If you asked him on any given day how he was feeling, he’d reply: “It’s the worst day of my life,” no matter whether he was comatose with depression or talking

If you asked him on any given day how he was feeling, he’d reply: “It’s the worst day of my life,” no matter whether he was comatose with depression or talking to you on your wedding day. It was almost like my dad had lost his inner compass to tell you how he was feeling: even if he acted like he was feeling better, he’d tell you he was feeling worse. I remember feeling like that. Having a good day, or starting to emerge from a particularly deep low, suddenly you feel more intensely, and you're doing more, and you see all the lost potential of the previous days. One of the nice numbing things about depression is that nothing seems possible. You can see the difference between what's possible for you and what's possible for other people, and it's humiliating, but the idea that you could do better is a dead one with no emotional potency. Then your depression lifts a little bit, and you look back with the perspective of a slightly higher capacity to perform, and it's crushing to see the time and possibilities you wasted. It's like depression holds a little back so it can hit you one more time in the gut on the way out, to remind you that it will be back.