on at the end of 2018, I was fearful of even pursuing a similar position elsewhere. Nevertheless, by December 2018, I had managed to pivot and 2019 looked promising.
Except it wasn’t.
Sure, in 2019, I worked on really fantastic teams at organizations I really liked but I was still a freelance contractor who never actually knew what her future held. I left the first org for a project that ultimately fell through but took heart in the fact that I was a shoo-in for a full-time position at a place I had my sights on for well over a year. Suddenly, during the offer phase, it was no longer full-time…but a contract role. I took it anyway, believing that I would go in, kick some ass, and be naturally offered the full-time role or at the very least, a contract extension.
Except I wasn’t.
And since then, my savings have dwindled and though I have had one-off projects here and there, I’ve been told no or completely ignored by dozens of companies since. With so much free time on my hands, I’m left to stew in the fact that nothing has felt right or comfortable since November 2018. I feel like less and less of a person with every new period of stress and no amount of “maybe this time” makes me feel better about the way things have panned out. I’m still so stressed that I’m going to have to freelance and scrape by for the rest of my life while watching seemingly everyone around me achieve exactly what they've set out to do. I’m tired. I’m ashamed. I feel crushed that I haven’t lived up to my own expectations, much less the expectations of everyone else. So I’m coping the best way I know how — by writing about it.
I currently oscillate between desperate optimism, angry pessimism, and hopeless indifference, sometimes on the same day. I’m tempted to put this out there publically but know that even this level of honesty may very well work against me.
I suppose I’ll put this out if things manage to turn around. We’ll see.
EDIT: Orginally written in October 2019, as of a year later, I’m happy to say tides have changed. I find value in this piece because I know how dangerously lonely this particular type of depression is. I hope this assists someone else in their journey.